And those gamma ray burst (hasn't the sun been "misbehaving" lately)...what if we got a big one today like the one from the 19th century that fried telegraph wires and juiced up rails ?
Would that be less or more of a problem than a nuclear EMP ??
Your view please.
Oh man, what a question. You know what, I'm gonna let the guys at Exit Mundi explain what GRBs do and what their potential for damage is. It's a pretty lengthy explanation but they do a good job breaking it all down.
EXIT MUNDI (Click on Gamma Bursts on the side menu)
I'll say one thing though: It's absolutely true that many astronomers and astrophysicists believe them to be the
leading cause of death in the universe.
Now, luckily for us our Sun - and indeed most stars in the Milk Way don't appear to have the right size and composition to be GRB candidates, although there may have been a few that went off in the galaxy's past and could have actually been responsible for a few global extinction events. For the most part, though, we observe them going off in other galaxies. It can be rather...well...sad actually. We're talking about entire swaths of galactic space being completely sterilized of all life in certain cases - of course that's if life could even gain a foothold in such volatile galaxies.
Bah. It's kinda depressing.
But anyway, for us on Earth, the Sun just doesn't meet the criteria to generate a GRB, and even if it did, it's nowhere near the end of it's lifespan. We got around 5 Billion years before the Sun transitions into a Red Giant.
That said, however, the Sun is still a very active star and while it's not going to explode or anything like that, a well-place flare or CME could cause considerable damage to electronic systems here on Earth or in orbit as you pointed out. I suppose an EMP would be a pretty good comparison to make when talking about the worse-case effects of either. Even relatively simple electrical systems (like telegraph) could be burned-out. The Earth's magnetic field does a pretty good job at deflecting charged particles and rays streaming from the Sun, but especially large ejections of matter and radiation can get through and enter the atmosphere where they can do significant damage.
