Tonight, 8.3 billion people will go to sleep sure of one thing.

The lights will be on in the morning.

SOLSTORM

The Civilizational Blackout Story

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September 1859 · The Carrington event

The sky caught fire.

Auroras as far south as Cuba. Telegraph lines sparked, shocked their operators and set paper alight. It was the largest solar storm ever measured, and it hit a world with almost nothing plugged in.

Now look what we've plugged in.

774 CE · The Miyake event

It wasn't the biggest.

In 774 CE the sun threw a storm ten to a hundred times stronger. It is written into the rings of every tree on Earth. Storms like it have struck at least half a dozen times since the last ice age.

  1. 12,350 BCE
  2. 7176 BCE
  3. 5259 BCE
  4. 660 BCE
  5. 774 CE
  6. 993 CE

Not if. When.

FIELD NOTES · 774 CE

How do trees remember a storm?

A solar storm drives high-energy particles into the upper atmosphere, where they turn nitrogen into radioactive carbon‑14. Trees breathe it in and lock it into that year's growth ring. In 2012 Fusa Miyake's team found a sudden jump in carbon‑14 in Japanese cedar rings dated to 774–775 CE. The same spike has since turned up in tree rings on every continent, with a matching signal of beryllium‑10 in polar ice.

Its strength is put at ten to a hundred times the 1859 Carrington storm. Since Miyake's discovery, researchers have found the same signature around 993 CE, 660 BCE, 5259 BCE and 7176 BCE, and an even larger one about 12,350 BCE. Those are just the ones we have found so far.

SOURCE: MIYAKE ET AL., NATURE 2012 · TREE-RING AND ICE-CORE RADIONUCLIDE RECORDS

T−40 years · The shield

And the shield is failing.

Earth's magnetic field is what turns these storms aside. It has collapsed before: forty‑one thousand years ago it fell to a tenth of its strength and stayed there for centuries. In this story it is falling again. When the big one comes, it is down to a third.

FIELD NOTES · THE SHIELD

What is a geomagnetic excursion?

Not a reversal. The field does not flip and settle; it breaks down, weakens to a fraction of its strength, and splits into several wandering poles before eventually recovering. The best-documented case is the Laschamps excursion, about 41,000 years ago: field strength down to roughly 10%, poles far from the geographic poles, a multipolar field for about 2,000 years with the worst 300 concentrated in the middle.

With the shield that weak, cosmic rays and solar particles reach the atmosphere at every latitude, including the tropics, which today are the best-protected part of the planet. Ozone thins. Ultraviolet at the surface climbs.

SOURCE: LASCHAMPS EXCURSION, ICE-CORE AND SEDIMENT RECORD

T−42 hours · The warning

You'd get a warning.

The flare's light arrives first, eight minutes after it leaves the sun. The storm behind it takes about two days. Satellites a million miles out would confirm it half an hour before it hits.

Most people would scroll right past the alert.

The way you're scrolling now.

FIELD NOTES · THE WARNING

How much warning would we get?

Solar observatories would see the flare and the coronal mass ejection leave the sun, and forecasters could estimate its arrival, usually one to three days out. What nobody can know until it arrives is how the cloud's magnetic field is pointed, and that decides how bad it is. Spacecraft stationed about 1.5 million kilometres sunward of Earth measure it as it passes them: fifteen to sixty minutes of certainty.

In 2013 the insurer Lloyd's estimated that a Carrington-class storm could leave 20 to 40 million people in the United States alone without power for anywhere from weeks to one or two years. That estimate assumed a shield at full strength.

SOURCE: LLOYD'S & AER, SOLAR STORM RISK TO THE NORTH AMERICAN ELECTRIC GRID (2013)

T+0 · Impact

The sky turns red.

Over Lagos.

Over Jakarta.

Over São Paulo.

Over you.

T+90 seconds · The grid

Ninety seconds.

In 1989 a storm a third this strong collapsed Québec's grid in ninety seconds. This one hits every grid on Earth at once. Transformers the size of houses burn from the inside. There are no spares, and each one takes a year or more to build.

FIELD NOTES · THE GRID

Why does a storm melt a transformer?

The distorted field induces slow, direct-current-like currents in anything long enough to catch them: transmission lines, pipelines, rail, undersea cables. Grid transformers are built for alternating current. A hundred amps of quasi-DC saturates the core, overheats it, and burns through the copper windings. That is not a breaker trip. It is hardware.

In 1989 a storm at about a third of Carrington strength collapsed the Hydro-Québec grid in ninety seconds and left six million people in the dark for nine hours. Extra-high-voltage transformers are custom built, mostly overseas, and take months to years to replace under normal conditions. There are no normal conditions after this.

SOURCE: HYDRO-QUÉBEC 1989 · NORTH AMERICAN GRID RISK MODELLING

Then it's quiet.

No hum.

No traffic.

No signal.

Everyone is still alive.

8,300,000,000

T+0 to T+4 days · Your world

Everything you reach for needs power.

Card readers. Fuel pumps. Traffic lights. Elevators. The fridge. The furnace. The phone in your hand has a few hours of signal left, until the cell tower's batteries run out.

T+1 day · Station blackout

The four-hour clock.

COPING TIME WITH NO POWER · ×440 REACTORS ON EARTH

About 440 nuclear reactors run on Earth. They shut down in seconds, but their fuel keeps making heat for years, and the pumps that carry that heat away run on electricity. Many are built to ride out four hours without power. The diesel generators start. Nobody is coming to refuel them.

FIELD NOTES · STATION BLACKOUT

Why does a reactor melt down when the grid dies?

Loss of power triggers a SCRAM: the control rods drop and fission stops almost instantly. But the fission products already in the fuel keep decaying, and decay heat starts at 5 to 6% of the reactor's full thermal output. Hours later a large reactor is still making tens of megawatts of heat. That heat has to be carried away by pumps, and the pumps run on electricity.

Fukushima's diesels started within a minute of the earthquake. The tsunami drowned them, and three cores melted over the following days. Here the diesels run until the tanks are dry, and no truck is coming. Every reactor that was operating when the sky burned will, eventually, melt.

SOURCE: US NRC STATION BLACKOUT RULE · FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI 2011

T+3 days · The water

The taps stop.

Water reaches your floor because pumps push it there. On the third day the taps cough and go dry. Toilets stop flushing. Sewage backs up into the streets.

A person can last about three days without water.

FIELD NOTES · THE WATER

Why do the taps stop?

Almost all city water is pumped: from rivers and wells to treatment plants, and from there up into towers, tanks and tall buildings. Utilities keep backup generators that run for hours or days, not weeks, and their fuel arrives by truck. When pressure falls, cracked pipes can draw dirty groundwater in, so even water that still trickles out is unsafe to drink untreated.

Sewage pumping stations fail at the same moment. Cholera spreads exactly this way: through drinking water fouled by sewage. And the reactors upstream are on rivers too.

SOURCE: MUNICIPAL WATER RESILIENCE STUDIES · WHO CHOLERA FACT SHEET

T+7 days · The food

The shelves empty.

A city keeps about three days of food. The rest is always on a truck, and the trucks need fuel that no pump can deliver. The registers are dead. By the end of the first week the shelves are bare.

This is where it stops being a blackout.

T+1 month · The fertilizer

Half of us eat because of the grid.

Here is the world. Each dot is about eight million people, a city the size of New York. Nearly half of them eat because of nitrogen fertilizer, made in factories that run on gas and electricity.

The factories have stopped.

FIELD NOTES · THE FERTILIZER

How can fertilizer feed half the world?

Crops need nitrogen. For most of history the only sources were manure, rotation with legumes, and lightning. Since the 1910s the Haber–Bosch process has made ammonia out of the nitrogen in the air, using natural gas and a great deal of energy. Synthetic fertilizer made that way now supplies about half of the nitrogen in the world's crops.

Researchers estimate that nearly half of the people alive today are fed because of it. Take it away and the world's farms can feed roughly half as many people. Fertilizer plants run on gas and grid power, and the fertilizer reaches farms by truck and rail.

SOURCE: ERISMAN ET AL., NATURE GEOSCIENCE 2008 · SMIL, ENRICHING THE EARTH (2001)

T+3 months · The harvest

There is no harvest.

Every link in the food chain runs back to the grid. Tractors need diesel, and refineries need power. Forty percent of the world's food grows on irrigated land, and the pumps are electric. The next planting never happens.

FIELD NOTES · THE HARVEST

Isn't there food in storage?

Some. The world holds a few months of grain at any moment, but it sits in silos, ports and warehouses far from the people who need it, and moving it takes trucks, trains and ships that run on diesel and power. Supermarkets restock several times a week from distribution centres. A city's shelves hold days, not months.

About forty percent of the world's food grows on the fifth of farmland that is irrigated, most of it watered by electric or diesel pumps. Tractors, combines and grain dryers need fuel, and refineries need power. The stores are eaten in the first season. The next harvest is the one that fails.

SOURCE: FAO IRRIGATION AND GRAIN STOCK STATISTICS

T+6 months · The famine

Famine is quiet.

It doesn't look like a disaster film. Food moves only as far as someone can carry it. Cities walk out toward farms that can't feed them. Cholera follows the dry taps. Cold finishes what hunger starts.

By the first winter, nearly half the dots are dark.

FIELD NOTES · THE FAMINE

How does famine kill?

Rarely by hunger alone. Starving bodies lose their defences, and crowding, cold and dirty water do the rest. In most recorded famines, infectious disease (cholera, dysentery, typhus, measles) has killed more people than starvation itself. Children and the old go first.

Cold raises the calories a body needs just to stay alive, so the first winter is the worst. People walk away from places with no food and carry disease with them. Very little of it is loud.

SOURCE: HISTORICAL FAMINE DEMOGRAPHY (IRELAND 1845–52, BENGAL 1943, CHINA 1959–61)

T+2 years · The storms return

Then it happens again.

With the shield failing, storms like the first return three or four times a year. Every grid anyone rebuilds is an antenna for the next one. The disaster stops being an event.

It becomes the weather.

FIELD NOTES · THE WEATHER

Why can't anyone rebuild?

Making an extra-high-voltage transformer needs grain-oriented electrical steel, industrial winding machinery and a factory with power, which is to say it needs the grid it would be rebuilding. And if someone managed it, the next storm would cook it within months. No community spends that on hardware with a known expiry date.

What survives is short: a water wheel and half a kilometre of wire, disconnected when the sky goes red. Within a generation that is not engineering. It is a rule the old people insist on, and nobody remembers why.

SOURCE: GEOMAGNETICALLY INDUCED CURRENT STUDIES · EHV TRANSFORMER SUPPLY CHAIN

T+200 years · The one percent

One in a hundred.

Two centuries later, ninety-nine of every hundred people are gone. Every dead reactor has become an exclusion zone; where they clustered, whole regions. The aurora never leaves the sky. Ultraviolet burns at noon. The living work at dawn and dusk, and live to fifty.

You are one of the ones left.

> RUN SOLSTORM.EXE

The door opens.

SOLSTORM · Post-apocalypse survival text RPG

Two hundred years after the sky burned, a door that was sealed to keep you in finally opens. What's out there is the game.

ENTER THE WASTELAND

DEMO BUILD · NO SIGNAL REQUIRED