Book Review Excerpt

The organization in the book is fantastic, each chapter starts of with a possible what if scenario. Placing fictional characters into the cross hairs of a doomed Earth. With each mini story giving a unique and interesting perspective, it really makes you think this could happen tomorrow, and who’s to say it won’t? The book features 336 fascinating pages and starts off the first chapter with an meteor impact scenario. In this scenario we see an individual who wakes up one regular morning and looks outside. He sees the normal things but doesn’t hear any birds chirping. He finds this strange but not too concerning. He then sees a bright light streaking across the sky. That bright light soon turns into a bright flash which blinds our main character for a moment. He then notices the tops of the trees are starting to smoke and the sky is turning bright red. The heat coming from his window is seemingly too much to bare and he has to back away. He decides its time to run, but the decision comes too late. A shock way hits and completely destroys the house and buries our main character in it. This is one way an Earth ending scenario could take place, and each chapter opens like this. This is an ingenious method of drawing readers in and keeping them fascinated, which I feel is an extremely smart way of keeping readers interested. He also gives a disclaimer at the end of each chapter to say it is not likely a disaster like will happen, and gives preventative approaches to prevent such and event from happening. And as Nick Bostrom, professor at Oxford University, says, “In order to cause the extinction of human life, the impacting body would probably have to be greater than 1km in diameter”. 1 km meteor impacts happen to thankfully be very rare events, but never the less a good way to scare readers into reading more. 

News Summary Excerpt

Nearly everything we use runs off of electricity. From our phones to our homes, power is needed everywhere. But one good solar storm that releases an extremely powerful solar flare could change all that. A solar flare is created from dark spots on the sun called sunspots; these spots always show up in pairs with one being the north pole and the other being the south pole. When the sunspots erupt they shoot streams of gas that arc from one pole to the other. Upon eruption, lots of tension is formed in the lines of gas between the two sunspots and sometimes the tension cannot be compensated so then the line snaps. There is multitude of energy stored in these lines, so when they snap huge amounts of energy are shot into space. This solar flare travels through space and can sometimes hit Earth. When the ejections are smaller we get a nice aurora of green lights over the north pole that sometimes streak down into lower Canada and upper United States. However, when the ejections are bigger, we get massive power outages all over the world. Like in 1989, the Earth experienced a strong solar storm that took down 15 power grids in Quebec simultaneously, thus becoming a providence wide black out. This all took place within 30 seconds of the geomagnetic mass ejection hitting us. This was by far, one of the weaker storms to hit the Earth.

 

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