Somebody give it to me strait, do I need to build a doomsday bunker ASAP and start stockpiling supplies?
No. The cost of building and maintaining a bunker is higher than any chance of ever realizing a benefit. This is true for any doomsday type scenario but if you live in a place with dangerously high winds or tornadoes a cellar might be a good place to weather a storm.
> stockpiling supplies?
Yes, you should always stockpile food and water in case of emergency [1]
[1] http://emergency.cdc.gov/disasters/foodwater/prepare.asp
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/10-ridiculous-things-tha...
Apparently something like that just happened last month:
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/06/23/fbi-raids-home-dange...
That guy was making booby traps and telling an undercover FBI agent that he is going to kill federal agents.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/fbi-arrests-...
>But the claims and allegations may have been blown way out of proportion. After police obtained a warrant to search Winters’ home based on information obtained from a confidential informant they were probably surprised that not only did Winters have no explosive booby troops set up all over his property as had been claimed, he was also far short of having possession of the fifty high-powered rifles that police said he had been stockpiling.
The police claimed he was crazy and plotting an elaborate confrontation with police, but there was no confrontation and the guy turned himself in peacefully.
They are only charging him with building some unspecified "destructive device" without a permit, which he has plead not guilty.
Edit: Might be 3months https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage
If you hold your nose and click through to the original source they link to, it's even further from your summary, referring to stockpiles of MREs, on a short list that also includes night vision goggles, rifle tripods, high-capacity magazines, and ammunition pouches.
(The flyer seems pretty clearly geared towards "suspicious" militia types).
Big boxes of ramen, pasta, frozen pizzas, etc.
It's not like I go to the grocery and buy a couple days' worth of food at a time.
Now, with kids, we tend to shop 2x a week, but even with that, even when we're about to go to the grocery, we could, if pressed, survive 7 days without external food. I'd imagine the same is true of most anyone with a kitchen, a pantry, and who is not in extreme financial distress.
- Biospheric effects, due to increased rates of DNA damage; and
- Infrastructure effects, due to increased radiation damage to satellites, or damages to power grids due to large induced currents from geomagnetic storms.
Infrastructure effects are well understood: higher risk of power or communications outages. You can mitigate that risk by stockpiling water (which is a good thing to do anyway), buying a diesel generator, etc.
On the other hand, biospheric effects are less well understood. There is some statistical evidence of some species going extinct right around pole reversals, and several plausible mechanisms have been proposed, but the evidence is by no means conclusive, due in part to intrinsic limits in the fossil record.
Note however that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so biospheric effects cannot be entirely discarded. But it is also unclear what steps could anyone take to mitigate such uncertain but potentially fat-tailed risks, so it is your call.
I bet that number will be really high. Like more than 50% of the humans.
I guess what you see then is struggle for the control of resources. A certain powerful groups will control the supply of resources and hence will dictate how every thing will play out from there on.
So while the earth may be more susceptible to solar flares, it won't be as dramatic as your scenario (or that of doomsday preppers) states.
No one ever dies from a global disaster, death is always very local, one person at a time.
The city I work in exclusively drinks groundwater, which will be undrinkable after the electrically powered sewer system shuts down and there is no electrically produced chlorine to sanitize the water. So a guaranteed million dead people after a couple days without electricity.
Its comforting to the species that the death of everyone in the city represents only 0.01% of worldwide population. Its not very comforting to me that 0.01% of the population being dead represents a large fraction of my family, everyone I know in day to day living, all my coworkers and local customers. That might be a slightly bigger problem for me, than for mankind as a whole.
Of course we're not the only city on the planet that drinks groundwater and dumps treated sewage into the same groundwater source. Some cities in "hurricane land" are used to this problem and have plans and stockpiles. Not our city, of course.
And where I live (as opposed to work) we have deep well water pumps... 1000 ft down. Works well electrically, but once we run out of diesel, we're stuck with the same contaminated groundwater.
Doomsday looks a lot more like the great depression combined with the 1917 flu epidemic at the same time, than like alas babylon or lucifers hammer.
I guess the main reason is that the Earth's atmosphere also provides a lot of radiation protection, regardless of what the magnetic field is doing.
So it doesn't seem likely that most of us will live to see it. That said, I understood it to be a gradual process and I thought there was a time of little to no magnetic field while it's shifting, which might be disconcerting.
Hopefully it's just a matter of securing power lines and hardening satellites, but I'm not sure whether anyone has studied this in much depth.
I wonder how it will affect animals that migrate...
Certainly the magnetic field has flipped before but do we know that animals that use magnetism for migratory guidance were able to "adapt quickly". Can you walk us through the evidence?
Apparently it "sees" the magnetic fields, but it also relies on the sun. I don't think it's been studied if it can reorient itself at birth if the poles are switched or if it's "hardcoded".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal#Effects_on...