The Carrington Event was in 1859... the "largest ever recorded" perhaps not meaning much given the limited capacity to even be aware, much less record, such things prior to that...
But, we've known about it and proceeded anyway... thinking it not overly necessary to plan for another ?
The odds likely somewhat less than advertised... as a function of the biasing element in science finding what it wants to find... scientists being just as prone to bias in relishing doom porn as any other humans...
How likely is another Carrington Event?
That tendency is even built into the language... which you see as a threshold occurring somewhere between 42 in 150 being "severe"... while 6 out of 150, necessarily also being "severe," go on to exceed the severity of others to become... "great" !!! ??? Every hurricane, of course, is "severe" weather... without every hurricane being "a severe hurricane" ?
However, "Space super-storms aren’t harmful to humans, because our atmosphere protects us" is a tad overly optimistic... in which case so is Elon Musk's expectation that moving one planet away will confer significant survival advantages for the species... if the sun has a bad day... or if there is some other near enough star that decides its had more than enough, can't take any more... and goes all super nova on us...
Douglas Adams, it turns out, was not only an incurable romantic, but a hopeless optimist ?
Statistically, however... your video link gets it more or less right... which should have you noting that the larger risk than possibly 6 years out of 150 having some solar related risks... is that many more years than that in recent history have had human related risks induced... and fully realized.
Fortunately, though, nothing like that in a deadly realization of risks has happened here on Earth since... February... when Texas killed a bunch of people because the arcane rules and mindless rulers of the Texas energy grid... failed to enable sufficient growth in the grid to allow supply to keep up with demand growth in the economy... over a span of 15 years... ? And, have they fixed it now ? Not a chance...
So, even narrowing the scope down to only "electric grid risks"... I'd say human induced risks are far larger than solar induced risks... and, if you break the human induced risks down into categories... many of the individual categories would still be larger than the total solar induced risk... ?
From, "oops, we blew up the grid"... to, "oh, shit... there goes Chernobyl"... accidents way up there.
Then, also, deliberate acts... there have probably been more EMP events in the last 150 years than "great" solar storms... while the odds in risks imposed by solar storms being realized likely stays more or less constant... the same likely cannot be said to be true of deliberately created EMP events... ?
Not only do we know the risks exist.. we know both they're not all that hard to anticipate and not all that hard to resolve with better systems design ?
But, then, how do you actually differentiate properly between "natural" disasters... and those that are really caused by our knowing the risks... and still adopting a stubborn failure to plan ?
We are at least taking action in other spheres where risks are, statistically, much larger... so, likely within the next decade... we will finally have an adequate enough awareness of near space... that when we are doomed to die in a collision with a large space rock... we will all know that we're going to die well ahead of the fact ? Assuming they bother tell us... ? |
