What a weird coincidence for me.
I just watched Nick Cage’s movie Knowing this morning. It was about a Super Solar Flare that wipes out all life on Earth. The “happy” ending is that his son and a girl his son’s age are taken away by some sort of celestial beings to begin humanity over again on a nice planet somewhere.
It made me wonder if Super Solar Flares were just a movie fiction so I looked it up. They have happened on other stars similar in size to our Sun and they could definitely be big enough to fry life on Earth down to the last microbe.
I’m not sure they would blow up the earth or disintegrate it, as it appears to be happening in the movie, but what it WOULD do is strip the ozone layer away in its entirety, exposing all life to withering ultraviolet radiation. Even those people who somehow got sufficient shelter would soon end up with nothing to eat as all the other life dies off.
We only exist here by the Grace of God.
In 700 million years of complex life, mass extinctions have been either volcanic proliferation like in the Permian 220 million years, or a nasty rock from space like the chicxulub meteor 67 million years ago. No solar flare stuff “recently “