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spend this entire video talking nothing
but trash about the Sun the Sun is
mostly pretty great it gives us warmth
it gives plants their energy it gives us
light and it basically allows us to
exist if it wasn't for the Sun none of
us would ever be here so that's pretty
neat
but the Sun gives and sometimes the Sun
takes every so often the Sun burps out
deadly lasers and rays that can hurt
earth and everything living on it and
something like this kind of happened 160
years ago back in 1859 on September 1st
and 2nd of that year skies around the
world lit up with majestic and beautiful
Aurora's it was so bright at night in
some places that people could read their
newspapers in the dark while telegraph
systems across Europe and North America
were mysteriously destroyed and often
gave their operators electrical shocks
but other than that the event had little
effect on human civilization and it was
forgotten about by mostly everybody it
was only later discovered that the event
was actually a cataclysmic solar storm
now referred to mostly as the Carrington
event the event still remains the
largest in the most powerful solar storm
on record and ironically it happened to
humanity before our civilization became
truly vulnerable to them if a storm of
this magnitude hit the earth today it
would have the potential of sending us
back over a century technologically but
to understand how you need to understand
what a solar storm actually is there
basically whenever the Sun erupts a
bunch of energy and mass out across
space
but there's two different main ways of
this happening solar flares are
energetic explosions that blast out huge
amounts of energy and particles across
space that occasionally hit earth when
our planet is in the firing range
Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field
deflects most of the damage that these
cause but satellites above can still be
pretty badly damaged the second way
though is a coronal mass ejection or CME
for short particularly large CMEs like
the one that caused the Carrington event
can be especially damaging to modern
tech
magnetized plasma from the Sun erupts
and carried by the solar wind shoots
through space like a canister shot fired
from a cannon most of these big ones
fire off in lines that don't ever
intersect with earth but it seems like
every few hundred years the line up just
right where Earth's magnetic field will
get overwhelmed consequently these
events can seriously damage all of our
electrical systems and throw much of the
world into darkness fortunately for us
so far all of these big events in our
past hit the planet before we ever
seriously developed our electronic
infrastructure so we never really
noticed besides a few Telegraph's going
out and some pretty night shows when one
of these happens in the future though
it'll be a very different story we had a
very close call
already in 2012 when a Carrington class
super storm was actually created by the
Sun and shot towards Earth it passed
through the Earth's orbit and missed us
by only nine days so if the storm had
been created just nine days previously
the Mayans would have actually been
right and our apocalypse may have
happened on time but we can get a few
glimpses at some of the chaos that will
happen in the future when a storm like
this hits the earth in 1989 a severe but
not quite Carrington class storm struck
the earth and most severely affected
Quebec in Canada their power grid was
knocked offline which left nearly 6
million people without electricity for
several hours or even days so the
thinking goes that whenever the really
big one actually does manage to hit our
planet it'll be powerful enough to knock
out electrical and communication systems
across the planet for days months or
even years power grids satellites GPS
the internet cell phone networks and
transportation systems all could be
damaged or destroyed bank accounts could
be totally wiped out and the stock
market could be shut down for weeks or
even months depending on the scale of
the storm and the part of the earth that
it hits it could do all of this damage
to a particular continent or maybe even
the entire planet and we'd probably only
have a few hours of warning before the
impending technological doom after the
storm hits conservative estimates have
suggested that the world may be looking
at upwards of two trillion dollars in
damages
timeline of ten years to fully recover
the most expensive disaster in history
was the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that
struck Japan and calls the Fukushima
nuclear meltdown and that only caused
411 billion dollars in damage nearly
five times less than what this solar
storm may cost us in the future even
more extreme studies estimates that the
cost may actually be as high as twenty
trillion dollars which would actually
kind of be really an end of the world's
scale disaster it's not a matter of if
the storm is going to happen it's
definitely a matter of when and whenever
it does happen you may have to read
about it in the paper the morning after
instead of seeing it on a screen in the
meantime though you should enjoy the
gifts of electricity in the internet
after all it's only because of the
internet that you just watched this
video explaining to you how you might
lose it all in the future when that
happens you'll have to go back to
learning about things the old-school way
with books and candles but in the
meantime you can still learn about
almost anything online like I've been
doing by watching this course by Kurtz
kazakh on how to create and animate an
educational video essay on Skillshare
you can really learn about any number of
topics on Skillshare though like how to
maintain your productivity by my friend
thomas frank or how to use microsoft
excel it's still early into the new year
so it couldn't be a better time to set
some goals and learn a valuable life
skill you can teach yourself pretty much
anything online these days and
Skillshare is a perfect place for you to
do it with professional and easy to
understand classes that follow a clear
learning curve you can jump right in and
begin learning how to do the work or the
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unlimited access to all courses but the
first 500 people to sign up using this
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first two months for free and as usual
thank you for watching and I'll see you
again next week