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So, look, I don't want to spend this entire video talking nothing but trash about the sun.

The sun is mostly pretty great.

It gives us warmth.

It gives plants their energy, it gives us light, and it basically allows us to exist.

If it wasn't for the sun, none of us would ever be here.

So that's pretty neat.

But the sun gives, and sometimes the sun takes every so often the sun burps out deadly lasers and raise that can hurt Earth and everything living on it.

And something like this kind of happened 160 years ago.

Back in 18 59 on September 1st and second of that year, skies around the world lit up with majestic and beautiful auroras.

It was so bright at night in some places that people could read their newspapers in the dark while telegraph systems across Europe and North America where mysteriously destroyed and often gave their operators electrical shocks.

But other than that the event had little effect on human civilization, and it was for gotten about by mostly everybody.

It was only later discovered that the event was actually a cataclysmic solar storm.

Now referred to mostly as the Carrington event, the event still remains the largest and the most powerful solar storm on record.

And ironically, it happened to humanity before our civilization became truly vulnerable to them.

If a storm of this magnitude hit the earth today, it would have the potential of sending us back over a century, technologically.

But to understand how you need to understand what a solar storm actually is, they're basically whenever the sun erupts, a bunch of energy and mass out across space.

But there's two different main ways of this happening.

Solar flares are energetic explosions that blast out huge amounts of energy and particles across space that occasionally hit Earth.

When our planet is in the firing range, Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field deflects most of the damage that these cause, but satellites above can still be pretty badly damaged.

The second way, though, is a Corona mass ejection, or CME E.

For short, particularly large CMI is like the one that caused the Carrington event could be especially damaging to modern technology.

Magnetized plasma from the sun erupts and carried by the solar wind shoots through space like a canister shot fired from a cannon.

Most of these big ones fire off in lines that don't ever intersect with Earth.

But it seems like every few 100 years the line up just right where Earth's magnetic field will get overwhelmed.

Consequently, these events can seriously damage all of our electrical systems and throw much of the world into darkness.

Fortunately for us, so far, all of these big events in our past hit the planet before we ever seriously developed our Elektronik infrastructure.

So we never really noticed besides a few telegraphs going out and some pretty night shows when one of these happens in the future, though, it will be a very different story.

We had a very close call already in 2012, when a Carrington class Superstorm was actually created by the sun and shot towards Earth.

It passed through the earth's orbit and missed us by only nine days.

So if the storm had been created just nine days previously, the mines would have actually been right and our apocalypse may have happened on time, but we can get a few glimpses at some of the chaos that will happen in the future when a storm like this hits the earth.

In 1989 a severe but not quite Carrington class storm struck the Earth and most severely affected Quebec.

In Canada, their power grid was knocked off line, which left nearly six million people without electricity for several hours or even days.

So the thinking goes that whenever the really big one actually does manage to hit our planet, it'll be powerful enough to knock out electrical and communications systems across the planet for days, months or even years.

Power grids, satellites, GPS, the Internet, cell phone networks and transportation systems all could be damaged or destroyed.

Bank accounts could be totally wiped out, and the stock market could be shut down for weeks or even months, depending on the scale of the storm and the part of the Earth that it hits.

It could do all of this damage to a particular continent, or maybe even the entire planet, and we probably only have a few hours of warning before the impending technological doom after the storm hits.

Conservative estimates have suggested that the world may be looking at upwards of $2 trillion in damages at a timeline of 10 years to fully recover.

The most expensive disaster in history was the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan and caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

And that Onley caused $411 billion in damage nearly five times less than what this solar storm may cost us in the future.

Even more extreme Studies estimates that the cost may actually be asshole Iast when t trillion dollars, which would actually kind of be really an end of the world scale disaster.

It's not a matter of if the storm is going to happen.

It's definitely a matter of when and whenever it does happen.

You may have to read about it in the paper the morning after, instead of seeing it on a screen.

In the meantime, though, you should enjoy the gifts of electricity and the Internet.

After all, it's only because of the Internet that you just watch this video explaining to you how you might lose it all in the future.

When that happens, you'll have to go back to learning about things the old school way, with books and candles.

But in the meantime, you can still learn about almost anything online, like I've been doing by watching this course by Kurtz.

Kazakh on how to create an animate an educational video essay on skill share.

You can really learn about any number of topics on skill share, though, like how to maintain your productivity by my friend Thomas Frank, or how to use Microsoft Excel.

It's still early into the new year, so it couldn't be a better time to set some goals and learn a valuable life skill.

You can teach yourself pretty much anything online these days, and skill share is a perfect place for you to do it with professional and easy to understand classes that follow a clear learning curve.

You can jump right in and begin learning how to do the work or the hobbies that you love.