My dad thinks that one unlucky day a little chunk of the sun will fly off and hit the Earth at a time when the magnetic field that usually protects it is unusually weak. Then everything electronic on the side of the Earth that happens to be facing the sun that day will burst into flame. Considering that includes the spark plugs in engines - including those in fire engines - it's going to be hard to put those fires out.
It's a pretty strange thing to think about but I can't really say it's impossible or even unlikely.
The sun is a big continuous explosion. Occasionally some of it flies off in a chunk, and not surprisingly sun bits are really dangerous. Sometimes they just miss us, but sometimes they strike Earth. Or rather, they strike near us - because our magnetic field protects us.For the past several thousand years, our magnetic field has been shaped like an apple. The indents on the top and the bottom lie at the North and South poles. That means that when sun bits try to hit us they mostly get pushed out and around the Earth, but they have the most impact on the poles where the field is weakest.
Lately the Earth has been doing something weird, a weird thing it does every hundred thousand years or so - it's swapping the North and South pole. That's right - eventually a compass that points North today will point South instead, and vice versa. If this happened uniformly we would in fact lose our magnetic field entirely for several years and humans would probably be wiped out by mild events in space. Fortunately reality is more complicated, and the pole is actually shifting in parts, so that over time there will be pockets on earth where compasses have flipped, and pockets where it hasn't, and along the boundaries compasses will just point nowhere useful at all - someplace in between.So for several years along the way our magnetic field will look less like an apple and more like cloud tops - lots of random bumps all over of normal or reversed field. Eventually "reversed" will become the new normal and everything will stabilize.
So the problem is what if a bit of the sun flies at us during that time where the boundaries between these fields aren't isolated to just 2 points at the top and bottom of the earth, but rather when they trace trails all over the earth, and expose large sections of it that directly face the sun?
Probably a big disaster for anyone who likes electronics. Or not being on fire (I'm a Fan).
