Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season

The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.

This is a big deal, but like many technical things that are a big deal, you’re not gonna hear about it until people start blaming politicians for it around November.

It’s obvious that we need to keep coming up with innovations to combat the threats associated with manmade climate change, but it only takes one major solar storm to knock out major satelite and communication infrastructure.

This seems like an area in which we collectively should be paying attention to and investing in… but fighting culture wars is way more productive.