As I said, I think, it would require an implicit understanding that electrical activity in the past, when Earth was younger, was on a much larger scale than it is today. Not to quote EU too liberally, but that is a tenet of EU theory, that younger bodies are generally more highly charged bodies in space, and as such will tend to be MUCH more electrically active. To see an electrically active body, I would suggest pointing toward Venus. Ever heard of the "arachnoids?" Take a guess where i'm going with this... You guessed it. They're all interconnected by filamentary arcs. What we're looking at is likely nothing less than a young stellar body undergoing massive electrical stresses as it interacts with its neighboring environment.

As I said, it's a tenuous limb to go out on, however, there is a certain wisdom in examining alternate ideas, even if they don't pan out. Still, you're right it IS an issue of scale. And we do know that EM effects and plasma effects do scale up. Likely the gouges on the sidewalk were either a downed power line or a small lightning strike. However, we know that larger strikes do occur. Ever heard of "positive lightning?" It's much more rare than standard "negative" lightning, but it's also far more powerful, of longer duration and its effects tend to spread further. That right there would likely be enough to create a much larger arc scar to whatever surface it touches.

It's funny, but we have evidence everywhere of processes that have been ongoing for a very long time, some of which, in the past, were FAR larger events than anything we see today. But we have no problem accepting those ("asteroid impacts," etc.)... I wonder why we have such a hard time accepting that massive events like electricity might also have been more plentiful and larger in the past as well? I mean, we don't see huge meteors hitting the earth causing extinction level events today, but we just "know" they happened in the past. How is that any more tenuous a limb to go out on than electrical theory?

I might also point out that a number of so-called "impact craters" are quite anomalous, insofar as they (if they were impacts) were extraordinarily high-velocity / high-energy events. BUT, only the surface area was ejected, and the layers underneath were completely intact. That seems extraordinarily odd. I mean, that we'd see no cracking or fissuring of the underlying strata. Normally, as demonstrated by my roommate's kid running smack into a sliding glass door, when an impactor hits a solid object, the stresses generally create concentric circular cracks, with ray-like cracks emanating from the point of impact. Obviously bed-rock is a bit different from a thin sheet of glass. Nonetheless, wouldn't we expect to find certain characteristics in the underlying bedrock similar to a high-velocity impactor at a "hyper-velocity impact" site? Maybe I'm wrong... But, still.

There was actually an interesting article recently (yesterday actually) on thunderbolts.info regarding the "confirmed impact crater" in Arizona. Oddly, the underlying strata was basically intact, but it displayed a number of interesting features consistent with electrical theory. One of which being the creation of concretions (described as "shale balls") all around the site. Another being that in an electrical event, that creates a crater (and often a lump in the middle of the crater), two rotating currents strip the surface away, layer by layer, and redeposit it elsewhere layer by layer. Early tests of the area showed that ejecta deposits appearde to be layered opposite the layers of bedrock in/around the crater. This would be quite odd for an impact event (to somewhat precisely oppositely layer the ejecta). But it's a pretty common thing for electrical machining. Top layer in the crater becomes the bottom layer of ejecta outside... Points to ponder.

Anyway, didn't really mean to get onto cratering. My main point is that a lot of what we know is guesswork, since we don't generally actually see the events in-process. However, once we've guessed, the guess becomes "fact" and we stop looking for alternate explanations that fit ALL the data. So, I'm just wondering why we can accept one really-out-there concept like meteorites that finely re-layer ejecta, but we can't accept an alternate theory that does the same thing and accounts for other anomales. The shale balls are basically the exact same thing as electrical concretions. An electrical event would only tunnel as far into the surface as it had charge to do so. It wouldn't disturb the underlying layers, nor fracture them as would be expected of a major impact. It would layer the sediments basically in opposite the natural order, since the top gets machined first, it becomes the bottom layer of ejecta. Etc.

Obviously, if this is true, it requires a lot of reconsideration of what our early or pre-history looked like. And nobody really wants to have to look that closely at dearly held beliefs. Still... The more we look, the more we see. And the more we see, the more we recognize certain electrical hallmarks. Not just on Earth, but on Mars, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, IO, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede. Many moons in the solar system are highly scarred bodies, I wouldn't be surprised if the scarring is still going on in some form or another. We know Venus is highly electrically active and also highly scarred. Saturn, and Jupiter and Earth all display auroras at both poles due to electrical interaction with Birkeland currents (there's NO reason to think they're not all caused by the same process, and we know what causes it on Earth). Venus has a two-eyed vortex at both poles. I'm pretty sure it was IO {?} that also has auroras at the poles. These are hallmarks of electrical interaction with field-aligned currents (Birkeland currents). That's why I'm really not surprised to find "spiders around the south pole of Mars." Probably one of the few places that still has a magnetic "bubble"/mini-magnetosphere (just guessing but I'm pretty sure that's what I saw on one of Nasa's APODs or press releases; it was a weird blistery-looking 3D model, that I could probably find again if I really needed to).

Again, if we can accept that events like "asteroid impacts" were "larger and more frequent" in the early solar system, why can we not also accept that electrical interactions on bodies and between bodies were equally "larger and more frequent?" I guess that's my main point. How can we accept one and not even consider the other. If things were, in general, more extreme in the early solar system, I guess my question is: why not explore all avenues?