I think this is the key takeaway for me at least. If we don't blow ourselves up first, the sun will basically blast us into the stone-age every 6000 years at best or 200 years at worst.
You can also add this to the Fermi paradox list. If intelligent life is rare, solar systems where intelligent life can develop the type of technology capable of space flight might be rarer still.
For all we know the Sun is actually quite friendly to this. Most stars might behave this way more often. If that's true then intelligent life able to harness electricity and all it entails would be very rare. If our Sun did this every, say, 25 years there would never be an industrial/technological civilization here... or at least not a sophisticated one able to build things like spacecraft.
In any case this is something we should be studying a lot more than we are. It is a far more tangible and realistic existential threat than very hypothetical AI apocalypse scenarios.
For all we know the Sun is actually quite friendly to this. Most stars might behave this way more often. If that's true then intelligent life able to harness electricity and all it entails would be very rare. If our Sun did this every, say, 25 years there would never be an industrial/technological civilization here... or at least not a sophisticated one able to build things like spacecraft.
In any case this is something we should be studying a lot more than we are. It is a far more tangible and realistic existential threat than very hypothetical AI apocalypse scenarios.