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FILE 039 · VOL VI · You're Not on the List
In 2012 the Sun Missed Us by Nine Days
You can store food for a year. You cannot store neighbors.
Based on: The Carrington Event and Solar Storms
Intake record
| Recovered from | Basement of a private residence, suburban Ohio; a shelving inventory and a security camera hard drive |
|---|---|
| Contents | Inventory (food, water, fuel, ammunition), camera footage (forty days), a handwritten note |
| Finder | Municipal recovery crew |
| Status | The residence was the only occupied home on the street at the time of recovery. |
Recovered file
On the morning of September 1, 1859, an English astronomer named Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots when he saw two points of blinding white light erupt from the surface of the Sun. Within a day, the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history struck the Earth. Auroras lit the sky as far south as the Caribbean, so bright that people in the northeastern United States read newspapers by their light at midnight. Telegraph systems across Europe and North America failed. Operators received electric shocks. Telegraph paper caught fire. Some lines kept working with the batteries disconnected, powered by the storm itself. [1]
In 1859, that was a curiosity. Today, almost everything runs on a grid that the same kind of storm could damage. Large transformers, the kind that power whole regions, can take a year or more to replace. [2]
On July 23, 2012, the Sun released a storm at least as strong as Carrington's. It crossed Earth's orbit at a point where Earth had been just nine days earlier. NASA called it a near miss. A physicist who studied the odds estimated the chance of a Carrington-class storm hitting Earth within a decade at about twelve percent. [3] An insurance industry study estimated the cost of such a storm to the United States alone at up to two point six trillion dollars, and a recovery measured in years. [4]
There is an old saying among the people who plan for these things, first spoken in the British House of Lords in 2007. Society is only nine meals away from anarchy. [5]
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 039 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
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