The Sun can send us to the middle ages at any moment now. What can we do about it?

It is already a matter of fact that most of our lives today are fully reliant on technology. Almost our entire identities are tied to a small electric brick, a few banks from China announced that they won’t accept cash anymore and that their entire work will be done with digital currency and nowdays it seems that almost every system has some technological side to it. It has gone so far that even every day devices, that don’t need to be connected to the internet or even to have computers in them at all, became absorbed in this movement. For example, a few days ago while I was browsing a social media site, I found a picture with a grill that refused to open because it needed “a software update”. Can you imagine the irritation of you having to wait EVEN MORE for that delicious food to be cooked on your expensive grill?

Now, what if I were to tell you that everything of that is in a big danger. Almost all the systems that current society works on; has a big threat in front of its eyes and there could be even a possibility that it could collapse because of some event that we are unable to predict with 100% accuract and it seems to get more frequent. The event in cause is: Coronal Mass Ejection.

You see, when we talk about the Sun we have mainly two “solar weather” events that we are preoccupied with: Solar Flares and as mentioned earlier Coronal Mass Ejections.

They are both caused by somewhat the same event and that is the contortion of the electromagnetic field lines of the Sun. How does this happen? Well, the Sun gets randomly these so called “Sun Spots”. These are called areas, with lower temperature than their surrounding matter, but way more dense in magnetic energy. If you were to point a telescope straight at the Sun, you could see these little dark dots on it (if you wouldn’t go blind in the process, of course). Another remark, they might seem tiny, but they usually are as big as the Earth or a few times its size. A little bit not that “tiny” when thinking about it now.

When two Sun Spots appear near one another; they “connect magnetically” which basically means that they start to hold hands. Very tight. And the hands move chaotically. With high speeds and sometimes tremendous energy. But when the holding breaks…that’s when we run into problems and these two weather events are created because of the energy released by that rupture. Mostly, the difference between these two consist in what they emit, energy levels and the travel time to reach Earth. You see, when compared, solar flares are more of a muzzle flash of a blank gun that it is spread in its vicinity (so the energy is dispersed on a larger area) while C.M.E.’s are more of packet cannonballs, propelled in individual directions (less area of impact, but way more power when it hits an unlucky target).

Coronal Mass Ejection Group | UNH Earth, Oceans, & Space

So everything is nice and informative, they seem cool and all, but the real questions: Are we in any danger? Should we care at all about them? Can we use C.M.E.’s as actual cannonballs if we have a large enough medieval canon? Kind of, yes and…with great sadness, no.

Thankfully, we have this really great and nice magnetic shield around the Earth that keeps us safe of so much radiation that you don’t have any idea of. Really, without it, we would’ve been hit with so much cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun, that these meat packs called “Humans” would not have any chance at surviving. This fella is really nice, give it a beer if you ever can, or some cookies.

Now, if we are not in any real danger, why should we care at all about all of this? Well, while our soft tissue cases will be safe, everything that you could call an electronic device: laptop, phone, electronic key-locks, car system, bank systems, YouTube servers, aeroplane boards and auto-pilots. Almost every somewhat complex system of our current society, is not that happy about all of this.

We are concerned, because we have records that in the past, Earth has been hit quite a considerable amount of times by some strong powerful C.M.E.’s. For example, I’m not sure if you ever heard of this so called “Carrington Event” or “The Most Intense Geomagnetic Storm” that we ever received. It happened in the year 1859, so when telegraph lines were around for 20 years already and settled as a main way of communication. When the rush of electromagnetic waves hit, they were so strong that the telegraph lines snapped and caught on fire; there have been also significant power outages caused by this. The waves also made some pretty Auroras that went as South from the North Pole as to the Carribean’s levels. If something like this were to happen today, almost every single piece of technology that we wave, would just get fried and practically useless. Maybe you could use your phone as a literal brick this time, but nothing more.

Carrington Solar Flare of 1859

Since the “technological revolution”, the Sun activity was at one of the lowest activity periods, which meant a very low number of Sun Spots and no electronic manufacturer had to take into the account if the Sun decided to get angry and shoot canonballs at us. Almost all of today’s technology is vulnerable to such an attack; without any sort of protection against it. Recent research shows that the “low activity” period of the Sun to be over, for 2 or 3 years already, results suggest that it might actually start one of its most active periods. Which means, a significant higher amount of Sun Spots, and the risks of an actual C.M.E. to hit Earth to be that much higher.

Luckily, for a device to become nothing more than a brick, it needs to be on or connected to a system that is on. So all we need to do to keep our cat videos servers safe is just a warning from some smart scientiests and yay! All is fine! Well…, even though we are not 100% C.M.E.-proof, we are decently safe. In recent years there has been significant improvements in the way of how we are able to dected Coronal Mass Ejections, and even though they are not 100% perfect we can protect ourselves against the risk of going into the dark age times. Hopefully, the progress will be enough with the future level of Sun activity.

Sorry Americans, Your Cell Phone Is Useless Worldwide - Joyful Journeying

Made by: Daniel-Ioan Mlesnita

Sources for this blog post:

  • Chapman, S. C., Horne, R. B., & Watkins, N. W. (2020). Using the aa index over the last 14 solar cycles to characterize extreme geomagnetic activity.. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2019GL086524. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL086524
  • Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi. 2021. Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse. In ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference (SIGCOMM ’21), August 23–27, 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472916

One Reply to “The Sun can send us to the middle ages at any moment now. What can we do about it?”

  1. Daniel – this is terrifying food for thought! Sometimes we forget how dependent the world is on networks and devices – it’s scary to think about what could happen if there was a CME like you described! Would make a great scifi movie…
    -Edie

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