Masako Tominaga
As a writer you must be willing to be called all manner of impolite and downright in-hospitable things. Unless your journey into the long form will consist of nothing but warm fuzzy love stories, you must be prepared for this. Some realms of fiction, such as science fiction, give their writers a lot of freedom to express themselves and include obscure science in their stories. When you get into the Dystopian genre you have to once again take beatings from tiny minds.
Part of me feels like I’ve written this post before. I’m sure I mentioned the topic in more than one post but I couldn’t find the keywords I sought so I’m hitting you over the head with it again. I swear I intended to write this back in January. Why January? Because Popular Science covered Masako Tominaga then. In John Smith – Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars I called it a polar shift. Her field of study is polar magnetic flips. You can call it George if you want, just don’t ignore it.
You really should read the article, but, these “polar magnetic flips” have happened more than once. This lady is on the forefront of trying to chart past flips in order to predict (within a window) when the next will happen.
Why should you care?
Well for starters, we won’t have electricity globally, at least for a while. By “a while” I mean it could be months or years. You see, magnetic north won’t be where it used to be and neither will magnetic south. It is unknown as to just how quickly the magnets in our electrical generators will lose their polarity.
I haven’t dug into Masako’s or anyone else’s research deeply enough to determine what current scientific consensus is about the EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) which will get released. If we have a polar “flip” instead of a shift, meaning a light switch rather than a slower “rotation,” we should have a rather dramatic EMP wiping out satellites for a while. The again, if we don’t have electricity we cannot use the satellites anyway.
The premise behind “John Smith – Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars” is that this happened while the bulk of the human race chose to ignore its possibility. It also explores the question “If humans are the sum of their history, what are humans when they no longer have a history?”
Many a reviewer, both in posted reviews and in private things sent to me beat me up over the thought our poles could shift in any way. I only wrote a book around the topic, I cannot imagine the road Masako Tominaga has had to walk since studying the very thing so many deny can happen is her life’s work.
