PLUS: More of WIRED's best longreads from this week.
Every so often, the sun lobs a plasma bomb out into the solar system. Usually this fast-moving mass of charged particles doesn't hit anything, because space is very big and the sun can't aim. But sometimes a planet happens to be spinning in its crosshairs. And sometimes that planet is full of puny DNA-based organisms whose civilization relies on a wispy electrical grid. In that case, if the bomb is fired at just the right moment and hits at just the right angle, the effect on the civilization can be catastrophic. Matt Ribel, in his first feature for WIRED, offers a play-by-play of what could happen when the next big coronal mass ejection hits Earth, from the moment the first GPS satellites go dark to the months-long blackouts and the overrun hospitals and morgues. He asks the questions any puny organism would, when faced with this game of cosmic Russian roulette: Can we predict it? Can we protect ourselves from it? Or are we going to lose a good chunk of modern civilization because people were too cheap to install capacitors? Anthony Lydgate | Features Editor | |
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