For hundreds of years our sun has been basically a tame beast, but coming up as soon as 2012 (big coincidence?) it's going to become active again and could cause crazy effects here on Earth.
NASA is telling us to prepare for a once in a generation storm which could result in widespread blackouts and leave us without critical communication signals for considerable periods of time.
During this period, they believe, there would be fiery explosions having the power of 100 hydrogen bombs that could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services, nuclear power and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity.
There really isn't much we can do, but sit back and see what happens. It could be really bad destroying lives and the human races hard work or it may just damage some satellites. We really won't have a good idea until we're a little closer to the storm's time frame.
