A
Slashdot contributor gazes up into the firmament and is frozen
with horror at the madness dwelling in the deep skyey
voids: 

A privately employed solar scientist named Pete Riley estimates
there’s a 12 percent chance of a massive solar storm comparable to
the Carrington Event in 1859 which resulted in breathtaking aurorae
across the United States and other temperate regions of the globe.
The electromagnetic surge from the 1859 event caused failures of
telegraph systems across Europe and North America. A similar storm
today could knock out power grids, GPS and communication
satellites, data centers, transportation systems, and building and
plumbing infrastructures and wreak $1 trillion or more of economic
damage in the first year alone, according to a 2008 report from the
National Academy of Sciences.

In the journal Space Weather, Riley
explains how he got his figures:

By showing that the frequency of occurrence scales as an inverse
power of the severity of the event, and assuming that this
relationship holds at higher magnitudes, we are able to estimate
the probability that an event larger than some criteria will occur
within a certain interval of time in the future. For example, the
probability of another Carrington event (based on Dst −850 nT)
occurring within the next decade is ∼12%

At Wired, Adam
Mann has details on the Great Chastisement: 

When they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, those [solar particles
traveling at 4 million MPH] generated the intense ghostly ribbons
of light known as auroras. Though typically relegated to the most
northerly and southerly parts of the planet, the atmospheric
phenomenon [in 1859] reached as far as Cuba, Hawaii, and northern
Chile. People in New York City gathered on sidewalks and rooftops
to watch “the heavens … arrayed in a drapery more gorgeous than
they have been for years,” as The New York Times described it.

Auroras may be beautiful, but the charged particles can wreak
havoc on electrical systems. At the time of the Carrington Event,
telegraph stations caught on fire, their networks experienced major
outages and magnetic observatories recorded disturbances in the
Earth’s field that were literally off the scale.

In today’s electrically dependent modern world, a similar scale
solar storm could have catastrophic consequences. Auroras damage
electrical power grids and may contribute to the erosion of oil and
gas pipelines. They can disrupt GPS satellites and disturb or even
completely black out radio communication on Earth.

During a geomagnetic storm in 1989, for instance, Canada’s
Hydro-Quebec power grid collapsed within 90 seconds, leaving
millions without power for up to nine hours… 

 “A longer-term outage would likely include, for example,
disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and
finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the
distribution of potable water owing to pump failure; and the loss
of perishable foods and medications because of lack of
refrigeration,” the [National Research Council] report said.

A one-in-eight chance seems much higher than, for example, the
likelihood of a chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear attack
estimated in this Risk
Management Solutions study [pdf].

Yet we spend $60 billion a year
on the Department of Homeland Security, and we have yet to send
even the first star cruiser to deliver a weather-controlling
machine to the surface of the sun. When will the government do
something about the electromagnetic pulse? 

When Newt Gingrich becomes president, that’s when!
The Newter has been warning us about the EMP threat for years
now. But the former House Speaker’s fears are limited to
terrorist EMP attacks by North Koreans or Iranians, who are always
using their high-yield nuclear weapons and state-of-the-art
ballistic missiles to do stuff like that. 

Once again, the wages of fear get spent on low-probability
threats mainly because the high-probability threats tend to be
events you can’t blame on anybody. You don’t have to accept at face
value all those studies that conclude you have a better chance of
being crushed under a vending machine than of being killed in a
terrorist attack – and who says you can’t be crushed under a
vending machine during a terrorist attack? But as our collective
boredom with fast zombies and bathroom accidents shows, we tend not
to fear the stuff that can actually kill us. 

Fortunately for America, one man is ever-vigilant about the
extraterrestrial threat. Reason’s Ron Bailey assesses
the threat of an asteroid collision; weighs
the probability of a collision over time; and wonders
why being freed of the burden of putting people into space has not
made NASA any better at watching the skies. Whether the threat
comes from the sun or from big rocks, one thing we know: It’s time
to stop sticking our bayonets into each other and start sticking
them into space.