OK, so the economy is in the dumper and maybe you've lost your job.
You're upside down on your mortgage. There's local flooding and the price of gas is on the rise.
Car companies, banks and giant financial institutions are on the verge of collapse.
Local governments are running short of money to fix roads and educate kids.
Know what?That might just be the good news, based on a report funded by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and issued by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
The report came out in January and I just read about it in an article by Mark Brooks on newscientist.com
It's fascinating stuff.
It basically lays out the scenario for a space storm to wipe out the power grid from here to the East Coast.
See, the sun's surface is a boiling pile of plasma. Plasma is basically a bunch of super-charged particles. Some of it escapes the surface of the sun and travel through space toward Earth.
When these smaller amounts of plasma get here, they create the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Normally, you have to head toward the North Pole to really see the northern lights, because the energy from the plasma isn't strong enough to reach very far away from the pole as it is dispersed by the Earth's atmosphere.
Once and a while the plasma disrupts satellite and cell phone transmissions.
But from to time, there is this thing called a coronal mass ejection. That's when a giant, billion-ton mass of plasma is released from the sun.
If that happens, and it hits the Earth, well, let's just say it would not be a good day.
It's not like an asteroid strike or anything really violent like that. It wouldn't kill anybody. It just messes with magnetic fields and currents.
Here's how Brooks describes it:
"The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and 6 million people spent nine hours without electricity."
The report notes that, depending on the time of day and time of year, a severe space weather event in the U.S. could melt 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people - from here to the East Coast.
Daniel Baker is a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado. He's also the chairman of the NAS committee that put out the report. He said, "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster."
The worst space weather event ever recorded happened in 1859. It's called the Carrington event, named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to figure out what cased it, which he termed as "two patches of intensely bright and white light" - plasma - coming out of a big group of sunspots.
There were eight days of severe space weather.
The world's telegraph networks were totally disrupted. Magnetometers went off the scale. You can see actual magnetometer readings online. It's amazing.
Brooks reports that a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful. Brooks quotes James Green, head of NASA's planetary division. He's an expert on the 1859 incident.
"We haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event. From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive."
But the report paints a pretty dire picture. Given a modern-day Carrington in the U.S., many of us wouldn't survive.
See, in 1859, nobody depended on electricity. It hadn't been invented.
Generator?
Only as good as the gas it runs on, which you can't pump out of the ground.
Water?
Can't pump that either.
Natural gas or liquid propane needs either gas or electricity to be delivered.
Can't transport food or preserve it. Can't manufacture anything - including prescription drugs - and even if you could, you couldn't transport them anywhere.
Hospitals dormant.
Without power for heating, cooling or refrigeration, depending on the time of year, people would start to die within days.
The NAS report says it could take four to 10 years to replace all the melted transformers and wires.
Whoa. A four-year power outage.
NAS says the financial impact of a bad space storm could be as high as $2 trillion in the first year after the storm. That's akin to 20 Hurricane Katrinas in one year.
Now the good news.
Given a little warning power companies can adjust voltages and turn stuff off to minimize the damage.
The thing NASA uses to monitor space weather - the Advanced Composition Explorer - lives in a solar orbit that always keeps it between the Earth and the sun.
It generates continuous data on the direction and velocity of solar wind and streams of particles and can provide 15 to 45 minutes warning of any incoming stuff.
Now the bad news.
Scientists who have studied the Carrington event have figured out that the plasma mass took less than 15 minutes to get here from where the ACE thing is in orbit. It would get here before we could do anything about it.
The report says a storm like this would most likely occur on a spring or fall night in a year of heightened solar activity, like 2012. That's because, the scientists say, the angle of the Earth's to the sun around the equinoxes makes us the most vulnerable.
Hey, isn't 2012 when those pesky Mayans predicted the world would end?
Now, the scientists don't really hang a percentage of likelihood on any of this happening, and it's probably more likely that I'll win the lottery this week, but it's fascinating stuff, isn't it?
Anyway, here's my advice if you ever see really intense reddish, bluish, greenish lights swirling in the sky and your power goes out.
Run to the grocery and grab all the canned food and bottled water you can haul out of there.
