>>13189943The last solar flare to clip Earth was in the mid 1800s. It knocked out the telegraph network temporarily, and set fire to a forest of trees in Canada.
It's all a matter of distance. If the Sun is scaled to a beachball, then the Earth is a pea eight and a half miles away. It's actually quite tricky for the Sun to hit us due to the corkscrew motion of our 3D orbit.
That's not to say Earth hasn't been smacked in the face by the Sun mini-novaing in the far, distant past, giving rise to all manner of obsessive Sun observatories by our ancestors. The description of the Sun as wearing a 52-56 pointed crown when it is "angry" is not a fanciful metaphor: that describes the developing plasma bolt as it generates from the perspective of someone about to be fried.
But, yeah, don't waste your life worrying about it. Chances are it already happened in the 1970s anyway, with the force of the mini-noa spewing forwards in this instance, unimaginably far away from the Earth.
