the only protection i can think of from this kind of discharge would be inside a faraday cage, and importantly, it can't be an earthed faraday cage, ideally it has a very strong insulator coating around the conductive material

a properly designed, heavy (like 2 feet thick) concrete bunker structure with a mesh of like 6" grid inside it that has been deliberately welded to become a complete conductive shell would probably be necessary to be able to survive this, and probably it would also help if the structure was spheroid or conical so if there is a huge discharge that passes through, it has minimal chance of going inside the cage

my idea of a prefab concrete dome bunker continues to escalate

the shape of the conductive mesh should also extend outwards and sideways to ensure it doesn't go through the centre, and probably ultimately you want it to just be a straight up sphere with heavy conductors in a classic cat-ball style cage, with weaker conductors in a fairly close mesh to keep charge from not going to the thick conductors 

 Unless everything around you melts in fire 

 well, if it's that much energy you be way too close to a low resistance section of the crust

i'm gonna start thinking about how that can be estimated

i'd guess that since in general thunderstorms are electrons coming down from clouds, that were seeded by those electrons negatively charging dust, that a historical map of lightning strikes would help avoid a likely patch where a giant zap could erupt suddenly after way too much energy comes from a CME

there's probably some kind of electrical resistance value that you can map to different soil types as well, and then from that make a heat map of potential lower resistance areas of the surface to avoid 

 is this related with Nikola Tesla's giant wireless tower? 

 yeah, i thought of that the other day... that the sun is literally dumping jigawatts of power on us on a regular basis, and all we have to do is plug into the ground where it can be pulled out and create electric potential difference

the thing that i don't know about is how you take violent electrostatic energy and safely apply it to work without fusing everything, it's probably some kind of tuning problem 

 or maybe you just need to make a giant fucking capacitor and put a heavy metre wide lightning rod up at about 2km, with a tungsten ball tip to not have it corrode away 

 imagine a capacitor made out of simple layers of basalt gravel and sand... 

 here:

https://geology.com/articles/lightning-map/lightning-strikes-map-lg.jpg

goodness... mongolia and siberia keep on looking better

note also, egypt is pretty calm - must be all that desert, lower mineral content and deeper layers of pure silicate sand 

 oooh... maybe the reason why that region of northeast africa is so insulated is BECAUSE it was a location of a recent past cosmic thunderbolt

the sheer thickness of the crust over mongolia explains its resistance level though

mongolia is looking better and metter for my future migration plans 

 my girlfriend, and then afterwards wife, circa late 2012, used to make jokes with me about mongolia

prescient 

 😂