In september of 1859 a solar geomagnetic storm occured known as the Carrington Event that
wreaked absolute havoc on the technology available in those days.
Specifically, telegraph stations that reported sparking and even a fire due to geomagnetically
induced current.
This led to a curious effect, even when telegraph operators turned their equipment off, they
were still able to send and receive messages.
That phenomenon was specific to how telegraph systems worked, but it’s a bit spooky to
contemplate a piece of technology staying on even after unplugging it just pulling energy
from the environment.
The event also caused massive and widespread auroras, and was most likely caused by a coronal
mass ejection from the sun.
Indeed, there was an observed solar flare that may have been directly related to it.
If this were to happen today, and it very well might, and we had a coronal mass ejection
pointed directly at us, it would wreak havoc on our technology and have long lasting effects,
such as the power grid going down long term.
But the Carrington Event, as bad as it was, doesn’t seem to be the worst the sun can
do.
In the year 774 or 75 AD, a spike in carbon 14 concentrations in tree rings is seen that
are 20 times the normal background.
More this event seems to also be present in form of Beryllium isotopes in ice cores, correlating
at exactly the same time period.
This has variously been termed the Miyake or Charlemagne event, Miyake being the scientist
who discovered it, and a reference to Charlemagne who was reigning as King of the Franks at
the time.
Further evidence suggests that whatever it was, it was global, and the creation of carbon
14 was almost instant, so whatever caused this specific event happened very rapidly.
The problem is, this event was over a hundred times more powerful than the Carrington Event,
and it’s not unique, there is evidence of another just two hundred years later, and
at least four other instances of very high energy radiation hitting earth.
These Miyake events are puzzling, because of their intense power.
The prevailing current theory is that it’s the sun, and that it can produce solar flares
of much greater power than we’d previously thought.
But there’s a problem.
The sun functions on a solar cycle, with sunspots and flares reaching a maximum every 11 years.
The Miyake events however seem to occur regardless of where the sun is in its cycle.
More they vary in duration, some seem very short, yet others seem to last over a year,
and one seems to have built up over the course of a decade.
Whatever this phenomenon is, it’s dangerous to technological civilization, unpredictable
though they do average out to one event ever thousand years, but only loosely, come out
of nowhere and we’re overdue for one.
These are not normal solar flares.
That’s assuming that they are solar flares.
There are other ways to make the observed isotopes including cosmic rays but alternative
hypotheses include gamma ray bursts, nearby supernovae and perhaps strangest bombardment
from passing neutron stars.
None of these explanations fit very well however, and there’s no recent evidence indicating
any of that.
There is some possibility that there’s something we don’t know or don’t understand about
isotope generation here on earth, and it’s also possible that all of the events were
not due to the same cause, but the best bet so far is that somehow the sun can produce
sustained and multiple flares occasionally in a collective superflare.
Another strange aspect of this is that there’s very little in the historical record about
these events.
Mostly, people just went about their daily lives and saw nothing unusual, as solar flares
of this nature do not pose a risk to life in general, just modern technology.
There was however one report in the year 775 in England of a red cross appearing in the
sky, something that sounds somewhat similar to an aurora.
Also Chinese astronomers recorded auroras in connection to this event.
But a storm of that magnitude should have sparked off absolutely astounding aurora activity
that no one could have missed.
But other than those two mentions, it seems to have been a non-issue.
But the biggest question of all is what would happen if one of these events were to hit
today.
To answer this, first we must visit the past.
Imagine for a moment it was the year 1800 and you were looking for a video like this
one.
You’d have been the greatest visionary in human history if you could conceive that someday
actual still pictures of humans would exist, even though in 1800 there were people alive
that would eventually be photographed.
Indeed, there are some claims that the earliest born human ever to be photographed, could
have been born as early as 1737 though at the time they’d have been around 113 years
old in 1851 when the daguerreotype was taken.
Not impossible, but rather unlikely.
That said there are plenty of confirmed cases of people born in the 18th century being photographed.
Here is Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the battle
of Waterloo, and would later become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, He born in
1769, here seen in a rather triumphant pose in a painting.
Here he is photographed later in life.
The point is though, that few born in the 18th century could have envisioned that their
visage would be directly reproduced without a painter involved.
No one in those days could have imagined that moving pictures would someday be possible,
and no one would have envisioned that someday youtuber science fiction authors would upload
regular videos about space, existential crises, and interviews with scientific luminaries
while adding in opposum content and saying the word live strangely.
I was not foreseen, and something tells me the Duke would not approve.
But two can play that game.
But ask yourself this, can you envision a world without photography?
Another, somewhat different situation is the much more recent development of going to the
moon.
In contrast, this was envisioned, Jules Verne, the films of George Melies, and so on all
depicted humans going to the moon.
This is because the age of enlightenment brought with it a scientific understanding of the
moon, and that it was, in principle, possible to go there and set foot on it.
This was realized with the Apollo program starting in 1969, but still represented as
it does today a gigantic technological leap.
But herein lies a question, these advances have made for us a life that is markedly different
from our origins as homo sapiens.
We are still the same species as any human that’s ever lived, but with a very different
mentality and understanding of our surroundings when compared to our ancestors.
Take my own ancestry, people often ask me why I have a name that looks like it should
be on a Canadian hockey player’s jersey, and I can emphatically say blame France via
Quebec.
Given my French creole quasi-cajun genetics, I often look with fascination at prehistoric
French cave paintings such as those at Chauvet cave and wonder however distantly I might
be related to the person that painted that cave wall almost 37,000 years ago.
Do I carry some remnant of their DNA, and the answer is almost certainly yes.
But What was their life like, how different is it really between painting an elk on a
cave wall versus making a youtube video?
The reality is that when you look at cave paintings of animals and with chauvet a single
fertility symbol, you see what was important to them.
Food and successful reproduction, the cycle of human life.
We still care about this of course, but food is far easier to obtain today, and medical
science has drastically cut child mortality.
What was once a task of finding a mammoth and spearing it has been largely replaced
in the developed world with a trip to a grocery store.
Our modern paradigm truely is a world away from what our natural paradigm actually was.
And this leads to a spooky question.
What if our paradigm suddenly went away?
Futurist James Burke once envisioned what this would be like, it would be beyond difficult
to go from living in an apartment in the city to operating a farm with 19th century technology
overnight.
And once we addict ourselves to a technology, it becomes very difficult to go backwards.
A good example here is the internet.
I remember a time when it basically didn’t exist in the public mind, and even when I
graduated high school it was still largely relegated to message boards and dial-up modems.
Within three years of that, I was involved in making most of my living using the internet,
and it’s been that way all the way through to the present with my youtube channels.
Such was the internet revolution of the 1990s.
But now, if the internet suddenly went away, it becomes, at least for me, jarring and unpleasant
since it’s such an integral part of my life.
A power outage for me is disconcerting and frustrating enough, but a permanent loss that
technology would at the very least force a reordering of everything I do, providing I
survived it.
A return to a pre-industrial existence overnight due to some calamity, such as a solar flare,
would wreak a level of havoc on our civilization to the point that it might be its end.
It’s possible that an enormous amount of people could be lost as a result, and civilization
is unable to recover in a meaningful way.
This gets worse as time goes on, we will eventually run out of fossil fuels, and will become increasingly
dependent on our technological paradigm, presumably by that time fusion energy.
Interrupt that with a solar flare, and you might not be able to make it back to where
you were for lack of formerly important resources.
It’s back to horses and manual plows, or some hybridized new technological paradigm
that incorporates many different past technology that have left obsolescence.
No matter any way you slice it however, the answer is bad news, and while the idea of
a solar flare hitting us in a carrington style event is scary, that there is an unknown mystery
superflare situation still not fully understood by science is terrifying.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently perplexed in that
over the course of the last year I wrote more Spooky October scripts than I could possible
have produced as videos within a month.
So dear subscriber, let me spin a yarn of next month after spooky october is finished,
and we begin the november leftovers which will actually contain some of the spookiest
members of the group and as always check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.