Civilization is collapsing,
and billions are in peril,
thanks to a catastrophe
that has wiped out electrical power everywhere...
With a deadly strike from space.
- There would be massive death and destruction.
There's just no two ways about it.
Will you be ready...
when doomsday strikes?
Can any of us survive?
150 years ago,
a giant solar flare heaved a chunk of the Sun
into our planet.
It knocked out the world's first
primitive electric system,
the telegraph.
Experts agree:
The next strike is overdue.
What would happen
if the same size storm
struck our modern world right now?
Would we survive?
- Think of the chaos
in the opening days
after a solar flare hits the Earth.
- There's very few cultures on this planet
that know how to function without electricity.
- Go! Go!
- It could create havoc
on a scale not seen in human history.
The disaster that blows out
the world's electrical power
and paralyzes civilization
begins...
on the surface of the Sun.
Scientists monitoring the Sun
suddenly notice a huge, violent explosion
called a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
- Wow. - Whoa.
- The detector is completely
saturated with protons.
- A coronal mass ejection is essentially a piece of the Sun.
It's a large blob that gets hurled out of sunspots
and off into space.
Ripping through space
at over one million miles an hour,
this solar storm will hit Earth in 17 hours.
And it won't be the first time.
Scientists believe these deadly blobs of the Sun's surface
strike our planet
roughly once every 100 years.
- That virtually guarantees that within our lifetimes
or that of our children,
we will experience a catastrophic
geomagnetic superstorm.
Now, as the scientists watch...
- It's hitting right there.
- Yeah. - That's early tomorrow.
- Early tomorrow, right around 6:00.
- These are gonna be big.
They race to alert
the world's electrical companies...
- We've just issued a warning.
That a massive surge of electricity
is about to come crashing down.
The solar flare slams into the magnetic field
that surrounds the earth,
triggering a truly global effect.
As far south as the equator,
the skies light up in auroras
brighter than any in living memory.
- It'll be an otherworldly experience,
almost psychedelic, all these green and red colors,
sometimes purple and blue.
As the atmosphere becomes electrified,
power surges into high-tension lines
and transformers from pole to pole.
- The electrical grid will go bye-bye.
Wires will fuse. High-tension lines will explode.
Transformers will turn into large hunks of fused metal.
Anything that runs on power
will be immediately affected.
In Denver, Colorado,
it's a peaceful, starlit night
when all of a sudden the power goes out,
and a family making dinner gets a nasty surprise.
- You get shocked,
because there would be very strong and sudden currents
flowing through these wires.
- You would have sparks. You would have fires.
You would have short circuits of anything electrical.
- Let's go! Everyone out of the house now!
Let's go! Let's go!
The same thing is happening
in cities all over the world...
on land...
and in the air too.
In Berlin, New York,
Buenos Aires,
and elsewhere,
air traffic controllers switch to emergency generators
and try to get planes out of the sky.
But in the cockpit, GPS signals go haywire.
- You're gonna get a GPS signal
that's gonna look terrible.
It may tell you you're way over there,
when instead you're right here.
- You look down. Perhaps you can see the lights of a city.
Wrong. The city lights are all knocked out.
- If this happens in the middle of the night,
probably hundreds of thousands of people are gonna die
from crashed airliners
trying to get down when they run out of fuel.
With communications down,
most people don't yet realize the event is global.
It seems like just a typical local blackout.
But for scientists
and national security experts
it's a worst-case scenario.
They know that without electricity
to provide food,
water, energy,
communications, transportation,
and everything else that makes modern civilization possible...
Mankind is facing the worst catastrophe
in recorded history.
- Compared with even a nuclear war...
That would be terrible, and a lot of people would die,
but losing the electric grid would kill a lot more people.
Scientists believe that once a century,
a gigantic chunk of the Sun's surface,
a coronal mass ejection,
slams into Earth.
If one hit our planet today,
would we survive?
12 hours after the lethal solar flare strikes,
electrifying the atmosphere,
high-tension wires and transformers
have been obliterated,
wiping out power across the world.
Outside Denver,
engineers assess the damage
and realize the destruction is unprecedented.
- Our transformer systems actually would fuse.
The wiring inside would just simply melt down and fuse.
Big problem, though, is your high-transmission lines.
You're gonna see a lot of them... Where'd the wires go?
It's because the overload was so intense,
they just literally exploded off the pylons.
Giant transformers,
which convert energy between two or more devices,
are the backbone of the world's electric system.
They take up to two years to build,
and national security experts warn
that there are no backups.
- They are very hard to replace.
There's only two countries in the world
that build them for export:
Germany and South Korea.
They weigh hundreds of tons.
Bridges have to be reinforced.
Roads have to be widened.
There's only a few flatbed railcars
in the whole of North America
that are capable of moving one of these things.
In places like Denver
and every other urban metropolis,
the solar flare's power surge sparks countless fires
when it charges into homes,
offices,
and most catastrophic of all,
gas pipelines.
- This can cause sparking,
which can cause explosions in the natural gas pipelines.
In fact, you can get firestorms in cities.
For those caught in the fiery inferno,
rescue will be impossible.
At the same time,
the blackout disables vital pumps
that maintain water pressure.
- A lot of municipal water supplies
are actually run by electric pumps.
If there's no electricity,
there's no electric pumps
keeping this water supply active.
- No water to drink,
no water to flush toilets, provide sanitation.
The lack of electricity
also siphons off another key element to modern civilization:
Gasoline.
Every day, the world consumes 94 million barrels of oil,
most of which is pumped through pipelines
using electricity.
Without electric power,
even those pipelines that didn't explode
in the initial surge
would shut down.
And the gas that's already at your local station
is also out of reach.
- The pump at the gasoline station is electric,
so you can't even fill up your five-gallon can
that you've got in the garage.
- You're gonna have people lined up a mile long, in panic,
trying to get gas,
or also get petrol
for their electrical generating systems.
The destruction of the world's electrical system
creates havoc in ways many people never imagined.
Take elevators.
Without them, high-rise cities become death traps.
- You have a elderly couple
that has their beautiful penthouse on the 50th floor.
They have to do the equivalent of hiking up a 500-foot cliff
just in the hope of getting a one-liter bottle of water.
Their life expectancy is just about zero.
The modern food system is also
totally dependent on electricity
for growing, harvesting,
transporting, and refrigerating.
All of that
has instantly collapsed.
- In our regional food warehouses,
we only have enough food
to feed the population for 30 days.
After 30 days, there is no food,
and, in fact, after 72 hours,
the emergency generators that keep the food cool
run out of gas,
and its food starts to spoil.
As people slowly realize
the extent of the catastrophe,
supermarkets become battlegrounds.
- First thing I would do is get away from any grocery store,
because that will immediately become a target for looting.
If there's no way to pay for your groceries,
what are you going to do?
Are you gonna stand there
with a handful of change?
This isn't happening.
It'll be a smash-and-grab situation.
And cash is not just a problem in supermarkets.
The entire global financial system
runs on electricity.
Like most people around the world,
this family in Denver has very few dollars on hand.
Today, only 10% of money exists
as cold, hard cash.
- The bank doesn't have a pile of money
sitting in the vault for you back there
that you can then access.
It's a bunch of bits, dots, and dashes
that are stored in electronic computer systems
that will be inaccessible.
So, suddenly, your lifetime savings could be wiped out.
It is likely that we would revert to a barter economy.
As the world tries to cope with the blackout,
not everyone is in a state of chaos.
In some houses,
like this one, 40 miles outside of Denver,
the lights are still on.
This family is part of the worldwide community
known as preppers.
They get their power from solar panels.
Glowing lights make them a magnet for neighbors,
who bring over food
that is spoiling in freezers and refrigerators.
They are happy to help...
for now.
- You will have a source of electricity.
Even if it's minor, you'll still have enough electricity
to be able to run little things
that would allow you to survive
and actually be a hub for your neighborhood
for people who aren't as fortunate as you.
But on the horizon,
the glow from a burning Denver is an ominous backdrop.
A world without power is about to turn
into a world of anarchy.
And no one is prepared
for the nightmare to come.
- The people living in big cities or the suburbs...
They would die.
In a sense, we're really talking
about the collapse of civilization.
A chunk of the Sun has smashed into the earth.
The massive power surge from this solar storm
has overloaded and destroyed
the world's entire electric system.
Without power,
how long can we survive?
As modern society descends into a state of turmoil,
food becomes the number one priority.
People in cities across the world
head into the wilderness
and begin hunting deer, raccoons,
squirrels, birds,
and anything else they can find.
- We're a nation of 320 million people right now.
A hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not sustainable
for 320 million people.
Even if people were survivalists,
there wouldn't be enough food to hunt or fish.
And for many people, this will be their first time
trying to kill their own dinner.
3/4 of Americans have never gone hunting in their lives.
- It's going to be absolute chaos
when thousands of complete random individuals
with absolutely no experience in hunting
go out hunting for the first time.
You're gonna be shooting at anything that moves.
Pretty soon, human casualties will outnumber deer casualties.
As people across the globe try to cope and survive,
they are also trying to make sense of this disaster.
Most have never heard of a solar storm.
But this isn't the first time it's happened.
The last huge coronal mass ejection to strike Earth
hit just before the dawn of the electric age.
- In September of 1859,
the mother of all solar flares hit the planet Earth.
It's called the Carrington Event.
Astronomer Richard Carrington was analyzing the Sun,
and saw this gigantic solar flare
that took place on the Sun.
17 hours later,
the skies exploded in auroras,
and the world's first primitive electrical system,
the telegraph,
crashed and burned.
- Telegraph operators record enormous anomalies;
Fires, sparks taking place,
and telegraph wires being electrified
as if by magic.
It took months to repair the telegraph system,
but the impact on civilization was relatively minor
because in those days, the telegraph
was the only electrical system on Earth.
The era of widespread electrical power
was still a few decades away.
In modern times,
there have been more recent episodes as well.
In 1989, a much smaller solar storm
blacked out the Canadian province of Quebec.
And we had a dangerously close call in 2012.
- In 2012, there was an enormous coronal mass ejection
from the Sun.
Fortunately for us,
the bundle of particles crossed Earth's orbit
about two weeks after Earth was at that location.
Just three weeks after the solar storm takes out
the world's electrical grids,
modern society as we know it
falls further into a state of anarchy...
As people scrape and claw
to get their hands on vital resources
like food and gasoline,
only the strong survive.
- You!
This is my property!
Don't be... don't be stupid.
- We can just leave with these two gas cans.
We're not...
- We will devolve into a tribal state.
If you are starving to death
and you have any semblance of weaponry,
you will try and take over somebody that has more than you
so you can survive longer.
Outside Longmont, Colorado,
the prepper family has retreated
to their well-stocked and isolated cabin.
Right after the disaster, they welcomed their neighbors
and shared what they had.
But now they become targets
- Those without any moral scruples
will see this as, "You got something I want,
I'll kill you for it."
As quasi-military groups run rampant
across the globe,
chaos reigns,
and nobody is safe.
But it pales in comparison to the nuclear disaster
about to engulf the planet.
Scientists have long documented
coronal mass ejections,
giant chunks of the Sun's surface
that break free and slam into Earth.
If one hit our planet today,
would we survive?
Six weeks after a solar storm has taken out
the world's electricity,
millions of people are starting to die.
With the collapse of electric-powered
water and sewage systems,
survival now depends on water from polluted rivers,
streams, and lakes.
- You've had human wastes and hospital wastes
and industrial wastes
back-flowing into lakes and rivers.
It would truly be fatal for people to be doing that.
People living in hotter climates
are particularly vulnerable.
In places like Mumbai, Baghdad, and Phoenix,
some try to survive by sheltering in place.
But with triple-digit temperatures
and no air conditioning,
modern houses in Sunbelt cities
are essentially unlivable.
- If you're living in, say, Phoenix,
it's 110 degrees, 120 degrees,
and the air conditioner shuts off.
What are you going to do?
Most of these communities have elderly people in them.
These people are going to die.
The living conditions are no better
for people in icy environments.
The loss of electricity also wipes out
most forms of heating.
From Russia to Canada,
Norway to Japan,
Korea to the northern US,
millions in cold climates face a frozen death.
As modern society crumbles,
and people fight to survive,
the crisis is about to go nuclear.
The fuel rods that power the world's
400-plus nuclear reactors
have to be kept cool 24 hours a day,
otherwise they would melt down
and spew deadly radiation.
Operators keep them cool
with a constant stream of cold water...
Water that's pumped with electricity.
When the solar storm hit
and caused the global blackout,
nuclear reactors like the one in Gravelines, France,
kept the cold water flowing
with emergency generators.
- They have emergency generators to keep them running,
which will run out of gas in about 72 hours,
and then they have battery systems,
which will last about a week.
Now, even the batteries have died.
As the cool water stops flowing over the nuclear rods,
they start to heat up.
- The reactor cores will actually explode
from steam explosions...
And you get radioactive debris scattered into the winds
that will travel for hundreds of miles
and cover huge areas with radioactive materials.
Towns and cities near the world's
400 nuclear power plants
are right in the line of fire,
and without warning,
they succumb to the deadly radiation that fills the air.
The global blackout has
now reduced the world's population of seven billion
to just two billion.
And the solar storm isn't done wreaking havoc.
A lethal chunk of the Sun has smashed
into the Earth.
The massive power surge from this solar storm
has wiped out power everywhere.
Three months into the disaster,
billions are already dead.
With no food, no clean water,
with transportation and communications obliterated,
mass starvation, dehydration,
deadly epidemics, and social chaos
sweep the planet.
And now it seems like the sky itself is falling.
When the solar storm hit,
it short-circuited thousands of satellites in space.
Now they plunge into the atmosphere
and rain fiery debris onto a desolate planet Earth.
How did modern society crumble so quickly?
The last time a giant solar storm hit
the Earth's atmosphere, 150 years ago,
the so-called Carrington Event,
people lived without electricity.
It was simply a way of life.
Transportation, industry, and farming
used steam and animal power.
Water systems were fed by gravity,
muscle power, or steam pumps.
Refrigeration didn't exist,
so every major city was ringed by local farms.
But in the high-technology 21st century,
a majority of the world's population
is not equipped to live like this.
- So you can't just say that "well, let's turn off
"the electricity, and we go back to where we were in 1800,
and people lived just fine back then."
- We don't have the 19th century infrastructure
where all of this was done by hand.
The harvest back in those days was not shipped
across the country, but it was consumed locally.
And you had an infrastructure
that would use horses and wagons
to bring it into the cities where it would be consumed.
That is all gone.
Another difference is population.
150 years ago,
the world's population was only 1.3 billion,
and there were frequent famines.
It is now over seven billion,
and famines rarely happen
thanks to things like modern agriculture,
advanced fertilizers, and refrigeration,
all of which require electricity.
- We couldn't possibly maintain
a population of about seven billion
if there were a loss of electricity and power
for one or two years.
Billions of people would die.
After seven months,
abandoned cities in hot desert climates
where water is next to impossible to find,
like Phoenix, Dubai, and Las Vegas,
have dissolved into ruins.
And survivors have headed
for more fertile terrain.
- Where I would want to be... I would want to be
near a fishery, a lake.
If you also think of a great orchard
where there are fruit trees and things like that.
You can live a long time
from the bounty of nature like that.
I would also want to be upwind of any nuclear reactor
or large industrial facilities
that are likely to create toxic clouds
or environmental damage.
The land surrounding nuclear power plants,
like France's Gravelines,
have become radioactive wastelands.
People in these areas are either dead
or they have moved to safer ground.
Incredibly,
one year after the disaster struck,
power hasn't been restored.
Families like the preppers in Colorado,
who fled to their well-stocked cabin,
have fended off gangs of bandits
and protected their resources.
It hasn't been easy,
but they survived the first year.
These preppers
and others who have weathered the solar storm
begin planting basic crops
to see them through the first meager post-disaster harvest.
Meanwhile, people begin jerry-rigging systems
to restore small-scale electricity.
- It'll be kind of this steam-punky
hodgepodge thing going on.
You'll be able to make a fire,
which heats water that can turn a simple turbine
and create electricity.
After enduring the worst disaster
known to mankind,
civilization slowly starts picking up the pieces,
and the flickering sparks of electricity
are also the flickering sparks of hope.
- I do believe we will be coalescing
back into smaller survival groups
that get their act together,
get a social structure going again,
get a legal system,
a fair system of living together,
and then try and rebuild from there.
But will it work?
And how could this whole catastrophe
have been avoided?
The world's electrical grid
has gone up in flames,
destroyed by a solar storm from the Sun.
Just over a year after the disaster,
90% of mankind is gone.
Without modern agriculture,
without water systems,
transportation,
industry, or medicine,
billions were killed off by starvation,
violence, lawlessness, and disease.
But for those with the will to survive,
there is a flicker of hope,
especially now that small-scale electricity is coming back on.
- You know how many solar panels there are
out in the middle of the desert?
Head there. Grab some.
Find a battery.
Connect it up.
All is not lost.
We just kind of hit the reset button at this point,
and we have to start again.
While survivors soldier on,
trying to rebuild modern civilization
will be a daunting, uphill battle.
Large scale electric power
will be much more difficult to come by.
It takes a huge industrial complex
to build and transport gigantic new transformers,
and that has vanished.
- Even with our current modern civilization,
unaffected by a catastrophe,
it's very hard for us to replace even one transformer.
For a civilization which has now had the props knocked out
from under it, it's hard to imagine
that it would be possible for that to happen.
The level of worldwide devastation
caused by the solar storm
is exactly what scientists predicted
when the U.S. Congress held hearings on the subject
in the early 2000s.
- Congressional studies here in the U.S.
state that about 90% of the population would be dead.
That's 300 million people.
- And on a global level,
out of the population currently
of about 7 to 7 1/2 billion,
that means there would be less than a billion people
still alive.
The Congressional hearings also stated
solar storms are just part of the threat
to our electrical grid.
A similar phenomenon of massive blackouts
could be caused
by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in space.
The energy released would cause an electromagnetic pulse,
or EMP.
- They were first discovered in 1962,
when both the Americans and the Russians
detonated in orbit nuclear weapons.
And both the Russians and the Americans were surprised
at how long these waves reached
and knocked out the transformers.
National security experts warned for years
that if terrorists exploded nukes in space
and triggered an EMP,
modern society could be devastated.
So various government plans were hatched
to harden and protect the electrical grid,
which would safeguard it
from both electromagnetic pulses
and solar storms.
- Hardening narrator: But little was done.
Most electrical systems are run by private companies,
not governments.
- Try to tell any utility executive
that you meet anywhere
that that's what utilities ought to be
spending their money on,
and you will not get a pleased response.
Everybody's saying, "Well, no, that's not my job. It's yours."
"No. Wait. It's yours."
Others were skeptical
that terrorists had the capability
to detonate nukes in space.
And as for a giant solar storm,
there hadn't been one in the 120 years
since mankind became dependent on electricity,
so many government officials had a hard time
believing scientists' warnings.
- What response did we get?
We got the giggle factor.
Politicians simply giggled at us,
and said, "What?
"This is something from Hollywood.
You guys don't need any money."
- Nobody has ever really
lived through anything of this nature,
so it's very difficult for people
to even fathom its existence.
Experts in the community insist
that the threat of a solar storm is very real.
But they also believe
the whole nightmare can be avoided,
and survival can be assured
if the right precautionary measures are put into place.
- The chance of another event
which could paralyze civilization
is about 1% per year.
That means in one decade,
there's perhaps a 10% chance
that all our electronics will be wiped out.
We'll be thrown back 100 years into the past.
Here are a few common sense steps:
First, reinforce the grid.
Create redundant systems, backup systems.
Train emergency crews so that they know
how to get the power stations up to speed again.
We know how to prepare for it.
We know what to do.
The question is money, planning,
changing our orientation,
because it's not a question of "if."
It's a question of when the Sun blows its top again.
- This is the violent universe telling us
that really we're pretty weak on the global scale.
And there are forces out there
that we have to contend with
in a very real way.
- We know that this type of event is going to happen.
Our star is the most relevant thing in the universe
because it's the thing that's going to affect us.
It gives life, and it can take it away just as quickly.