Uh-oh.
It’s already started: the first in what promises to be a year of huge solar storms.
Described as an enormous ball of gas travelling at 2000 kilometres per second, a “coronal mass ejection” struck the Earth on Thursday, causing fears of navigational disruption, satellite damage and even power grid failure.
True to its 11-year cycle of stormy activity, the Sun is belching out masses of charged radioactive particles, some of which hit us. With an unusually weak magnetic field wrapped protectively around our planet, our local star’s tetchy behaviour could wreak havoc with our technology and our way of life.
This combination of a weak magnetic shield and solar hyperactivity doesn’t happen very often. When it did, in 1859, telegraph lines burst spontaneously into flame all over North America, and the sky was so bright with an extended aurora borealis that workers got up in the middle of the night, thinking it was morning.
Telegraph was the only sort of electronic technology at the time. But now we have a civilisation almost entirely dependent upon digital technology.
Uh-oh.
