Forget new tech trends stealing your job. The biggest threat to our generation is silent, invisible, and comes from above. It’s called the Carrington Event, and we are statistically overdue for another one. The "cloud" we use today for the internet is just metal and electricity, and the sun can turn it off permanently.
In 1859, a massive solar storm hit Earth It was so intense that telegraph machines literally caught fire. If that happened today, it wouldn't just be sparks. The solar storm creates massive currents in the ground that flood into our high-voltage power lines. This causes the giant transformers at substations to overheat and melt. Here is the scary part: we don't have spares. These transformers take 18 months to build. If they blow, the grid is down for years.
Without power, Amazon and Google data centers die in 48 hours once their diesel generators run dry. The internet would physically break down because the repeaters on undersea cables connecting continents would burn out. Your hard drive wouldn't be erased, but its electronic controller would fry, turning your data into a useless brick. Even money stops working because banks rely on GPS for timing, and solar storms scramble GPS signals.
Physicists estimate a 12% chance of this happening per decade. We are currently in the "declining phase" of Solar Cycle 25 (2026-2028), which is historically when the monster storms hit.
TL,DR: The Sun creates currents that can melt the power grid. No power means no cloud, no banking, and no internet for years. Keep cash and offline backups of your photos.
the internet and global finance have a 12% chance of physical collapse by 2027 (astrophysics)
byu/Rare_Eagle1760 inFuturology
27 Comments
Why would the repeaters on undersea cables “burn out?” Aren’t they shielded by being underwater?
Isn’t it worth noting that we got a near direct hit by a relatively powerful solar storm a year or so ago that caused surprisingly little disruption?
Not eager to actually experience, but as a thought experiment I wonder how long it would take to recover from this? When no one can rely on electronic info to help figure out how to rebuild/fix things? I’m not sure humans are up to the task. I think we’d have to rebuild some stuff from the bottom, like the way it originally evolved. Who could build a steam engine that runs a generator? A semiconductor fab? Who could write the code to compile higher-level languages?
We don’t have backup transformers? And I would presume if it were a concern of national security and critical infrastructure, it would be possible for major governments to coordinate building new ones faster than the typical 18 month cycle.
You see this sort of thing pop up every once and a while but what’s often forgotten or ignored is that there are tens of thousands, if not more, people who work their asses off every day to ensure catastrophic failure if this magnitude doesn’t happen.
A solar storm that could wipe out information age civilization could happen, but a fuck load of people would have to collectively drop the ball for that to happen. With enough time and warning a lot of the damage from such an event could be mitigated and reduced. I’m not saying a direct hit from a CME wouldn’t be a big deal, but the fact that we can even have this kind of discussion means we can meaningfully address it.
It’s much worse than no internet. We effectively go back to the pre industrial era. It’s the end of civilization as we know it. It would be like getting hit with a massive EMP. Most of the population would also die out as the supply chain would crash
Gutterl’s book on ways to end the world actually provides some apocalyptic numbers: something like a third dying of starvation and whatnot.
It’s the same vulnerability that makes cyberattacks so worrisome.
I don‘t know whose bottom you pulled the 48 h out of but it sounds very wrong. Also, the data centers themselves would be destroyed as well.
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun
Damn.. folks that wear pacemakers and/or defibrillators are screwed if this happens.
I’ll take “Catastrophic things to worry about that I have absolutely no control over” for $500, Alex.
Interesting on the preppers sub someone asking about how to keep access to PDFs offline. Which is making me think about this again
We are still stuck on 1 planet cause of the systems we follow , karma of our actions i’d say 🧘♂️
Kind of scary how modern society would be wiped out by a large enough event while somewhere in some remote place on earth a small tribe would continue his life without even realizing what’s happening. Our food supply chains would collapse, people in cold places probably would freeze to death without heating, no hospitals to treat the ill and wounded and no way to keep informed or in touch with other people further away than a few kilometers. I guess thats the trade-off when we switched from hunting and gathering to a cozy office job.
Space weather forecasting is not achieving impressive results, but it will reassure you a little bit to know that the biggest earthbound eruptions of this cycle and the last have come from active regions that were tracked weeks in advance. You probably remember the various news flashes that a coming storm *could* produce naked eye aurora at low latitudes. Those come when complexes that NOAA has been waiting to erupt finally do
There will almost certainly be warning the next time a Carrington Event hits, but the forecast timing will be +/- 8 hours or more and the false positive rate will be high. There will be difficult/expensive decisions to make about what to preemptively disconnect and when. I don’t have a good feel for how long it takes to “safe” a UHV transformer installation; I’d be interested to hear if others do.
I’m not certain you understand how either statistics work or how one of these events would play out.
We’ve known about the possibility for centuries and the backbone infrastructure takes such events into account. Add onto this that techniques to prevent disruption from cosmic rays are proliferating and we are in an ever improving state. In the era of the Internet we’ve been hit by storms of similar magnitude in 1972, 1989, and 2003. We have advanced warnings when one is coming and there are policies in place. What one of these events does is disrupt wireless communications and inject extra electricity into anything exposed. We have terrestrial fallbacks for time clocks (ptp still operates without a GPS master clock), minimal drift for weeks there. And the majority of the infrastructure for things like the Internet is shielded, indoors, underground, or has fuses to turn it off if a surge occurs. Worst case scenario is that we turn off or reduce power for a day to avoid disruption of the grid, and then possibly have to replace some unlucky satellites whose shielding was insufficient, and private battery powered civilian devices people left outside and powered on during the storm. It’ll likely be no more damage to our grid and digital infrastructure then a Derecho. And it’s getting better every year.
More than a Carrington Event I fear a Kessler Syndrome where all satellite constellations in orbit begin a self destructing chain reaction which, besides annihilating our communication systems, also exponentially increases the amount of space debris in orbit so we’re screwed for decades because it will be incredibly hard to put anything in orbit ever again given how much dangerous crap will be orbiting earth. But a Carrington Event can definitely be the starting point of this scenario.
Have you been watching the sun lately? We just had a sun spot larger than the one that caused the carrington event facing us down. I didn’t check the odds on it popping but I would be surprised if it was less than a 1 in 4 chance, and even that was optimistic.
We actually have studies and procedures on handling much of this. First of all, it doesn’t just fry the whole globe. It impacts specific regions.
Second, as of 2016 long distance transmission providers have to do studies and abatements for geomagnetic storms. You can do things like temporarily switch off lines, have large surge protectors, etc to handle it.
Third,
>Your hard drive wouldn’t be erased, but its electronic controller would fry, turning your data into a useless brick.
Isn’t true for *many*. There are many levels of surge and power supply protection for devices at many points in the chain. This is why it is already recommended to have surge protection and preferably a UPS already attached to sensitive electronics, rendering that claim moot.
Yes, it is something power line operators have to plan for. Yes, it can still cause widespread issues and billions of lost productivity. But your post is fare more alarmist and takes too much to extremes.
Why are you using AI to generate this post and subsequent replies?
If the power grid of the whole world goes off, the photos in my phone are the least of my worries and I think cash becomes useless.
A DNS issue is probably more likely to take out the cloud and cell phone network by 2027.
>about every 500 years
idk, this is not at the top of my worry list
Score one for renewable energy sources. Anyone with solar panels on their house would have continuing power available to them.
I’m not too worried about this event, but I am very aware of how vulnerable we are due to over reliability on digital systems. I can imagine the world erupting into chaos if payment systems went down for some time, for example. I take this as a timely reminder that I should really stockpile some food in case events such as these occur. In actual fact, I think governments should encourage this given that it’s plausible.
NASA is important because it does lots of things other than just ‘Space Exploration’. One of them is monitoring the Sun for these events, so that we have enough warning to shut everything down while it passes, and then power it all back up afterwards, avoiding the catastrophe you described.
I wanna smoke what u/Rare_Eagle1760 is smoking. Colorado or California, be honest?