The Solar Storms We Ignore

A few days of solar fireworks were all it took to remind us of a basic truth:
the universe is not a friendly place.

During the recent severe solar storms, auroras spilled far beyond their usual Arctic haunts, glowing over much of Europe and the continental United States, with displays reported as far south as Florida and the U.S. Southwest. Here in Colorado, the sky looked like it had been hacked… bands of red, purple, and green flickering overhead while most people scrolled past the headlines about “pretty northern lights.”

But behind that beauty is a blunt reality: we live on a small rock orbiting a variable star that occasionally hurls billion-ton clouds of plasma at us at a million kilometers per hour (that’s over 600k miles per hour).

We pour trillions into “solving” carbon dioxide while doing comparatively little to harden our societies against solar storms, super-eruptions, or asteroid impacts… events that will happen again, regardless of how many heat pumps we install.

This piece is about one of those real threats: solar storms.