Despite his relative youth The Internet has become an essential element in many aspects of our lives.. At work, at leisure, when interacting with other people, when looking for information… If we look back just 25 or 30 years ago, we can remember how different everything was and then appreciate the impact that the network has had on our lives in just over two decades. Two decades that are little more than a sigh in the entire history of modern society and its development.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’re already familiar with the specials we publish at the end of the year, in which our editors select the highlights of the year in various areas. Specifically, in the best series of 2022, I chose Blackout by Movistar+, a plausible fiction in which a particularly strong stream of solar wind ends, with the stroke of a pen, electricity and communication plunge us into a darkness that is bleak and terrifying.

I mentioned this a few weeks ago when I was referencing said series one of these solar winds hit our planet and caused radio blackouts in the shortwave band that affected much of the South Pacific, including much of Australia and all of New Zealand. Could a phenomenon of this type, but on a larger scale, cause all or some of the effects we might see in a blackout? Well, that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the show so much, and that’s because the answer is yes.

As we can read in Chron, the possibility of a large-scale Internet outage due to solar activity was already pointed out in 2021 by Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer expert from the University of California, who estimates a 1.6% to 12% chance of internet outages “for months” sometime in the next decade. And yes, you read that right, we’re not talking about specific cuts, minutes or even hours, her prediction is talking about months of global internet disruption. Said publication estimates daily economic losses in the United States alone at $7,000 million.

We are not talking about a side theory, something that should not be considered. Just the opposite, solar currents They are a phenomenon that science has been studying for a long time. Fortunately, some research like the one done by NASA can be of great help in understanding the threat better so that we can reduce its impact as much as possible.

The Parker Solar Probe, which we have talked about with you on previous occasions, is the man-made object that has come closest to the Sun, and thanks to the data it collected during its approaches to the center of our solar system, Scientists have obtained a lot of extremely useful information about the solar winds . Thus, the scientific community confirms that we are already close to what is necessary to identify an explosion of this type in time, which would allow us to prepare as best as possible. Maybe it could cut internet outages from months to days, maybe even hours. But what seems clear is that sooner or later it will happenand to be better prepared.