Still “f*cking love science?”

Decades ago I read about the Carrington Event, a solar storm that decimated telegraph systems in 1859.

What if that happened today? I wondered. Nobody seemed to be talking about it. Yesterday, I started thinking about it out of the blue and Googled it because I experienced a sudden “bad feeling” about it.

Turns out, people besides scientists are talking about it. It’s been picked up on the mainstream radar and has spread throughout TikTok. Suddenly I’m no longer the crazy old man warning teenagers about the murderer at Camp Crystal Lake. This is a catastrophic event that’s very possible. In fact, we’re overdue.

As a xennial, someone who was born between the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I was raised in an analog world that became digital while I was still young enough to adapt. Generations before that struggled to make sense of this new digital frontier, and generations afterwards can’t conceive of an unconnected world. They don’t know what it’s like to come home from work or school and have zero contact with the outside world without going out and getting it, in person. Entertainment has never been one-sided for them. They’ve never been passively entertained by TV you can’t talk back to. They’ve never had to drive someplace to pay a bill every month. They’re used to having a megaphone to broadcast their thoughts to the world.

What will those people do? How will they adjust? It boggles the mind. I myself would have major issues adjusting, because I’m just as connected as anyone else, if not more so than average. I’ve been on the internet since 1996 and it’s a major part of my life.

We’ve put all our eggs in one basket, and the bottom is about to fall out. There’ll be much death and destruction as a result of the internet being wiped out . A lot of people will suffer, initially. I have to wonder, though, is it for the best?

We’re killing the planet. Oh, sure, it’d recover if we disappeared, but that’s not the point. If we continue down the path we’re on, we’ll render this world virtually uninhabitable.

On the other hand, if we reverted to a primitive state and our high-tech age became a historical footnote with few records to prove it was ever a thing, it’s possible that we’d be happier and healthier as a species.

After millions of deaths, of course.

This isn’t idle speculation. This is a highly likely scenario. You know what another highly likely scenario was that people lived in denial about? A global pandemic. Take a look at how we handled that and then picture it without the availability of the internet.

Stay tuned. Things may get interesting.

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