Solar physicists put the odds of a major geomagnetic storm that wuld put the electricity grid at risk some time in the next ten years at around one in ten
1859 C.F. Herbert, prospecting for gold in south-eastern Australia, saw something sublime in the evening sky. “A scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable colour were issuing from the southern heavens,” he would later recall. “The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution.
Technology plays a crucial role in the hazards such events generate. It can bring surcease, as a vaccine might for a pandemic. It can bring vulnerability, as electric grids have when it comes to geomagnetic storms. And it can also bring forth new risks of its own. The most obvious are the technologies of internal combustion and nuclear weaponry, which made possible catastrophic global warming and war on an unprecedented, environment-shattering scale.
Risks that are merely catastrophic, not existential, do not tend to be the subject of such philosophical rumination. They are more amenable to the sort of calculations found in the practice of politics and power. Take the risk of a nuclear attack. According to Ron Suskind, a reporter, in November 2001 Dick Cheney noted that America needed new ways to confront “low-probability, high-impact” events.
America does, at least, have a solid plan: the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan, published in March 2019. It also has an early warning system. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the space-weather centre in Boulder, also runs a satellite calledcircles a point on a line between the Earth and the Sun—the point about 1.5m kilometres inward from Earth where the two bodies’ gravitational attractions balance each other out.
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