If they are many times larger it sounds like they could be more like an EMP from a thermonuclear bomb.
Looks like they happen on average every few thousand years. We really should be looking at how we recover from such an event, and whether we can do things in the design of power grids to minimize damage.
If there were humans living on the Moon or Mars these seem like they could be even more fatal unless they were living underground.
Given how profoundly useful and powerful electronics are, perhaps events like this are why electricity and electronics are not used at large scale by organic life. Have you ever wondered why humans and other life forms are so unaffected by EM that we can subject ourselves to things like MRI scans without even noticeable effects? Maybe there has been selection against anything that is vulnerable to EM because every few thousand years anything else is culled.
Electronics should be fine from solar flares and EMP. The confusion about electronics being damaged comes from nearby and high-altitude EMP behaving differently. Nearby EMP damages electronics. High-altitude EMP induces current in long conductors. Solar flares behave similarly to high-altitude EMP, but whole hemisphere.
I think this is the key takeaway for me at least. If we don't blow ourselves up first, the sun will basically blast us into the stone-age every 6000 years at best or 200 years at worst.
You can also add this to the Fermi paradox list. If intelligent life is rare, solar systems where intelligent life can develop the type of technology capable of space flight might be rarer still.
For all we know the Sun is actually quite friendly to this. Most stars might behave this way more often. If that's true then intelligent life able to harness electricity and all it entails would be very rare. If our Sun did this every, say, 25 years there would never be an industrial/technological civilization here... or at least not a sophisticated one able to build things like spacecraft.
In any case this is something we should be studying a lot more than we are. It is a far more tangible and realistic existential threat than very hypothetical AI apocalypse scenarios.
Looks like they happen on average every few thousand years. We really should be looking at how we recover from such an event, and whether we can do things in the design of power grids to minimize damage.
If there were humans living on the Moon or Mars these seem like they could be even more fatal unless they were living underground.
Given how profoundly useful and powerful electronics are, perhaps events like this are why electricity and electronics are not used at large scale by organic life. Have you ever wondered why humans and other life forms are so unaffected by EM that we can subject ourselves to things like MRI scans without even noticeable effects? Maybe there has been selection against anything that is vulnerable to EM because every few thousand years anything else is culled.