I always figured the Sun was just up there tanning influencers and occasionally frying my retinas, until I had an unplanned deep conversations with an ol’ friend and co-geek @Marcel-Jan-Krijgsman, who doubles as the president (not the tangerine one) of interplanetary affairs in the Netherlands. He’s an astronomer next to being a data scientist, in case you’re wondering if he wears a tinfoil hat.
I won’t bother you with details, yet, but this introduction is meant to both give you an idea of what’s to come, and also set the stage for the drama which is going to unfold.
What are you even talking about?
Let’s start.
Every now and then, the universe taps us on the shoulder just to see if we’re paying attention. Yes, the sun. As it turns out, this smug nuclear furnace in the sky, has already thrown three warning shots at us, and each one landed harder as we seem to be getting more and more dependent on plugged-in nonsense.
Again, what are you talking about?
I’m taking about this thing astronomers and freaks alike call Coronal Mass Events.
So , these so-called CMEs are monstrous solar burps. They’re throwing together a smoothie made of billions of tons of charged plasma (super hot soup of Hydrogen nuclei and more stuff) and hurl it into space at speeds that would make Noel Skum’s rockets cry.
Basically, the Sun is sneezing pure electromagnetic rage straight into your Computer, your smartwatch, your car electronics, your Wi-Fi.
Your everything electronic.
When one of these stellar spitballs lines up with Earth, the northern lights do a little rave and like any raver on methamphetamine, an inevitable crash follows. The CME slams our magnetic field and every freaking chip and every electronic circuit is toast. Fried. Satellites die. Power grids are gone. Your microwave is dead (ay ay ay!). .
We’re thrown back to the dark ages in minutes.
Who cares about AI displacing jobs or creating a Skynet when the sun can just sneeze it out of existence.
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It happened in the past
In 1859, some British dude named Richard Carrington looked through his telescope, saw two blinding white spots flaring like welding arcs. The sun literally spat fire, and he thought, “Wow, splendid!”.
Eighteen hours later, the telegraph offices everywhere were reenacting Final Destination. In London, telegraph operators screamed as their machines sparked to life without batteries. In New York, messages kept sending after the power was cut, and they were hissing like a delusional snake on shrooms, and desks were even catching fire. One operator was knocked unconscious, and another watched his telegraph key weld itself to the table.
I kid you not.
And all the while this happened, the sky danced green and red as if the apocalypse had decided to show its balls. Carrington stood under that spectral aurora, watching the heavens paint over the Victorian smugness. He had just discovered the Carrington Event (of course not called Carrington back then), the biggest solar storm in recorded history.
But nobody cared.
The public blamed “sunspots” or “ether disturbances” (yes, the ether was a real thing back then). And he spent the rest of his life as the man who saw the Sun lose its temper, then got politely ignored. Roughly a century later, people would quote his data to design satellites, never realizing he’d done his lab work literally under fire.
Then came March 1989.
Maybe you remember this one?
Jean Tremblay was a power-grid engineer in Quebec (that’s Canada), and he was the kind of man who spoke fluent transformer. March 13, 1989, was a normal night until his switchboard began to hum in a tone you only hear in bad dreams filled with scenes from Hellraiser.
That day, Quebec learned the hard way that the Sun doesn’t need your consent to pull the plug.
A geomagnetic storm had hit Canada. GICs were pouring through the grid like invisible lava. The meters spiked. Geomagnetically Induced Currents, are what happen when a CME hits Earth’s magnetic field. That shifting magnetic field acts like a gigantic moving magnet, and according to our old buddy Faraday, moving magnets and conductors make electricity.
Ta-da.
You’ve got electric currents flowing through every long metal thing on Earth like power lines, pipelines, railway tracks, undersea cable, you name it.
And in his little shack, the transformers howled like my Weiner, Slob when I’m leaving for work (awww). Jean reached for a relay switch just in time to see the lights die. Not flicker, die. And across Quebec, a network of 735 kV lines became an antenna the size of France, and it was channeling electricity straight into the power grid.
Nine hours of blackout, six million people freezing in the dark, and the entire grid collapsed. Transformers went kaboom, and the takeaway was simple, we built a civilization that’s one magnetic sneeze away from medieval times.
And by 2003, us hoomans had upgraded everything, except common sense (still the case). Those Halloween storms cooked half the satellites, grounded flights, and made Canada flicker like a disco.
And that wasn’t even the big one.
The Carrington Event was still about 60% nastier. So yeah, we got a trailer for the apocalypse, and somehow nobody bought surge protectors.
And yet, despite our preparations, we are still highly vulnerable for new CMEs.
Why we built the perfect target
Our modern world is a giant freaking antenna that is also designed to catch cosmic death rays and amplify them into civilization-ending chaos. When a coronal mass ejection hits us with a billion-ton cloud of pissed-off particles that are traveling at two million miles per hour, they smack into Earth’s magnetosphere and it triggers magnetic reconnection that sounds really fancy but really means our planet’s protective field gets kicked in the groin and starts flailing around like a drunk octopus.
What usually keeps us from getting roasted like marshmallows is Earth’s magnetosphere. That big magnetic bubble you can see in northern Sweden and Norway as a green glow in the sky, is the real umbrella. It deflects most of those charged particles long before they reach the atmosphere. The particles follow the magnetic field lines and that is why they spiral toward the poles and light up the sky as auroras (instead of lighting up your bloodstream).
These magnetic storms induce electrical currents in the ground itself and therefore it is creating geomagnetically induced currents that flow through dirt in the form of underground rivers and they cause pure destruction. And the thing is that we’ve helpfully built a massive network of power lines, pipelines, and communication cables to channel this rage directly into our most critical systems.
High-voltage transformers are the crown jewels of vulnerability. These things weigh 400-ton and are custom-built monsters that cost $12 million each and take 18 months to replace under normal circumstances.
Not when it rains alpha particles.
And there’s not really an umbrella for those, unless you count a few millimeters of anything solid like air, paper, your dead phone battery, because alpha particles are the little kids of the cosmos. And like little kids, they’re loud, energetic, and stopped cold by the first wall they hit.
Um. Maybe not a great analogy.
If the CME is strong enough though, a lot of that radiation slips through and in that case, conductive shielding like metal layers, spacecraft hulls, or specialized materials like polyethylene, can absorb the alpha particles themselves. Remember, alpha particles can’t even get through a sheet of paper, but when they come as part of a CME’s high-energy storm, the problem isn’t the penetration . It is the electromagnetic havoc they drag along.
And these transformers are designed to handle nice, predictable alternating current at 60 Hz, but not the quasi-direct current chaos that GICs bring to the party.
Drama-filter-ON.
And when these currents flow through a transformer, the iron core saturates like a sponge and that is forcing the device to draw excessive current and thus (don’t you just like the word ‘thus’) it starts to overheat, distort, and fluctuates voltage that ultimately ends with the transformer literally exploding in a shower of sparks and burning oil that can be seen for miles.
Drama-filter-OFF.
Satellites get the full cosmic beatdown without Earth’s atmosphere to soften the blow. High-energy particles penetrate their shielding like bullets where they are flipping bits in computer memory and destroying its solar panels, and causing permanent component failure. The atmospheric heating increases drag and then sends them tumbling back to Earth where they can be witnessed as (rather expensive) shooting stars.
Aircraft are flying computers that depend on GPS for navigation and ground-based radar for not boinking into each other, but both systems vanish when the ionosphere starts absorbing radio signals. That, and the fact that every wire is live for multiple seconds, mean that in-flight electronics is fried. The aircraft’s engines stop and it has to glide to safety.
The interconnected nature of our infrastructure means that one failure triggers cascading disasters throughout the entire network. Communication systems need electricity and satellites, transportation relies on electronic ignition and computer-controlled engines, financial systems process trillions through networks that die with the power grid, and medical equipment from ventilators to dialysis machines simply stops working when the electrons stop flowing.
We have built a silicon/copper house of cards, and then placed it directly in the path of a cosmic ray gun.
If you wondered how such a scenario would play out, here you go . .
The collapse timeline
When the sun sneezes, we all die of pneumonia
No warning sirens. No Hollywood countdown. Just a quiet day in the week where everyone is doom scrolling, slurping their coffee, and of course pretending they have everything under control. That is, until the sky decides to pull the plug on the human experiment, and what follows is apocalypse porn and it takes the form of physics cashing in on 150 years of technological arrogance.
This is how the modern world ends.
Not with a bang, mind you! But with a geomagnetic rage that remind us all that we have built an electronic house of card and are totally dependent on it.
Here’s the time-line from hour to hour, week to week and month to year.
Zero Hour. Game over
11:42 AM Eastern on a day somewhere late October 2026- the most powerful coronal mass ejection in recorded history slams into Earth’s magnetosphere with the subtlety of a nuclear bomb. Space weather stations have been screaming warnings, but this X50+ solar flare exceeded every model and prediction and within minutes, over 2,000 satellites start having electronic breakdowns when high-energy particles fry their circuits and communication satellites go silent one by one. GPS signals become as reliable as Mark Rutte’s**†** promise, and weather satellites transmit corrupted data before joining the graveyard in orbit.
† Trumps lapdog calling him daddy.
Hour One. The grid commits suicide
Geomagnetically induced currents flow through the ground. The first transformer to die is a 500kV unit that weighs 417 tons and costs more than most people’s houses. It suffers catastrophic internal failure as GICs push its iron core past the breaking point and it creates temperatures over 1.600 degrees Celcius – that is about three times hotter than lava and it’s hot enough to melt pretty much everything you own. And of course it melts the copper windings and causes the whole thing to explode like very expensive firework. The failure cascades across interconnected grids as protective relays trip, but the GICs are so that powerful they overwhelm even the safety systems that the humans have implemented since 1989.
Hour Two. Continental lights out
The entire North American power grid collapses in a domino effect that would be beautiful if it wasn’t ending civilization. California’s 40 million residents plunge into darkness, New York City’s 8 million people find themselves trapped in a metropolis that is suddenly stripped of its electronic heart. Subway trains stop in tunnels where they become the coffins of its commuters and traffic lights fail and create a gridlock that makes traditional rush hour look like meditation. The failure spreads globally as interconnected transmission systems carry electromagnetic chaos across continents.
Hour Three. Communication dies
Power goes down, and now the communication infrastructure begins its death spiral when cell towers lose power and satellite links vanish. The few towers with backup generators get overwhelmed when hundreds of millions of people try to make calls simultaneously which is creating jams that crash the remaining network nodes. Internet infrastructure collapses when routers and switches lose power, fiber optic networks go dark, and within three hours global internet connectivity drops to less than 5% of normal levels. This is effectively ending the information age and isolating communities that had been connected just hours before.
Hour Six. Transportation chaos
Reality sets in and highways become parking lots when millions of people try to flee the cities at the same time. Modern cars fail when the electromagnetic effects damage their computer-controlled engines, electronic ignition systems, and fuel injection – you know, basically everything that makes them more sophisticated than an Amish horse and buggy. Airports become disaster zones the moment that air traffic control systems fail and radar goes dark, but also communication with airplanes becomes impossible and GPS navigation vanishes. The 5,000 commercial aircraft in flight must make emergency landings guided only by visual navigation and backup instruments, but without ground control many flights end in disaster.
Hour Twelve. Medical apocalypse
Hospitals are faced with an unprecedented crisis when its backup generators run out of fuel with no possibility of resupply. Life support systems shut down and ventilators stop breathing for patients, dialysis machines cease filtering toxins from blood, incubators can’t maintain temperature control for premature infants and the most vulnerable patients start dying when the medical infrastructure simply ceases to function. The staff needs to make impossible decisions about who gets access to limited manual care.
Day One. The death count starts
By day’s end, approximately 100,000 people have died globally. Primarily those who are dependent on powered medical devices like elderly patients on life support, premature infants in neonatal units and patients undergoing surgery when the power failed. But these are just the opening notes of an orchestra of destruction.
Day Two. Water systems collapse
Water treatment and distribution systems shut down completely because pumps stop working and chemical dosing systems stop altogether. Also the water pressure drops to zero in urban areas and therefore taps run dry, toilets stop flushing, and the infrastructure that is providing clean water to hundreds of millions of people simply stops functioning and next to that, the sewage treatment plants shut down which is causing raw sewage to overflow into water sources and creating immediate public health crises.
Day Three. Food crisis explodes
Modern food distribution collapses. Supermarkets find their refrigeration is dead without power supply, and supply chains are severed so new fresh produce doesn’t make it to market. The average supermarket carries three days of food for local populations, and with no resupply possible and refrigerated goods spoiling the food shortages become critical. And now, when panic buying starts it gives way to looting when remaining people realize that money is meaningless without electronic payment systems. Debit and credit cards don’t work, ATMs are dead, banks are closed – the doors won’t even open, and the entire monetary system has collapsed.
Day Four. Social order evaporates
The population realizes that this isn’t temporary but a permanent infrastructure collapse. And this is triggering a complete breakdown of social order. Police lose control because communication and patrol capabilities vanish and looting becomes widespread. This leads to armed gangs to be formed to get control over remaining resources. The first refugee movements begin when urban dwellers flee toward rural areas but rural communities organize armed resistance against approaching waves of desperate people.
Week One. Government paralysis
Federal and local governments prove that they’re unable to coordinate a meaningful response without communication or transportation systems. The heads of state declare martial law from a secure bunker, but without systems to transmit orders or deploy troops, the declaration becomes meaningless. Military units act independently to maintain small zones of control around critical facilities.
Death toll – Week one: 500,000 to 1,000,000
Deaths concentrate among vulnerable populations dependent on medical devices, plus mounting casualties from violence and accidents as emergency services fail.
Week Two. The great exodus
The greatest migration in human history begins because millions of people walk out of cities to rural areas and like in WO2 movies, you see them carrying whatever they can manage on foot or dragging a hand cart or a kids wagon. Highways become rivers of human misery as families walk for days without food or water. People start scavenging from abandoned vehicles and the elderly and infirm get left behind to die. People in the rural communities destroy bridges and block roads to prevent refugee access.
Week Three. Disease outbreaks
Water treatment is down and sanitation has collapsed and now disease outbreaks become inevitable. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid are back and they spread rapidly through refugee populations. Food spoilage causes widespread poisoning and minor injuries become life-threatening without medical care and the absence of antibiotics. Bodies accumulate in streets as disposal systems fail.
Week Four. New reality sets in
The scale becomes undeniable – this is permanent collapse of technological infrastructure. Barter systems emerge since money is now worthless, people trade food for medicine and labor for shelter. Complex specialization gives way to desperate scrambles for basic survival skills when advanced technology knowledge becomes irrelevant.
Death toll – Month one: 7.5 to 16 million
The death toll accelerates because of an increase in starvation, and disease. And violence intensifies when social structures completely break down.
Month Two. The great die-off
Mass starvation becomes the dominant cause of death when humans reach the 30-40 day survival limit . . . without food. Urban areas become death traps – New York with 8 million people and no local food production sees its population drop to 50%. Insulin-dependent diabetics die as medication runs out, dialysis patients die from kidney failure and cancer patients succumb to infection without treatment.
Month Three. Warlords rise
Government authority completely collapses and instead new social organization emerges around strongmen with weapons and fuel who establish control over remaining resources. These warlords create small fiefdoms offering protection for labor and loyalty. Religious and ethnic communities band together, sometimes leading to conflicts because social tensions magnify under survival pressure.
Month Six. Lower level stabilization
Population stabilizes at a much lower level when the most vulnerable of people have died and the survivors adapt to the new living conditions. Small communities form around whatever resources are available like functioning wells or defensible locations. Agriculture resumes at primitive levels but without modern inputs. Most survivors are forced to focus entirely on food production and ending specialization.
Death Toll – Month Six: 200 to 400 million
Death rate slows as vulnerable populations already died and survivors adapt, but cumulative toll continues mounting.
Year One. New dark age
The old world is gone forever. Global population drops from 8 billion to perhaps 5-6 billion. Entire cities are abandoned and the global economy gets replaced by local subsistence and barter. Knowledge needed for modern technology is also disappearing because universities are closed, research labs are abandoned and the internet containing human knowledge is gone. We all wished we had printed our emails and iPhone photo’s to remember the ones that have past. But it’s too late now. Children born now will grow up in 18th century conditions where they have to learn farming and crafting instead of vibe coding and robotics.
Death toll – Year one: 700 million to 2 billion
Highest death toll year as full collapse impact becomes apparent through starvation , disease , violence , and medical care breakdown.
Year Five. The new normal
Humanity settles into new equilibrium with 1-2 billion people left. People live in small self-sufficient communities where technology has regressed to early 19th century levels. Some communities preserve small amounts of modern knowledge – they have a few hospitals with basic equipment powered by water wheels and some radio communication over short distances is reestablished – but these are exceptions. The political map is completely redrawn when the national governments ceases to exist. It is replaced by local councils who’re controlling areas that are no larger than a few hundred square miles. International trade has disappeared and is replaced by occasional barter between neighbors.
Total Death toll – Five years: 2 to 5 billion people
A CME will lead to the greatest catastrophe in human history with 25-50% of global population dying from infrastructure collapse or secondary effects of starvation, disease, and violence.
What we’re actually doing about it
Despite the fact that there’s a growing awareness of solar storm threats, the mitigations that we humans have taken against this cosmic fury are futile. The United States developed a National Space Weather Strategy that is coordinated by agencies including NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, the Department of Homeland Security (developed a risk assessment tools, yeeey), and the Department of Energy (of course). And all three of them are funding the development of the first operational Neutral Blocking Device† in 2022.
Power companies have taken just a few basic steps to prepare for solar storms. They run assessments (duh… we assess that we’re, um, uh, ℉☋ ₵₭€₯) that use monitoring tools, to monitor how screwed we actually are, and the satellite industry has built electronics that can handle a bit more radiation. Oh yeah, and countries also share space weather data through international programs as if that’s gonna help.
But these actions are far too small to handle a major solar storm.
The entire United States has only one working Neutral Blocking Device, protecting almost nothing. And on top of that, this kind of defense is made for mild events, not for Carrington type disasters that destroy all infrastructure.
The U.S. spends about $100 million a year on this issue, but real protection cost hundreds of billions, and yet they’d rather spend it on Palantir and Stargate data centers, and on top of that, there are no laws that force infrastructure and utility sectors to prepare. Only about 100 large transformers can be built worldwide each year, so replacing thousands would take decades. The emergency plans that we’ve been able to find all assume that power will return in days or weeks, but not that the grid is permanently destroyed.
So you may conclude that the preparations out there are nowhere near enough. In fact, we need a major national program, like on the scale of the Manhattan Project, to build proper defenses before the next big solar storm hits and ends our technological way of life.
But still, we’d rather spend it on the short term, like defense and big data centers than on ruggedizing the net.
I can only conclude that we are living on borrowed time because our whole world could collapse at any moment under assault from an angry sun. The physics of destruction are well understood, the historical precedents are clear, and collapse timelines have been mapped in terrifying detail, but still we delay massive investments needed for protection and we’re gambling our civilization’s future.
† A NBD is a doohickey that ‘stops’ DC-type currents (especially those caused by solar storms and nuclear EMP) from sneaking into a transformer’s neutral/ground connection. The idea is that at Hour Zero + 1, the NBD limits the GIC from flowing into the transformers so they won’t go 💥
Signing off,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins and clean up the mess.
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