A Plan to Stop Solar Storms From Sending Us Back to the Stone Age
Charles Bresnahan
It’s the year 2040, and the Big One—a civilization-smashing solar storm of a scale not seen since the 19th century—is on a collision course with Earth.
Far out in space, where geostationary satellites orbit, a half-dozen school-bus-size satellites crack open and start dumping barium, lithium or sodium. Within minutes, sunlight transforms this material into an ionized gas shield that slows the oncoming massive blob of plasma.
Down on our planet’s surface, a would-be global catastrophe—potentially knocking out entire electrical grids—is reduced to a nighttime display for anyone who cares to look up and see the Northern Lights.
Even its name, StormWall, sounds like science fiction, but authorities on space weather say it could work, mitigating an event that happens, they estimate, once a century. The trio of scientists who conceived of it say an international coalition could build such a system with existing or soon-to-arrive technology.
Back-of-the-envelope math suggests it could cost tens of billions of dollars. Yet with all of the electronics on Earth that increasingly govern our lives, and ever more infrastructure being put into orbit, from internet-delivering satellites to AI-training data centers, spending that much could be a no-brainer, says StormWall co-designer Brian Walsh, an associate professor of engineering at Boston University.
“A 100-year [solar] storm could cause huge power outages over entire continents,” says Walsh, adding that such an event could damage space-based data centers and missile-defense systems. “If the cost is less than sending people to the moon, and people do the math, it will make sense in the very near future,” he adds.
The solar wind
For decades, scientists have studied the interaction between the Earth’s protective magnetosphere—generated by its iron core—and the otherwise-lethal “coronal mass ejections” from our sun. (Ever wonder why Mars is a dead planet? No magnetic field.)
Charged particles of solar wind constantly catapult toward Earth, but most get deflected by the magnetosphere, which acts like a real-life Star Trek shield. A portion of those particles are channeled to Earth’s magnetic poles, and when the solar wind is particularly active, they become visible as the aurora borealis and aurora australis. Activity tends to rise and fall in cycles that average 11 years.
“This is a process that takes place every day, several times a day,” says Allison Jaynes, a professor and physicist at the University of Iowa. “When it happens in a big way, that’s when we get the bad effects.”
“A 100-year [solar] storm could cause huge power outages over entire continents,” says Walsh, adding that such an event could damage space-based data centers and missile-defense systems. “If the cost is less than sending people to the moon, and people do the math, it will make sense in the very near future,” he adds.
Currently, putting that much material to geosynchronous orbit is nearly impossible, since it would require many launches. The StormWall payload mass is many times the mass of a typical geo satellite, and those already require the world’s most powerful rockets.
SpaceX is developing Starship to send large amounts of mass to deeper-space destinations using refueling operations it hasn’t tested yet. The company projects Starship will begin launching to lower-Earth orbits in the second half of this year, but it isn’t clear when the company could get its rockets to the orbits required by StormWall.
Then there is China’s Long March 9, which is projected to have roughly equivalent launch capabilities, but its maiden launch isn’t expected until the early 2030s.
When I ask Welling how soon StormWall could be launched, he says that even in the best-case scenario, just the research would require at least five more years. “You don’t want an air bag that explodes, and you don’t want an air bag that under-inflates,” he says.
Even if it costs $100 billion, that price tag is only a 10th of the amount tech companies are projected to spend on building out artificial-intelligence infrastructure next year alone. And without a space air bag, any sufficiently large solar storm has the potential to turn all those data centers into inoperable piles of steel and silicon.
Christopher Mims is a columnist who writes about technology for The Wall Street Journal's tech bureau in San Francisco.
Charlie/K1CB, Secretary, Falmouth Amateur Radio Association