One of the more likely black swan events that has the potential to cause global upheaval. Quite a bit of data now from other solar systems in terms of likelihood of these events. So far it looks like it is slightly more likely to occur in the ramp up stage of a cycle, not at the very peak.
We would most likely see a very large sunspot(s) days before the event and have 10-15 hours to take action, decoupling transformers etc, but the effects would be massive nonetheless.
Seems to me a search for alien artefacts should have more focus. SETA vs SETI. Eg probes in solar or trojan orbit in our system.. We have had our own stuff out to earths lagrange points, but not looked for stuff as far as I can tell.
Earth probably looked pretty interesting a billion or two years ago so plenty of reason to send a simple probe sometime between then and now.
I think the only real way to do that is as part of a civilization that is expanding into the solar system and has a group understanding to look for artifacts first and not destroy them or life. (Kind of a big ask, admittedly.)
Space just is huge, even in our solar backyard. There needs to be an economic reason for infrastructure out there for a hope of a dent in the size of the area to be cover-able.
Maybe it’d be first sending probes to a region to canvass the area competently before any industrial activity. Hopefully those probes would be from a non-corruptible independent agency.
I’m increasingly interested in what that base minimally viable industry would look like.
Otherwise, pointing telescopes of increasing complexity to large swaths of the sky is our best hope of all sorts of research. The universe just dwarfs the scale and variation we could ever dream of in a lab setting.
