Is tomorrow the day?

How the sun could wipe us out

A burst of plasma would set in motion a devastating cascade of failures

Bret Weinstein

JULY 19, 2021

The world began to end on 12th May 2024,though another 309 years would pass before our species finally went extinct. The apocalypse was not the result of one thing, unless that one thing was that we repeatedly ignored signs that industrial civilisation had become increasingly fragile, even as it grew ever more powerful. But our end very definitely had a trigger.A burst of charged plasma from the sun caused the sudden, simultaneous collapse of numerous electrical grids across the world,setting in motion a cascade of devastating failures from which humanity would never recover.

In one regard, this was perfectly predictable. In any given decade since the grid’s invention, there was a one in eight chance that such an electrical collapse could occur. In 2013, a report had warned that an extreme geomagnetic storm was almost inevitable, and would induce huge currents in Earth’s transmission lines. This vulnerability could, with a little effort, have been completely addressed for a tiny sum of money — less than a tenth of what the world invested annually in text messaging prior to the great collapse of 2024.

And it wasn’t as if the profits of some powerful industry depended on leaving the vulnerability open; the fossil fuel industry had a reason to oppose sustainable power, but the grid’s vulnerability enriched no one. In fact, every person on Earth stood to benefit from fixing the flaw. And yet it remained, never a priority, perhaps because nobody could predict when the fuse would be lit.

The burst of plasma leapt from the Sun’s surface on 9 May, 2024.It was detected by Earthbound space-weather observers, who track these dangerous Coronal Mass Ejections. They made the usual calculations and issued the standard warnings. Had the grid been promptly disconnected, the crisis might have been lessened. But as was invariably the case with geomagnetic storms, they could not say how seriously — or even if — this burst would disrupt power, so the scientists’ warnings were largely ignored by grid managers, who don’t like blacking out vast areas on the remote chance of a severe problem. Crossing fingers had worked pretty well in the past. This time it did not.

Continued at site…

https://unherd.com/2021/07/how-the-sun-could-wipe-us-out/