Solar storms are not even in my top five list of threats to humankind (nuclear war, asteroid strikes, super-volcano eruptions like Yellowstone, a supernova within 30-50 light years, and intergalactic pirates), but they are still worth talking about. Especially because there may be an easy way to protect ourselves from the worst effects of solar storms.
Nobody knew anything about such storms until two centuries ago, when a big one scrambled all of the world's long-distance communications. But the technology was new (electric telegraphs and the batteries that powered them), and apart from that, electricity had few practical uses. The solar storm was therefore just a transitory nuisance, not a global disaster.
It became known as the Carrington Event, named after Richard Carrington, the British astronomer who witnessed the solar storm, a "coronal mass ejection" from the Sun on Sept 1, 1859. Thinking laterally, he linked it to the worldwide electrical outage that happened only a few hours later. It stirred a lot of interest in the scientific community, but not much in the rest of the world because power grids, light bulbs and electric motors had not yet been developed. Now, however, electricity is indispensable in almost every industrial, commercial and domestic activity worldwide, and it turns out that these Carrington-like events happen quite often.
