Amateur Brain Surgery

…compared to what the next big solar storm will do!

The Nurse is glad she wasn’t around for the biggest ever recorded solar storm , 1859′s so-called ‘Carrington Event’. 

She’s even more pleased she was locked up safely here in the UK when, in March ’89, a solar storm hit Quebec leaving six million Canadians freezing their jibblies off for a miserable nine hours. And she definitely doesn’t want to be around when – rather than if – the next big one hits.

Why all the drama? So what if we suffer the daddy of all electricity cuts?

Sadly the next big solar storm won’t just put the lights out for a few hours, days or weeks. It will completely fry the world’s electricity grids. Some experts reckon that Europe, the US and UK might never recover.

Put bluntly, without electricity we’d be utterly fucked. Chew on this:

• No healthcare – hospital emergency generators will last a few days then that’s it. 
• After a couple of weeks, no medicines – you can’t manufacture drugs, or anything much for that matter, without power.
• No fresh water or fuel – almost all pumps run on electricity.  
• A massive and sudden food crisis – if you can’t pump fuel you can’t run cars, lorries, ships or aeroplanes and you can’t deliver food to supermarkets. Even if you could, the tills wouldn’t work.
• The internet would die pretty much instantly.
• Your home would be cold and dark. No cooking, even by gas… gas pumps use electricity too.  And you can forget telly. 

The Nurse could go on, but she’s sure you’ve got the point. The next big solar storm will be the end of society as we know it.

It was bad enough for the Victorians, wrecking their unsophisticated telegraph systems and magnetometers. Unless you live in some godforsaken desert or jungle and wouldn’t know electricity if it bit you, you’ll be absolutely and completely stuffed. 

So what’s the risk? The Carrington Event was the biggest we know about  but solar storms are a fact of life. The sun’s activity intensifies every eleven years or so, following a rough but regular cycle. The next solar maximum is due in 2012. Having said that, solar storms can happen any old time whether or not the sun’s throwing a wobbly. 

All of which sounds pretty grim. But it makes the current economic climate look like a walk in the park, and global warming seem like a picnic.

What to do? We can’t do anything about it. NASA’s aging ACE probe can only give a maximum of 45 minutes’ warning, so being warned is bugger all use to anyone. And if we had plenty of warning – an impossible task because solar particles move so fast – all we’d be able to do is turn the planet’s power off, hang on to our hats and keep our fingers crossed.  

The phrase ‘hoist by our own petard’ springs to mind. The Nurse has decided that the only thing to do is party.