Solar Storms; The Gamble We All Lose

In a bleak world the news is often alarmist, fear-mongering and almost wholly without a sense of perspective, but even the modern media have limits and I bet you can guess what they are

Once the news media was a crowded place. Stories jostled for the space available, items vied for time on the nightly bulletins, articles wrestled for precious column inches, and there was always something that fell by the wayside, always news that slipped between the cracks. Of course in this digital age with its 24 hour news cycle and social media’s aping of the real thing, that’s all changed, the beast is now insatiable, there are now so many niche news sites that almost nothing goes unnoticed.

End Of The World

• As little as 12 hours warning
• Mass coronal ejection event
• Electrical infrastructure vulnerable

The Orwellian wet dream in which we all live is as much our fault as that of the corporations that service our need for ever greater amounts of information, we even believe our own mundane existences are news of a sort, just ask anyone on Facebook or Twitter. However away from the specialized corners of the web and ill-advised mass confessional that is social media, the mainstream media has a new dilemma; The slow news day.

Slow news days are not, I should hasten to add, anything new, however these days the razzamatazz with which big stories are greeted, presented and analyzed stands in marked and noticeable contrast to days when not much is happening. This leaves many outlets gambling news coverage of the latest celebrity scandal will hide the dearth of real stories, but it doesn’t. Indeed it could be argued it merely highlights all the things the news doesn’t talk about.

There are numerous unsavory parts of our world that rarely get discussed or aired in the mainstream news media. Often this is because they’re far too depressing. The plight of those suffering might be all very well when it’s a single individual with which we can sympathize or even empathize, but when the numbers of those in pain of dire circumstance gets too large we find it overwhelming and turn over or stop reading. Commercially supported news media doesn’t like that, so they don’t do it.

Bored Of The End Of The World Already?

This is why the end of the world tends only ever to be mentioned by the mainstream media in rather laconic or amusing articles in which witty writers throw up their hands and fatalistically make the sort of jokes you’d call gallows humor if anyone actually believed we were in danger. TV production companies might be willing to make dramatic documentaries for Discovery about it, but you won’t see the possible causes talked about in “the news” before the latest Brangelina story has been covered.

Oddly this isn’t because they worry it will alarm people, news editors have no qualms about punting fear at the audience with gay abandon. According to them our nations are being flooded by immigrants, our countries stolen from us by extremists, and terrorist hoards lurk armed to the teeth around every corner awaiting their moment to strike. They don’t think we’ll be scared, just bored. On hearing how the world might end we tend to shut our minds to it, and turn over to watch Fraiser.

This is a naturally occurring human defense mechanism against the paralytic terror that would overwhelm us were we to actually have a realistic sense of perspective concerning the fragility of life on Earth. The news media doesn’t supply that perspective because the paralyzed don’t consume much, and indeed assist in our dismissing of it by making it almost humdrum in entertainment. From nuclear war to the zombie apocalypse, from disease to asteroid impact, they’ve covered it all.

So used to only dealing with concepts of such mammoth implication in terms of the latest disaster movie that you’d get more reaction out of someone who likes to bet on sports in the UK by telling them Arsenal were into transcendental meditation than that the world is likely to end through a complete collapse of the international financial and banking system. This is why sports doping scandals seem more frequently covered than the unsavory parts of living on this spinning ball of rock.

Space Weather Preparedness Strategy Report

It is also why you’ll only hear about the possible end of life as we know it on very, very slow news days. Take the recent release of “The Space Weather Preparedness Strategy” report that has emanated from the UK cabinet office and managed to gain momentary mention across the media for its similarity to a movie plot. It stated we would, in case of a coronal mass ejection, when the sun farts radiation towards us in dangerous quantity, get 12 hours warning to prepare for it.

Precisely what anyone could do about it, however, seems to remain unclear. The famed Carrington event of 1859, a massive solar storm if you will, knocked out the telegraph system of the day, but times have changed and our dependence on electricity, its generation, its transport, its use, means that the same event today would plunge the world into chaos, if you were told to turn off all your electrical appliances right now, would you do it? Really? Would you?

Our modern world relies so much on connections of power and information, of trade and communication, all powered by electricity that it is almost impossible to think that upon word of command from the government people will stop using electricity, cease wagering on Bet365, browsing the news, watching television, using lighting, heating or kitchen appliances. In 1965 when the lights went out people sat in the dark and waited, in 1977 they rioted, looted and committed arson. What might happen after a solar storm is unpredictable then, save for one salient fact, the power won’t be back on any time soon.

Modern large transformers are not easily replaced. They cost a lot, take time to build and facilities to manufacture them are limited. In 2010 the US barely had 6, today that number is not much higher, at the rate of production possible it might be years before some were back on line as before. A world without electricity might well be a movie plot, or a dour report covered on a slow news day, but it is sadly all too possible, and those in the UK gambling laws custodians have a plan to save everyone a la Bruce Willis is wholly mistaken, but don’t expect the news to tell you so any time soon.