don't be so sure it can't happen! there is plasma and electricity in space between us and jupiter, if the magnetic fields are just so, i bet there can literally be a discharge between jupes and another planet... probably extremely rare like hundreds of thousands if not millions of years between

i saw a great youtube video recently where someone modified a tazer so the electrtodes were too far apart to arc normally, and then put the electrodes in front of a flame and whaddya know, it arced

so, yeah, if the sun blowed up a shitload of plasma out into the solar system, and jupes took a huge UV/X/Gamma pulse and made it very negative and the earth was close enough and positive enough that the current could flow, it could happen

now THAT would be the thunderbolt of the Gods

not to say the ones that we can have sometimes here are not bad enough... the phenomena is very likely real, there is dozens of ancient cultures with icons to represent this phenomenon... they often look like dancing ladies like the one in Magura Cave in Bulgaria, but there is also the old germanic one that was used by the industrial band Einsturzende Neubauten:

what happens is along the magnetic flux lines that emerge from the "tropic" lines north and south of the equator, are charged at the top with solar energy that compresses the ionosphere, the electrons are then pushed close enough to the earth and they travel along this arc from the equator down to the ground and nuke a whole huge region of the earth either side of the flux lines where the electron buildup happens

it's real, alright, and by all estimates and data i see, these will happen more than a few times in the next 1200 years or so