The Christian Science Monitor reports: “The sun is about to get a lot more active, which could have ill effects on Earth. So to prepare, top sun scientists met Tuesday to discuss the best ways to protect Earth’s satellites and other vital systems from the coming solar storms.

Solar storms occur when sunspots on our star erupt and spew out flumes of charged particles that can damage power systems. The sun’s activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, and it looks to be coming out of a slump and gearing up for an active period.

‘The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity,’ said Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division. ‘At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.’

Fisher and other experts met at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum, which took place in Washington, D.C., at the National Press Club.

People of the 21st century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. But smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity.

A major solar storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina, warned the National Academy of Sciences in a 2008 report, ‘Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.’

Luckily, much of the damage can be mitigated if managers know a storm is coming. That’s why better understanding of solar weather, and the ability to give advance warning, is especially important.

Putting satellites in ‘safe mode’ and disconnecting transformers can protect electronics from damaging electrical surges.

‘Space weather forecasting is still in its infancy, but we’re making rapid progress,’ said Thomas Bogdan, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, CO…” (Solar storms, cyber-warfare or the “electromagnetic pulse” unitedly or singularly can throw the entire world into chaos as the computers and electrical systems fail – as predicted in Luke 21:25 where it states that: “…nations [will be] in distress with perplexity [ meaning mass confusion].)