Telegraph systems covering Europe and North America went down, as sparks flew from equipment, giving electric shocks to their human operators and even starting fires. Amid the electrified tumult, machines that had been disconnected from their power supplies
eerily continued to relay their truncated messages.
It was, in other words, technological chaos. Yet from the comparatively futuristic perspective of 2018, as far as tech apocalypses go, it all sounds rather quaint and contained.
The thinking goes that
"the big one" [solar flare], when it hits (about
once every 500 years,
if not sooner) would be powerful enough to knock out electrical and communications systems across Earth for days, months, or even years – nixing power grids, satellites, GPS, the internet, telephones, transportation systems, banking, you name it.
And forget taking out Quebec – we could be talking about all of Canada going offline, maybe the whole world – and with only
hours of warning before technological darkness falls.
It sounds like something out of a disaster movie, but it's not the stuff of fiction. Conservative estimates suggest we could be looking at up to
US$2 trillion of damage in the first year of such a calamity, with a recovery effort that could take a decade for the world to pull off.
On the more extreme side, others say US$20 trillion is a more reasonable figure – an inevitable damage bill that should perhaps make us reassess the risk factors of space-borne destruction.
https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-would-happen-if-solar-storm-wiped-out-technology-geomagnetic-carrington-event-coronal-mass-ejection
