Earth assaulted by a solar storm...

…but hey how come we’re all still using the Internet!!!

Many consider the events of the past few of days to have been blown out of proportion by the media as much as they did with the Y2K bug in 1999 when we were given visions of aircraft suddenly falling out of the sky and nuclear reactor cooling towers going offline. Solar flares expending from the Sun last week triggered a storm of charged particles known as a coronal mass ejection which on Thursday battered the Earth’s magnetic field which protects the planet from harmful solar radiation. Scientists warned that this could have disrupted power grids, satellite navigation and plane routes but there was no significant impact other than the NOAA declaring a R3 level radio blackout and some aircraft routes diverted from the polar regions.

So why wasn’t there significant power surges or major disruptions to worldwide communications? Could it be that the storms above our atmosphere weren’t powerful enough to significantly shake our magnetic field or had the boffins just been over-cautious in their analysis? In truth it was neither and in a closed session of the UN General Assembly in NYC on Saturday morning, the truth was revealed…

“Worse case scenario was of course that the storm could have depolarised the magnetic field and irradiated every living thing on the planet” warned Dr. “Cloudburst” Hunt, UNETIDA's representative to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “I’m sure that’s one way that the universe will reset the balance between man and nature but the magnitude of current solar activity is only threatening to unleash the same devastation as a planet wide EMP pulse.” Hunt added that while losing all our technological achievements since the invention of electricity would be a devastating blow to modern civilisation - it wasn’t as if we had no warning or were powerless to stop it.

“We always have a plan!” said Dr. “Quantum” Paatal, Director of UNETIDA Research and Development. “It just sometimes depends if we have the technology to implement it.” Pataal explained that within the past five years UNETIDA researchers discovered that a race of powerful aliens visited the Mediterranean Basin some 5000 years ago and "influenced" the Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations throughout their history. "We discovered that the 'keys' to our own survival had been given to us in the hope we would work together and combine them to protect ourselves from the Sun. "Sadly" said Pataal "The world does not work like that and with time running out we had to violate a few conventions."

"The Earth is not going down on my watch!" bellowed Colonel "Whopper" Creedon, Acting Director of Intelligence for UNETIDA. The Colonel revealed that he released powerful Extra-Terrestrial technology to thwart the Sun's plans influence the course of our existence. "It's all very complicated and no one will understand, let alone believe me if I explained"  he said. Creedon informed the assembly that last year he recovered an ancient Egyptian key, "liberated" from a plundered museum during Arab Spring and that last month he had dispatched UNETIDA Special Operators posing as thieves to retrieve a similar artifact from Greece's Ancient Olympia museum. The Colonel stopped sort of detailing what form the keys themselves took - for reasons of planetary security - but he did say that they were placed in a type of lock that was recently unearthed at excavations at Palatine Hill in Rome, one of the earliest sites of Roman civilisation.

“I must stress that while the timing of Arab Spring and the collapse of the Greek Economy were fortunate to have occurred at the most opportune times for our retrieval operations," continued Creedon. "I must make it abundantly clear that UNETIDA categorically denies involvement in suspected engineering of those events, we only used them as cover for our clandestine operations necessary to protect member states from threats outside the boundaries of international law in accordance with our mandate.” The was said presumably because Russia currently suspects that Arab Spring was started by the United States and Europe in an attempt to exert more control in the region.

A member of the UN assembly asked the UNETIDA contingent if the alien technology deployment that saved the planet was a permanent solution to our woes from solar storms in the future. Neither Dr. Pataal or Dr. Hunt could affirmatively reassure the delagate it was so. Creedon only offered: "We are not gods! - But we're the closest thing you have!"