Something bizarre happened on the night of Sept 1,1859. All the telegraph systems over North America and Europe suddenly failed. At the same time, there were reports of telegraph operators receiving electric shocks and telegraph pylons throwing sparks.
Unlike today’s ubiquitous satellites, fiber optic cables and telephone lines, the telegraph was the only mode of long-distance communication at the time. Its sudden state of disrepair meant that people from different parts of the world were entirely and abruptly cut-off from each other.
At the same time, bright, mysterious auroras started appearing as far south as Mexico. They were so bright that people in the northeastern US could read under its light and gold miners in the Rocky Mountains, US, started waking up and preparing breakfast, erroneously believing that it was morning already.
Today, we call it the Carrington Event. It was the largest solar storm in recent history and it caused a coronal mass ejection (CME), a sudden release of plasma and magnetic field from the sun. We largely escaped unscathed then as a solar storm of that magnitude is most detrimental to electrical equipment, which were scarce at the time, but not so much to humans.
Can you imagine if a Carrington-level event were to take place today?
It could blow up power station transformers, fry the electricity grid, knock out satellites, and according to experts, cost us over US$2 trillion in damages. It will mean no communication, no electricity, and no transportation. All at once – and very suddenly.
It would literally plunge us into a new dark age.
In fact, we just narrowly and very fortunately missed a solar storm of similar magnitude by a mere nine days in 2012. According to NASA, there is a 12% chance that we’ll be experiencing one in the next decade and a 60% chance that we’ll experience one in the next 50 years. I don’t like those odds.
And neither does Dr Robert Schoch of Boston University, who contends that a solar storm of epic proportions struck Earth around 11,700 years ago, bringing the last ice age to a thunderous close. It caused lightning storms, massive wildfires, torrential rain, a sudden sea-level rise, massive destructive floods, and increased the Earth’s temperature by around 10 degrees Celsius. He says this wiped out entire civilisations, brought humanity to its knees, and knocked progress back by thousands of years.
Randall Carlson, a prominent independent scholar agrees with Dr Schoch about the approximate timing (he puts it between 11,600 and 12,900 years ago) and the magnitude of the cataclysmic event but says it was due to an asteroid impact, not a solar storm.
Among many other things, he points to the fact that asteroid impacts like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs are far more common than most people realise or pay heed to. NASA gives credence to the claim, saying there are 4,700 potentially dangerous asteroids lurking near the Earth. The most chilling example Carlson gives is of something even more terrifying than the Carrington Event.
On the morning of the 30th of June 1908, a large explosion erupted around 5 to 10km above a sparsely populated area in the Eastern Siberian Taiga region in Russia. It was no ordinary explosion.
It was the violent disintegration of a 100 metre-large asteroid in our atmosphere. It flattened 80 million trees, its shockwave would have registered a 5.0 on the Richter Scale and it released as much energy as 30 megatonnes of the explosive TNT. It was called the Tunguska Event.
For context, if this happened above Kuala Lumpur, the entire city would be obliterated, instantly incinerating hundreds of thousands of people and flattening buildings over two thousand square kilometres.
And it gets worse. The asteroid that swung into the Earth’s atmosphere was just a tiny fragment of the Taurid Meteor Stream, which crosses the Earth’s path twice a year. There is evidence to suggest that there are asteroids in the stream that are up to 30km in width, which is a staggering 90,000 times the volume of the Tunguska asteroid and somewhere in the region of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
If an asteroid this large were to slam into the Earth, it would all but spell the end of civilisation. Humanity would still survive as we have survived calamities of this magnitude before, but we’d be left crippled and teetering on the brink. We’d lose most of the technology we hold dear today, sending us back to a more primitive way of life.
More recently in 2013, a similar but much less severe event occurred, again, over Russia. A 20-metre wide asteroid that was traveling at a blistering 19km per second (around 35 times the speed of a bullet) exploded about 45km above the city of Chelyabinsk. It did so with the energy of around 500 kilotonnes of TNT, glowing 30 times brighter than the sun, injuring over 1,200 people and causing some to have skin and retinal burns due to its radiation.
All this points to one thing: we are not nearly as safe as we think we are. Calamities caused by solar storms and asteroid impacts are much, much more common than we realise. It’s about time we dispelled the idea that we’re living in this linear, constantly progressing, yet fairly safe and steady-state world.
More and more evidence is being unearthed that’s slowly but surely giving credence to the hypothesis that advanced civilisations existed thousands of years ago but were destroyed by such cataclysms.
This is when it’s useful to remember that the Earth is but an infinitesimal speck in a violent, dynamic universe. We’ve been lucky to live through a period of relative peace and a lack of true extinction-level events. To expect our lucky streak to continue unabated is foolish.
You might say that the Covid-19 pandemic is one such event but I think of it more as a shot across the bow, not a true global calamity. Sure, many have perished and it has caused economic carnage, but it’s not even a blip compared to the cataclysm around 11,700 years ago that destroyed vast, ancient civilisations or the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
In some ways, we’re even more vulnerable now than we were all those years ago. A thousand years ago, we were a largely agrarian society who knew how to grow our own food to feed ourselves and our loved ones. Go back even further and we were nomadic hunter-gatherers who knew how to hunt and forage for food.
Today, however, we’re all so reliant on technology and long, incredibly complex, and vulnerable supply chains for everything from food to fuel to face masks. If the internet and power lines go down, we’ll be left entirely exposed and powerless. We lack basic survival skills and our population is highly specialised which means that if some people are killed, we risk losing vast pockets of knowledge and expertise forever.
But fret not, it’s not all bad news. For the first time in the known history of humanity, we also have the power to avert or at least recover from a cataclysmic event when it does occur. But the only way we’ll do that is if we stay vigilant against these extraterrestrial threats and devote much more resources to it than we do currently.
After all, it’s just a matter of when, not if, a true humanity-threatening calamity befalls us. And when it does, we stand to lose everything.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
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