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This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.

We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.

On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.

Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...

Doesn't that roughly coincide with the Younger Dryas?

I hope it doesn't take so long to happen again that we have nobody around who remembers how to fix what it breaks. If so it'll be back to the stone ages for humanity.

New as in research from 2023?

https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S02624079230189...

The article casually mentions a "notorious" 775 AD event which I'd never heard about (insert relevant XKCD here), so here's Wikipedia:

The event of 774 had no significant consequences for life on Earth, but had it happened in modern times, it might have produced catastrophic damage to modern technology, particularly to communication and space-borne navigation systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...

Interestingly, the identification of the cause of the 775 AD event with a huge solar flare came from the same researchers as this story.

I’m curious what humans at the time would have felt, if anything.

(pdf) https://oulurepo.oulu.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/55447/nbnfio...

Is this not one of the Miyake Events[1]? This particular one was reported in 2023 [2].

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event

[2]. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02624...

Baseless wild speculation time: I don't think the timing quite matches up, but the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck is a little close to this.

What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?

This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.

Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.

Are there any cultural artifacts from these types of events? You'd think there would be stories of sky gods causing all kinds of mischief in areas where they are unaccustomed to aurora.

Isn't it amazing that we have an in-silico model that goes back thousands of years and can even tell us about atmospheric conditions 12,000+ years ago? We can confirm this via miyake events which are registered as growth in the tree rings. One just cuts down 13,000 year old trees to confirm the model, and we're good!

If this is C14 then this requires biological matter. Carbon dating depends on C14 so I’d assume that this needs to be tied to a chain of tree ring dates going back to tie these events down.

There’s no doubt evidence of stronger events further back, it would be interesting to see if theirs a loose record of suggested intensities for those.

I take it most of these details will be in the happy which I’ll need to study.

Around this time we know there was a rise in human migration and settlement across Europe in particular. A human Y-chromosone haplogroup associated with the Near East shows up in Italy, and Western Hunter Gatherers start to move across Europe replacing the Magdalenian cultures.

I wonder if this event prompted people to think about the World around them differently in any way.

> This event establishes a new worst-case scenario

This person’s definition of “worst-case scenario” is much different than mine.

We don’t know with certainty what the universe will throw at us.

We just do the very best we sensibly can.

Why should we assume that the worst thing that could happen to us happened within the past 20K years?

If I notice an unusual and not predicted weather change I usually check for space weather news to see what’s the sun up to. Afaik no weather model can include solar flares reasonably which can temporarily change the weather on earth abruptly.

Just 5 years away from being 12345

So we can look forward to radiocarbon spikes in the weather forecast.

"New SOCOL:14C-Ex model reveals that the Late-Glacial radiocarbon spike in 12350 BC was caused by the record-strong extreme solar storm".

Were they able to measure the -nT value for this storm?

That would be interesting to know, I was at the May 11th 2024 event taking photos. It was probably the strongest in the last 30 years.

Holy shit, is this the squatting man? (strangely similar stick figure cave drawings dating to the same timeframe all over the world, and reproduced apparently with high energy plasma experiment).

https://medium.com/@rajkumarrr/history-mystery-the-squatting...

More fuel for the Fermi paradox. Our sun is a fairly calm well behaved star. Many stars, even if they allow life, might make anything using electricity very problematic.

Of course ours will eventually if we don’t prepare. Seems like this type of event would also doom any space settlements if it hit one.

Makes me wonder if going to the outer solar system further from the sun would be better than Mars.

> The findings revise our understanding of solar physics and space weather extremes. "This event establishes a new worst-case scenario," Golubenko notes. "Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms to modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems."

…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.

The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.

An international research team has identified the most extreme solar particle storm ever recorded, occurring approximately 14,300 years ago in 12350 BC.

wow that's cool. Given that the 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense than the 2005 solar storm, what are the possible consequences if a storm of similar magnitude were to occur today?