These days the internet pretty much runs our society, but could this come to a grinding halt sooner than we expect?
Over the past few days and still for the next few especially, Earth has been in a very close proximity of line-of-fire for the recent coronal mass ejections (CMEs). If it so happens that this solar matter doesn’t just pass by in close proximity but actually continuously engages and on a large enough scale, it could mean the end of the Internet as we know it (okay, I had to add in some extra dramatic effect for this; but on a serious note, we could really end up without Internet for quite some time if we don’t properly prepare for this anomaly).
In Short
In a nutshell, you don’t need to worry yourselves about being internet-less…for now anyway. Although it is highly unlikely that the Sun will be causing a cyber-blackout any time soon, it’s not completely out of the realm of possibilities and we, as the human species, are certainly nowhere near ready for this.
These concerns were brought to the surface during the SIGCOMM 2021 conference which commenced on the 20th of August (for the welcome session; the program itself started on the 23rd) and concluded on the 27th of August. To highlight the main presented research which sparked the realization of how unprepared we really are, the research paper (which is yet to be peer-reviewed) was presented on the 26th of August.
“What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it’s the same with internet resilience. Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event.” – Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi told Wired.
Basically what all of this means is that most of the world could be plunged into disconnection, i.e.: no internet for weeks or even months at a time.
Repeaters that are installed along the underwater fibre lines (which will be rendered useless if the repeaters go offline), as well as GPS satellites and other communications hard- and software will be the worst hit if the solar winds (a mass of charged particles emitted from the Sun’s corona) interfere too harshly with the Earth’s magnetic fields. Sometimes the interferences are actually pretty cool, resulting in phenomena such as aurora borealis (basically light effects like that of the Northern Lights) and other interferences being not so cool, meaning they result in Geomagnetically Induced Currents (the currents which will cause damage to above-mentioned technologies).
Not only could the satellites be indefinitely offline, but they could end up plummeting out of orbit. As for the internet connections, well for the most part the more localized short-distance connections would be relatively okay; it’s the international connections that would be severely impacted. For example, South Africa would be able to maintain inter-province connections and even connections with other African countries; whereas we would be cut off from Australia or the UK.
So online players, you won’t be rendered completely multiplayerless, you’ll just be subjected to less foreigner-outbursts of rage when you hit them with that 360-noscope and have to settle for the standard ol’ local ragers.
But in all honesty, as of right now in this day and age, the probability of this “worst-case scenario” is highly unlikely. This is merely stating the possibility of such an event and the need to be prepared for it.
Just a Little Something Extra
To begin, the estimate of an extreme solar storm actually directly striking Earth has a probability of between 1.6% and 12% per decade, according to Sangeetha’s paper.
The Sun’s solar winds are always sprinkling down upon Earth but not so much that it has any real negative effects. Instead, Earth’s magnetosphere protects us from these particles and essentially diverts them off towards the poles where we end up with the beautiful aurora spectacles. However, intermittently we end up with a fully-fledged solar storm. Although this does sound mildly terrifying and panic-inducing when you start to think about the chaos that the world will lapse into, this has only ever been recorded twice in more recent history.
The first of these two was in 1859, known as the Carrington Event, where things got so severe that telegraph wires caught alight; and the second event in 1921, simply known as the May 1921 geomagnetic storm.
Solar storms can also cause smaller scale inconveniences such as in 1989 when the entirety of Quebec was blacked out for about 9 hours.
So it’s not completely out of the ordinary for these things to happen, it just so happens that as time goes on the environments and atmospheres change and so does the progression of mankind. As natural disasters and phenomena increase and the human world becomes ever more reliant on technology and the internet, these are situations that we need to start acknowledging, taking note of, and coming up with preparations.
Resilience tests are one way to get on top of things, as a start anyway. When the time does come that a severe geomagnetic storm hits again, we’ll have about 13 hours to prepare for it, confirms Sangeetha.
We also need to keep in mind for when this happens that it will cost hundreds of thousands, millions, likely billions to repair the damages as well as just the sheer, daunting tasks that the specialists will need to take on to get the jobs done.