[ominous music]
* *
- Greetings, Bill Nye here,
coming to you from aboard the International Space Station.
Looks like a peaceful night on our planet.
Those city lights are the electric glow
of billions of people working, playing, celebrating,
or just relaxing in front of the TV
enjoying a fun but terrifying science program.
Little do they know a solar shock wave
is heading toward Earth, and it will
plunge our world into permanent darkness
and total chaos.
[alarms blaring]
After tonight our civilization will not be the same,
not for a very long time, maybe not ever.
* *
[dramatic music]
* *
[cow lowing]
Welcome again, my friends, to the Disaster Institute,
a museum of catastrophic events that have happened
in the past, are happening now, or could happen at any moment.
These might seem like nightmares or scenes
from scary movies, but they're all too real.
They're possible outcomes that we may soon
have to deal with if we are unlucky or foolish
or both.
This time we're here to witness
the event that could end our technological civilization,
a solar flare from our Sun that has the power
to short-circuit our way of life.
This is not a could happen.
It's a will happen.
It's a warning to us all.
Sometimes things really do go bump in the night.
And some nights never end.
[thunder booming]
Zeus, the mightiest and most dangerous
of all the Greek gods.
He wielded the power of lightning
to cut down any human arrogant enough to challenge him.
[thunder booming]
- [grunting]
- The ancient Greeks were drawing on an even more
ancient fear of electricity.
You can hardly blame our ancestor, Kor.
For most of history, we were at the mercy of nature.
During big storms, volts of electricity
would strike out unpredictably from the clouds,
and all we could do is scurry out of the way.
[thunder booming]
- [grunting]
- Sorry, old friend.
Just lie low.
You'll be OK.
Every early culture associated lightning with a god.
The Hindus had Indra.
The Aztecs had Tlaloc.
The Norse had Thor long before
he was a hammer-holding hottie.
In each case, the story we told ourselves
was the same: electricity was a power beyond human control.
Until it wasn't.
In 1752 Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod
made our buildings safe from electrical attack.
In 1820 a Danish scientist named Hans Christian Oersted
discovered that electricity can create magnetism.
A decade later the brilliant Michael Faraday,
a personal hero of mine, realized the process
goes the other way too.
Magnetism can make electricity.
He soon put that idea into action
and built the world's first electric generator,
lightning on command.
From there it was a short journey
to Edison and his light bulb.
It's a story with a glorious beginning.
The question is, how will it end?
Electricity runs so much of our lives
that we've stopped noticing it.
We use our god-like electric power to build and sustain
our modern civilization.
But have we done enough to protect it?
[suspenseful music]
* *
If I may coin a phrase, with great power
comes great vulnerability.
To see how our electric world comes to an end,
we'll take a ride on the Disaster Simulator
to experience it firsthand from three points of view,
an astronaut, trapped in orbit,
cut off from everyone she knows and loves,
her father, lost in the dead of endless night,
and a scientist who sees doom in the sunlight.
The source of our vulnerability hangs in the sky above us.
The Sun gives us vital light and heat,
but it also produces its own kind of lightning.
Sometimes the Sun shoots out huge flares
of charged particles.
Those flares carry jolts of electricity and magnetism
billions of times more powerful than any storm on Earth.
If a giant solar storm were to hit our planet head-on,
could our technology handle it?
This is when we find out just how fragile
our civilization really is.
* *
Our story begins here in the not-too-distant future
on the surface of our home star.
A solar flare is erupting on the Sun, and it is huge,
as wide as a dozen Earths.
It has more energy than a billion megatons of TNT.
* *
This astronaut is the first human to see
the flare with her own eyes.
Impressive.
But most flares pose no danger.
She decides to check in with her father.
- How about, when I get back, we'll go for ice cream?
- She'll be home soon, she tells him.
They'll take a walk in their favorite park.
- They have me working, so I got to go back.
- What neither of them know is that the effects
of this solar flare are about to change
life on Earth forever.
- I miss you so much.
- Scientists at the Space Weather Prediction Center
in Boulder, Colorado, run an early warning system
that tells us if something dangerous
is happening on the Sun.
They see the flare too, and in a lot more detail.
Minor solar eruptions happen all the time.
Most are harmless.
Sometimes they disrupt satellites,
nothing too serious.
But there is nothing minor about what's
happening right now.
This latest eruption on the Sun appears huge,
what they're calling a potential super flare.
I'm not talking about pants from the 1970s.
This could be an even bigger disaster.
[solar flare roaring]
When a solar flare erupts, it emits a shock wave
of charged particles into space,
a coronal mass ejection.
[solar flare roaring]
If this shock wave were to strike Earth
it could cause a global power blackout.
Our solar physicist wants to issue an early warning
to the world's power grid operators
so they can prevent blackouts.
- We need to issue a warning about this system.
- But her colleagues think she's--
say it with me--overreacting.
The shock wave will most likely miss us.
Most of them do.
But we are playing a life-and-death game
of dodgeball with the Sun.
[foreboding music]
* *
[siren wailing]
We've played this game before.
But so far, we've been lucky.
In 1989 a coronal mass ejection
knocked out power to more than 6 million people
in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2012 an even bigger CME
missed the Earth by just nine days.
But the last monster coronal mass ejection to hit Earth
was the so-called Carrington Event in 1859.
Back then the most advanced electrical technology
was the telegraph.
Sparks shot out of telegraph wires and even started fires.
There wasn't much damage, because there wasn't much
electrical infrastructure to damage.
Today it is a whole nother story.
Whew.
[solar flare roaring]
[ominous music]
* *
- You need to get as much heart meds as you possibly can, OK?
And stay where you are.
I will come for you.
[static crackling]
Listen carefully.
There is a serious solar flare coming your way.
I promise I will come for you, OK?
- Unfortunately, most people don't have
an astronaut orbiting overhead looking out for them.
For average folks, the situation is
a big old ball of confusion.
We're in the path of a coronal...
what did they call it?
Conspiracy theories are all over the internet.
And the news is nonstop doom.
Most people don't even fully understand
what they're preparing for.
World leaders are failing to talk clearly
to the public about the science of what's happening.
I mean, can you imagine?
[solar flare roaring]
We are in one of the power grid operation centers
in North America.
We take you to the coolest places, don't we?
Like the Space Weather Prediction Center,
this is part of the hidden infrastructure
you never knew you needed.
Here technicians work around the clock
to keep the lights on.
They are the guardians of the electrical grid,
and their number one priority is keeping
the flow of our electricity in our power lines
balanced and steady.
* *
The U.S. electrical grid is the largest
interconnected machine on Earth,
millions of miles of power lines connecting
thousands of power plants, sending electricity to homes,
factories, and businesses.
For many people, myself included,
it's the greatest engineering achievement
of the 20th century.
Back here at Grid Operations, their big worry,
surges of current caused by the solar shock wave
will cause a chain reaction of surges
through power lines that would overload the entire grid.
Ironically, too much electricity is what leads
to this electrical blackout.
One way to keep that from happening
is to isolate and shut down selected parts of the grid
at just the right times to keep a few surges
from building up into a huge overload.
Our technician here is activating
one of those safety systems.
- Ha, you got to see this.
It's like he's never seen toilet paper before.
[quirky music]
- Well, he was, until he got distracted
by an admittedly adorable cat video
and unleashed this act of cow.
[dramatic music]
Act of cow symbolizes the human negligence
that can trigger a disaster or make one worse.
It's inspired by a bovine named Daisy,
who as legend has it kicked over a lantern
and started the Great Chicago Fire...
[cow lowing]
Like a technician making a small but fatal
keystroke error in an overworked grid
turning a bad situation a whole lot worse.
[solar flare roaring]
[alarm blaring]
- Oh, sh...
- Many sections of the grid are antiquated
and lack the automated protection systems
that would prevent human error.
Because he failed to implement key safety measures in time,
the surges are now building into a full-blown overload.
[fire roaring]
[electricity crackling]
[all screaming]
[solar flare roaring]
[electricity buzzing]
[siren wailing]
[horns honking]
[dog barking]
[indistinct radio chatter]
[alarm blaring]
This is it.
This is the big one.
Pretty soon we are all going to be in the dark.
[indistinct chatter]
- We gotta get home.
- Which way do we go?
[tense music]
* *
[sirens wailing]
- [screams]
[all screaming]
[sirens wailing]
- Run!
- Power grids are failing.
The world is plunging into a new, really dark Dark Age.
[alarm blaring] - I have no idea.
- What's going on here?
[electricity crackling]
- This is what it looks like when a grid dies.
Power surges are following the wires
from building to building,
from neighborhood to neighborhood,
and then city to city.
Overloaded electrical equipment is
triggering explosions in factories and chemical plants.
Toxic fumes waft through the streets.
Oh, yeah, traffic lights are out.
Train signals are down.
Ships can't find their ports,
can't even make radio contact.
And get this, air traffic control is down,
21,000 pilots around the world flying blind.
[airplane engine roaring]
[car alarms blaring]
Gas stations aren't operating.
Electric cars still run,
until they drain their batteries.
Before long it'll be back to the horse and buggy,
unless people start eating the horses first.
Even in normal times falling power lines start
hundreds of wildfires a year.
Right now, we've got about 100 times that many
burning everywhere all the time.
And the story is the same in forests, homes, factories.
It's all going up in flames.
And there are no firefighters to spare.
And there's no dispatch system to direct them anyway.
[glass shattering]
The economy as we knew it vanishes.
Wall Street is just a street.
Jeff Bezos is just a bald guy with a cool house.
Cash is trash.
Cryptocurrency blinks out of existence.
And people are scrambling for things that
have real value, like water, backup generators,
and batteries.
Hey, you guys, there's no electricity.
Never mind.
The only silver lining in this nightmare
may be that with cities dark and no light pollution
many people are going to see the night sky
for the very first time.
Up in orbit they're about as far off the grid
as anyone can get.
But all of the essential supplies come from the ground.
It could be months or years before anyone
is launching rockets again.
They have to make a tough choice,
stay put for now and hope for a supply run
or abandon ship and attempt to land on a world in disarray.
* *
[siren wailing]
- [groaning]
[heartbeat thumping]
- [inaudible]
- Get inside.
[indistinct chatter]
- Come on. Come on.
* *
[heartbeat thumping]
[sirens wailing]
- Humans lived for thousands of years
without even a concept of electricity.
So why would we all now perish without it?
Well, no electricity, no water.
Very few of us still carry a bucket
to a well to draw water.
Modern plumbing and sanitation systems depend on electricity.
No electricity, no food.
Almost everyone around the world
depends on refrigeration and complex supply chains to eat.
Without those things, our planet couldn't
sustain 8 billion people.
No electricity, no information age.
Do you want to Google that?
You can't.
Books.
Books become one of the world's most precious commodities.
And places like these, libraries,
will once again become the sole repositories
of human knowledge.
Unfortunately, most of the books in that library
won't be read.
They'll be burned, not for censorship, but for warmth.
No electricity, no climate control.
If you live in Montana in the winter,
you know this is a serious problem.
Ever hear of people in their own homes
dying from hypothermia?
[electricity crackling]
That's a blown transformer.
Downed power lines like this one
may still be carrying a lot of juice.
And unlike in the movies, they don't give off sparks
or buzz or jump around like hissing snakes.
These silent killers can deliver
more than 700,000 volts.
You might be thinking, Bill, you look ridiculous.
Who walks like that?
Someone near a downed power line, that's who.
When a live wire touches the ground,
electricity travels in all directions,
and the voltage decreases as the distance from the wire
touching the ground increases.
So if you run or take a large step,
you'll conduct electricity from one leg at one voltage
to the other leg at a different voltage,
which turns you into a human French fry.
That's why I'm shuffling my feet close together,
never taking them off the ground.
I'll need to get at least 35 feet away to be safe.
Right now, I'm about 20 feet.
A ways to go yet.
Everything's going to be fine.
Here we go.
Ahh!
[tense music]
* *
[alarm blaring]
[foreboding music]
- [exhales]
* *
[sirens wailing]
- [sobbing]
- As the lights go out on civilization,
our disaster simulation fades to black.
[tense music]
Wow, I'm shocked, literally and figuratively.
Do you see what just happened?
We failed to learn lessons from the past,
and we ended up in a very dark future.
But it's not too late.
Let's take a closer look at what went wrong
and see how we can do better.
Let's go to the lab.
I've prepared an enlightening demo.
Now, I know this show's been scary,
but I've got to turn off the lights again.
Now, let's say this is the Sun.
The Sun not only shines with light we can see,
it has a huge magnetic field.
If we could see it, it would look something like this.
And like a planet, the Sun spins.
Unlike a planet, different parts
of the surface of the Sun spin at different rates.
So now and then its magnetic field gets twisted,
and energy builds and builds until it snaps,
creating a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
It's an explosion on the Sun.
Whew.
The more energy in the magnetic field when it snaps,
the bigger the flare.
But the main event comes about a day later
when a shock wave of charged particles
from the CME reaches Earth.
Ah, here's Earth right here.
Compared to the Sun, Earth is quite small.
In fact, a million Earths would fit inside the Sun.
Our planet has a magnetic field too.
That's what makes a compass work.
Now, most of the time, Earth's magnetic field
acts as our protector.
It prevents our atmosphere from being stripped away
into space, which is great for anyone
who's a fan of breathing.
Now, when a huge solar shock wave reaches Earth,
it distorts our magnetic field like a funhouse mirror.
Now, mind you, the planet itself doesn't suffer much.
Life goes on as usual if you're a squirrel
or a carpenter ant or a begonia.
But you know who does suffer? Me and you.
What I'm saying is, our entire modern civilization
could be brought down by the Sun.
The same thing that keeps us alive
could kill us when it destroys our electrical grid.
And there's one part of the grid
that is especially vulnerable, the weakest link, so to speak.
To show you what could go wrong,
we need to take a trip to France.
Behold the City of Light.
Paris got its nickname in the 17th century
when Louis XIV put lanterns on every block
to create a sense of peace and order.
Paris was the first major city to install gas streetlights.
Today it sparkles with an electric glow.
[in French accent] The weakest links in petite Paris--
[clears throat] Wait.
[in normal voice] The weakest links in tiny Paris,
just like in your town or city,
are the transformers, the components
that control voltage.
They transform the high-voltage electricity
that comes out of power plants
into the low-voltage electricity
that you can use in your home.
Without transformers, you have no grid,
no juice in your outlets.
The City of Light turns back into the city of lanterns.
Hey, man, didn't I see you at the Yellowstone eruption?
- Huh?
- Glad you made it through in one piece.
- Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
- [chuckles] We've been through a lot together.
- Mm-mm-mm-mm.
- If you've ever walked or driven by a power station,
you've probably seen a transformer.
You may also have noticed them near power lines, factories,
monuments, any place that moves a lot of electricity around.
[gentle music]
* *
From the outside, transformers look like
big buzzing boxes or cylinders.
Inside, they are delicate constructions of spun wire.
They can burn out, melt, or explode if they're overloaded.
If they all fail at once, like, say, after a major solar flare,
then you have to replace them all
before you can restart the grid.
And if the power is out and the transformer factories
are ruined, you don't have any way
to make any more transformers.
Now your blackout becomes a forever blackout.
There's no waiting for the power
to come back on, because the power
is never coming back on, ever.
To demonstrate, I'm going to zap
tiny Paris with a super flare.
[device beeping]
Au revoir, petite Paris.
[electricity crackling]
- Oh, no!
- Whoa!
Ahh!
If we don't want to end up in the dark like tiny Paris,
we'll need to find a way to protect our transformers
and other critical systems.
As someone once said, it is during our darkest moments
that we must finally see the light.
* *
- If we're going to be prepared for the future,
we can't ignore the past.
Solar super flares have happened again and again.
We can tell because really big flares
leave a chemical imprint in the air,
like the smell after a thunderstorm.
That's ozone.
Trees take in that altered ozone air,
and we can see it in their growth rings.
A tree becomes a witness.
So here's the solar flare from the year 774.
Here's one from the year 1293.
The next big one in the future
that kills our civilization, well, that would be
out here someplace, I guess.
Now, one way to protect the grid
is to add systems that can sense a power overload
the moment it happens and shut down the parts of the grid
that need to be protected, just like circuit breakers
in your house or apartment
but on a much, much larger scale.
We can also protect the most sensitive parts
of our electrical infrastructure
so they remain intact no matter what happens.
Here, I'll show you.
That shiny tower is a Tesla coil,
a machine that delivers a million volts
of pure electricity.
When it switches on, things will get
crackling in here, just like our planet
during a solar superstorm.
It's dangerous.
But this is a disaster show, people.
Danger is our business.
[tense music]
* *
Ah.
Now, I'm not looking to become French fry Nye.
This wire cage may not look like much,
but when I'm inside it, I'm protected
from electromagnetic fields.
The conductive wires of the cage
cause the fields to go right around me.
I don't feel their effects at all, even if I do this.
It's called a Faraday cage, named after Nicolas Cage.
Kidding.
This is another Michael Faraday brainstorm.
Not only did he discover how moving magnetic fields
create electricity, he figured out how to isolate
objects from electromagnetism.
Anything within the Faraday cage
is isolated and safe, safe even from the fury of CMEs
and geomagnetic storms.
It's working for me.
Should be working for the grid too.
Whoo-hoo!
[airplane engine roaring]
[thunder booming]
Here's a tip.
If you're in a car during a lightning storm, stay there.
The metal body of the car acts as your Faraday cage,
so the lightning can't zap you.
The same is true of an airplane fuselage.
If you fly through an electrical storm,
don't freak out.
Michael Faraday has got your back.
The entire airplane is a Faraday safety cage.
In fact, an airplane is one of the safest places you can be.
[all groaning]
You can imagine putting our critical transformers
in Faraday cages, but we're not doing that.
We're not even investing enough for our systems
to weather winter storms.
Recently in Texas, the electricity
went out statewide.
The reason things got so bad there
was a result of cutting costs, aging infrastructure,
and lack of preparedness.
In fact, the entire state of Texas
was just seconds away from total power failure.
Quick thinking grid operators managed
to stop the chain reaction of blackouts in the nick of time.
If they hadn't, the damage would have taken
months or years to repair.
How many of the 30 million people living in Texas
knew how close they were to being
in the dark indefinitely?
Another problem, the Texas power grid
was designed to be independent.
By independent, I mean not connected
to any other state or country.
When it came to protecting their own power plants,
politicians didn't get around to it.
What happened in Texas is a warning
to the rest of the world.
If we're going to keep expanding
our electric civilization,
we must also invest to protect it.
Time to rethink the whole thing.
What we need is a smart grid.
The power flowing in your home right now
is the product of an antiquated system
of power plants and transmission lines
invented while horse and buggies were still around...
really.
Every town and city in the world
from Bangladesh to Bakersfield still uses
this primitive one-way power network
and relies on aging infrastructure
to keep our lights on.
A smart grid would allow for two-way communication
between control systems, computers, homes,
businesses, power plants,
and all the infrastructure in between.
A smart grid would constantly adjust
to match the ever-changing supply and demand
and distribute power efficiently.
A smart grid would have automated safeguards
to handle emergencies that the existing grid cannot,
things like winter freezes,
earthquakes,
and yes, solar flares.
So what are we waiting for?
There's lots of work to do.
We're talking millions of miles of wires and cables.
It will be like replacing every road and street.
A smart grid is possible, but it will take time.
Let's demand that our government
invest in upgrading our electrical infrastructure
starting now.
Hey, I can see my house from here.
We also need a modernized
space weather forecasting system.
We're relying on a limited fleet
of aging spacecraft that were mostly built in the 1990s.
This one, called SOHO, was the state-of-the-art at the time.
It's still one of the best Sun monitoring stations we've got,
but it's ready for retirement.
Today's space weather probes can give us barely an hour
of advanced warning before a solar CME
blasts our electrical system.
Tech from the 1990s, videotapes, science guy shows?
We can do better, people!
New space weather probes are on the drawing board,
but most are still in the planning stages.
We need better eyes on the Sun as soon as possible
to warn us of a major solar flare.
The lights should always stay on in the City of Light.
Now we have systems to put electricity where it's needed
when it's needed or to disconnect parts
of the grid if necessary.
This is also a moment of great opportunity
for the developing world.
Countries can skip past the vulnerable stage
and build robust green energy grids from the get-go,
or from the grid-go. [chuckles]
C'est magnifique!
The Sun is going to do its thing no matter what.
So it's up to us to do our thing no matter what.
This time, armed with detailed information
about conditions on the Sun and in deep space,
scientists are prepared to act quickly.
They have days of accurate advanced warning,
plenty of time to warn the public.
With new smart grids online, automated safeguards
kick in before any overload can happen.
And it even corrects for human error.
- It's like he's never seen a baby talk before.
[laughs]
[light music]
* *
- Our astronaut recently completed
a productive expedition on the ISS
running microgravity experiments
to create new medicines.
Her father is proud of her work,
but he's also grateful to have his daughter
back on solid ground.
[indistinct chatter]
As night sets in, people can enjoy the city lights and all
the other electrical essentials that come with them
confident that it won't all disappear in a flash,
that we managed to think ahead, plan ahead,
and design a world in which the good things stay good.
* *
- People often talk about human progress as a journey
away from fear and superstition.
On the whole, I think we've done a pretty good job.
I certainly try to do my part.
We no longer live in terror of storm gods
and their capricious lightning bolts.
We figured out how lightning works,
and we found ways to harness its secrets.
We've got initiative, no question.
What we lack is "finishative."
We often fail to finish, to complete
that crucial last step and protect things we've created.
Look at us; we built a global network
of astonishing electronic technology.
But even though we've had blackouts and fires
and other warning signs, we haven't done enough
to protect the grid.
Over and over we put off thinking about things
like infrastructure and where our energy comes from
and how it's managed.
I get it.
These things seem wonkish and unsexy.
But we all use electricity,
and we all know how important it is.
We can get better at being resilient
and investing in a better tomorrow.
And you know how we start getting better?
By doing something about it today, right now.
Smart grids and green energy and Sun-monitoring satellites
are ready to go if we just decide to build them.
With our future secure, we can watch a TV show
about an end of the world instead of living through one.
Let's go.
[inspirational music]
[dramatic music]
* *