Preparing For The 100 Year Storms

An exploration of what impact large scale solar events could have on our technological infrastructure (including telecommunications systems, power grids, modern vehicles and digital money systems).

In permaculture design, we strive to take a step back to see the larger cycles (which often exist outside the scope of our individual lifetime) that have the potential of impacting our designs so that we can plan accordingly. This applies to 100 year rainstorms, 100 year droughts, 100 year ‘economic storms’ and 100 year solar storms as well. If we want our designs for our garden (and life in general) to be resilient enough to persist through the ‘100 year storms’ we have to be willing to get out of our conditioned thinking that ‘since something has been relatively stable within our lifetime, if will continue to be so’. History teaches us that while such thinking may be comforting, it is in essence nothing more than a popular delusion that is not supported by the facts.

Here in the modern western world we are used to money (in the US and here in Canada) having a reasonably stable value and I think that as a result we have developed a kind of misplaced confidence in that perceived stability continuing because it is all we have known in our lifetime. But both history and current events tell us a different story.. and with so much of our fiat currency economy being tied into computers now, a stock market crash (due to a scamdemic or some other psyop the plutocrats have up their sleeve) or hyperinflation are not the only possible causes that could render our respective units of currency practically worthless in a very short amount of time. Not only are our computer systems and power grids dependent on unsustainable and finite resources, they are also vulnerable to being irreparably damaged / rendered unusable by both manmade and natural events (EMP-s, CME-s, hacking etc) which means that the numbers in our bank accounts could be wiped from existence (or rendered inaccessible to us for long periods of time) without warning.

Our local star (Sol aka “the sun”) goes through natural cycles in which it casts off a mass of magnetized plasma.

These powerful solar flares are referred to as CME-s (coronal mass ejections) and they are capable of causing a large geomagnetic storm if the solar matter impacts the Earth (which can damage the telecommunications infrastructure that provides online services, cell service and even has the potential to physically damage satellites, modern vehicles, electrical grids and other electronic devices).

All modern cars include integrated circuits. So, theoretically a large solar event could disable modern cars (which would require microchip replacements before they could run again).

Not only may power, Internet, and GPS systems be disrupted, but these solar storms can also impair daily communication. Everything is affected, including access to hard drives/networks storing your banking information, phone calls, Internet access.

According to a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences, power grids may be more vulnerable than ever. The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. In some ways, it makes economic sense—but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging "cascade failures."

To estimate the scale of such a failure, report co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with "water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on."

And it could be down for months (or years depending on where you live and how prepared people are in that area) because repairing the destroyed and damaged infrastructure will require a lot of time.

Most of our money is now digital, that means your hard earned dollars stored in a bank account are vulnerable too.

While cryptocurrency may be a preferable alternative in the short term for investing in something more stable in value and less restricted/controlled by plutocrats than fiat currency (conventional banking systems) it is also true that we could face situations in which all of the above would be rendered practically worthless in the near future. EMP devices or naturally occurring CMEs (geomagnetic storms) could cripple telecommunication networks and personal hardware that transmits/verifies and stores cryptocurrency.

"The Carrington Event” as it’s known today, is considered a once-in-a-century geomagnetic storm—but it took just six decades for another comparable blast to reach Earth. In May 1921, train-control arrays in the American Northeast and telephone stations in Sweden caught fire. In 1989, a moderate storm, just one-tenth the strength of the 1921 event, left Quebec in the dark for nine hours after overloading the regional grid. In each of these cases, the damage was directly proportional to humanity’s reliance on advanced technology—more grounded electronics, more risk.

When the CME and resulting "solar storm" caused an 11-hour blackout in Quebec (in In March of 1989) six million people were affected. This was in a time before widespread internet-dependent infrastructure. Thus, the impact that even a CME of that size (1/10 as strong as a “Carrington Event”) would have on a city today would be exponentially more disruptive.

When another big one heads our way, as it could at any time, existing imaging technology will offer one or two days’ notice. But we won’t understand the true threat level until the cloud reaches the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite about a million miles from Earth. It has instruments that analyze the speed and polarity of incoming solar particles. If a cloud’s magnetic orientation is dangerous, this $340 million piece of equipment will buy humanity—with its 7.2 billion cell phones, 1.5 billion automobiles, and 28,000 commercial aircraft—at most one hour of warning before impact.

At 11:18 am on September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a 33-year-old brewery owner and amateur astronomer, was in his private observatory, sketching sunspots—an important but mundane act of record-keeping.

Richard Carrington

That moment, the spots erupted into a blinding beam of light. Carrington sprinted off in search of a witness. When he returned, a minute later, the image had already gone back to normal. Carrington spent that afternoon trying to make sense of the aberration. Had his lens caught a stray reflection? Had an undiscovered comet or planet passed between his telescope and the star? While he stewed, a plasma bomb silently barreled toward Earth at several million miles per hour.

When a coronal mass ejection comes your way, what matters most is the ‘bullet’s’ magnetic orientation. If it has the same polarity as Earth’s protective magnetic field, you’ve gotten lucky: The two will repel, like a pair of bar magnets placed north-to-north or south-to-south. But if the polarities oppose, they will smash together. That’s what happened on September 2, the day after Carrington saw the blinding beam.

A typical bolt of lightning registers 30,000 amperes. This geomagnetic storm registered in the millions. As the clock struck midnight in New York City, the sky turned scarlet, shot through with plumes of yellow and orange. Fearful crowds gathered in the streets. Over the continental divide, a bright-white midnight aurora roused a group of Rocky Mountain laborers; they assumed morning had arrived and began to cook breakfast. In Washington, DC, sparks leaped from a telegraph operator’s forehead to his switchboard as his equipment suddenly magnetized. Vast sections of the nascent telegraph system overheated and shut down.

There are several studies assessing the probability of occurrence of a Carrington-scale event. Current estimates range from 1.6% to 12% probability of occurrence per decade for a large-scale event (note that the probability of occurrence per decade of a once in-a-100-years event is 9%, assuming a Bernoulli distribution where events are independent).

The frequency of CMEs is not uniform across solar maxima. In addition to the 11-year cycle, solar activity also goes through a longer-term cycle in approximately 80 - 100 years called the Gleissberg cycle. This cycle causes the frequency of high-impact events like CMEs to vary by a factor of 4 across solar maxima. The most recent solar cycles, cycle 23 (1996-2008) and cycle 24 (2008-2020), are a part of an extended minimum in the current Gleissberg cycle. In other words, modern technological advancement coincided with a period of weak solar activity and the sun is expected to become more active in the near future. Hence, the current Internet infrastructure has not been stress-tested by strong solar events.

The probability of a Carrington-level event in the 2020s is 2-3 percent, according to Katepalli Sreenivasan (professor of physics, engineering, and mathematics at NYU).

Now, given these facts, it becomes clear that we may face a day within our lifetime where internet and power grid is down not just in our own neighborhood, but across the globe (or at least a large portion of it), knocked out from space: by an enormous solar superstorm.

It sounds like science fiction, but several studies says it could become our reality earlier than we think if we don’t prepare properly for the next time the sun spits a wave of magnetized plasma at us.

One of these studies, written by University of California assistant professor Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, is titled “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse.”

It paints a sobering picture of what will inevitably happen when an enormous solar storm hits us: submarine cables between countries shut down, power grids offline, data centers from web giants going dark (meaning no access to your digital currencies).

For additional info on CMEs and other phenominon related to the sun that can impact our technological infrastructure (and biology), you can go here, here and here.

It is worth noting that history has shown us that physical fiat currency systems are not sustainable nor stable either. In reality, these are just pieces of paper, plastic, metal, (and more recently, mostly just) zeros and ones (data) on a hard drive that (unlike seeds, skills, food and good soil) have no intrinsic value.

Whether it be through intentional market manipulation engaged in with the intent of further consolidation of material wealth and power (as was the case with the intentional manufacturing of the great depression) or through the inevitable collapse of hollow foundations due to the unsustainable nature of the private central bank dominated fiat money system, or be it through a natural or manmade EMP event.. these are systems that will inevitably implode (leaving many who depend upon them in really tough situations).

Thus, there may come a time when the only people who are eating are those that know how to grow, forage for and preserve their own food. Some say gold or other precious metals are a good way to invest in something more stable than digital currencies or fiat money, but in my opinion, in certain hypothetical situations (where something like a large CME fried the grid and people have not had heat or access to buy food from stores for months) I don't know if anyone would be willing to trade shiny pieces of metal or gems etc for that which has intrinsic value (food, water, clothing etc). Things like gold/silver may retain some degree of perceived worth in the short term, but if major components of our hyper-centralized modern western civilization implode (as they inevitably will if we continue on our current trajectory) there will likely come a time when seeds, food, practical/durable tools, knowledge and skills will be more valuable than paper, data or shiny objects that one cannot eat. That is why I invest most of my time and resources into the Earth, as history has taught me that human empires rise and fall, and when they fall, it is those that know how to grow/forage for their own food, medicine and preserve it that survived.

So what should we do? Fortify our high tech gadget dependent lives with faraday cages and hardened central power grid components so we can keep on living as we have been (until some other critical vulnerability in our hyper centralized infrastructure buckles)? That does provide temporary solution and would certainly allow for the preservation of digital artifacts we have come to hold dear.

We have a rudimentary faraday cage where we store a limited amount of gadgets (mostly related to energy generation, water purification, communication etc) and some drives (with cherished memories, evidence of plutocratic racketeering operations for posterity and art forms etc) though at the same time I feel it is important to also take steps to be capable of living (comfortably) without those things (since I, nor anyone in my local community cannot build those devices from scratch if they were to be destroyed, so I feel depending on them would be unwise).

If you want to learn more about building a faraday cage you can do so here.

While Faraday cages allow us to preserve some semblance of our technologically dependent lives in the case of a large scale CME or man made EMP (given we have other tools for gathering energy off grid at our disposal) that only addresses preparing for the 100 year solar storms, and not the once in a century storms of a different nature which are at our doorstep.

So what is a pathway that increases our preparedness to weather the hundred year storms universally?

The answer is simple... if our human systems of exchange (money systems) are weak, unreliable, unpredictable and/or have been usurped by nefarious interests, let us leave them behind. We can wean ourselves off of our dependence on these systems and chart a more responsible and reliable course. We can invest our time and energy in something that precedes these unreliable/unstable systems.. a method of exchange and 'economic model' that has persisted for millions of years and can be relied upon to provide our basic needs when we need them most.

This means making the decision to open up an 'account' with Mother Earth and do some long term investing. Soil, seeds and delicious homegrown produce are so much more dependable than fiat currency, cryptocurrency or precious metals. A forest is a 'soil seed bank' that is self perpetuating, self regenerating and provides exponential abundance... we can emulate this elegant, prolific and resilient system in our garden spaces to create our own 'soil seed banks' (that provide abundance in food, medicine and beauty).

Even in 'stable' times if Mother Earth's 'interests rates' are compared to the interest rates of human institutions, it becomes clear that investing in the Earth is the wiser choice.

The current situation with the global financial infrastructure (among other things) is serving to remind us how investing our time and energy into unsustainable, hollow and fragile human institutions and money systems is a risky proposition. While fiat currency can serve many functions that make life 'easier' and facilitates large scale collaboration it is also something people have become so dependent upon that should that centralized system cease to function many would have a tough time providing themselves with their basic survival needs. Also, as stated above, due to the dependence of cryptocurrencies on computer systems and telecommunications systems, these are also systems that are unreliable in the long term (at least in their current mainstream formats).

While investing in the Earth (through gardening, preserving and saving seed) is always a wise and dependable investment, there are times when the value of that investment increases exponentially.. we are now approaching such a time.

The Earth does not have 'stock market crashes' and when you invest your time and energy in the Earth (through building soil and maintaining a regenerative food garden) the returns she offers on that investment are multi-faceted and increase in magnitude year after year.

The path to invest in the Earth and co-create resilience, adaptability and abundance begins with a conscious choice to break old patterns and chart a new course.

These challenging times we are living in are offering us an opportunity to see how decentralization, localization, embracing hands on, DIY, low tech skillsets and food/health sovereignty are key pathways towards a resilient future. This is true both on the scale of individual households and communities.

Can you really afford to wait until it is a desperate need to act? Plan for and plant an organic food garden now for the joy, health, and preparedness it provides.

All it takes is a will to learn from the Earth's natural systems and cycles, a handful of seeds and some tlc.

I have been working on putting together a ‘trail map’ for those that want to take steps to becoming prepared for the ‘hundred year storms’ (and in a way that also nurtures joy, creativity and health during the best of times). If you are interested in learning more about saving seed, composting to build fertile soil, cultivating heirloom crops, preserving your garden harvests using low tech methods and creating your own natural medicines these are some of the main focuses of my soon to be published book.