Doomsday: 10 Ways the World Will End (2016) s01e05 Episode Script
Solar Storm
Civilization is collapsing, and billions are in peril, thanks to a catastrophe that has wiped out electrical power everywhere With a deadly strike from space.
- There would be massive death and destruction.
There's just no two ways about it.
Will you be ready when doomsday strikes? Can any of us survive? 150 years ago, a giant solar flare heaved a chunk of the Sun into our planet.
It knocked out the world's first primitive electric system, the telegraph.
Experts agree: The next strike is overdue.
What would happen if the same size storm struck our modern world right now? Would we survive? - Think of the chaos in the opening days after a solar flare hits the Earth.
- There's very few cultures on this planet that know how to function without electricity.
- Go! Go! - It could create havoc on a scale not seen in human history.
The disaster that blows out the world's electrical power and paralyzes civilization begins on the surface of the Sun.
Scientists monitoring the Sun suddenly notice a huge, violent explosion called a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
- Wow.
- Whoa.
- The detector is completely saturated with protons.
- A coronal mass ejection is essentially a piece of the Sun.
It's a large blob that gets hurled out of sunspots and off into space.
Ripping through space at over one million miles an hour, this solar storm will hit Earth in 17 hours.
And it won't be the first time.
Scientists believe these deadly blobs of the Sun's surface strike our planet roughly once every 100 years.
- That virtually guarantees that within our lifetimes or that of our children, we will experience a catastrophic geomagnetic superstorm.
Now, as the scientists watch - It's hitting right there.
- Yeah.
- That's early tomorrow.
- Early tomorrow, right around 6:00.
- These are gonna be big.
They race to alert the world's electrical companies - We've just issued a warning.
That a massive surge of electricity is about to come crashing down.
The solar flare slams into the magnetic field that surrounds the earth, triggering a truly global effect.
As far south as the equator, the skies light up in auroras brighter than any in living memory.
- It'll be an otherworldly experience, almost psychedelic, all these green and red colors, sometimes purple and blue.
As the atmosphere becomes electrified, power surges into high-tension lines and transformers from pole to pole.
- The electrical grid will go bye-bye.
Wires will fuse.
High-tension lines will explode.
Transformers will turn into large hunks of fused metal.
Anything that runs on power will be immediately affected.
In Denver, Colorado, it's a peaceful, starlit night when all of a sudden the power goes out, and a family making dinner gets a nasty surprise.
- You get shocked, because there would be very strong and sudden currents flowing through these wires.
- You would have sparks.
You would have fires.
You would have short circuits of anything electrical.
- Let's go! Everyone out of the house now! Let's go! Let's go! The same thing is happening in cities all over the world on land and in the air too.
In Berlin, New York, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere, air traffic controllers switch to emergency generators and try to get planes out of the sky.
But in the cockpit, GPS signals go haywire.
- You're gonna get a GPS signal that's gonna look terrible.
It may tell you you're way over there, when instead you're right here.
- You look down.
Perhaps you can see the lights of a city.
Wrong.
The city lights are all knocked out.
- If this happens in the middle of the night, probably hundreds of thousands of people are gonna die from crashed airliners trying to get down when they run out of fuel.
With communications down, most people don't yet realize the event is global.
It seems like just a typical local blackout.
But for scientists and national security experts it's a worst-case scenario.
They know that without electricity to provide food, water, energy, communications, transportation, and everything else that makes modern civilization possible Mankind is facing the worst catastrophe in recorded history.
- Compared with even a nuclear war That would be terrible, and a lot of people would die, but losing the electric grid would kill a lot more people.
Scientists believe that once a century, a gigantic chunk of the Sun's surface, a coronal mass ejection, slams into Earth.
If one hit our planet today, would we survive? 12 hours after the lethal solar flare strikes, electrifying the atmosphere, high-tension wires and transformers have been obliterated, wiping out power across the world.
Outside Denver, engineers assess the damage and realize the destruction is unprecedented.
- Our transformer systems actually would fuse.
The wiring inside would just simply melt down and fuse.
Big problem, though, is your high-transmission lines.
You're gonna see a lot of them Where'd the wires go? It's because the overload was so intense, they just literally exploded off the pylons.
Giant transformers, which convert energy between two or more devices, are the backbone of the world's electric system.
They take up to two years to build, and national security experts warn that there are no backups.
- They are very hard to replace.
There's only two countries in the world that build them for export: Germany and South Korea.
They weigh hundreds of tons.
Bridges have to be reinforced.
Roads have to be widened.
There's only a few flatbed railcars in the whole of North America that are capable of moving one of these things.
In places like Denver and every other urban metropolis, the solar flare's power surge sparks countless fires when it charges into homes, offices, and most catastrophic of all, gas pipelines.
- This can cause sparking, which can cause explosions in the natural gas pipelines.
In fact, you can get firestorms in cities.
For those caught in the fiery inferno, rescue will be impossible.
At the same time, the blackout disables vital pumps that maintain water pressure.
- A lot of municipal water supplies are actually run by electric pumps.
If there's no electricity, there's no electric pumps keeping this water supply active.
- No water to drink, no water to flush toilets, provide sanitation.
The lack of electricity also siphons off another key element to modern civilization: Gasoline.
Every day, the world consumes 94 million barrels of oil, most of which is pumped through pipelines using electricity.
Without electric power, even those pipelines that didn't explode in the initial surge would shut down.
And the gas that's already at your local station is also out of reach.
- The pump at the gasoline station is electric, so you can't even fill up your five-gallon can that you've got in the garage.
- You're gonna have people lined up a mile long, in panic, trying to get gas, or also get petrol for their electrical generating systems.
The destruction of the world's electrical system creates havoc in ways many people never imagined.
Take elevators.
Without them, high-rise cities become death traps.
- You have a elderly couple that has their beautiful penthouse on the 50th floor.
They have to do the equivalent of hiking up a 500-foot cliff just in the hope of getting a one-liter bottle of water.
Their life expectancy is just about zero.
The modern food system is also totally dependent on electricity for growing, harvesting, transporting, and refrigerating.
All of that has instantly collapsed.
- In our regional food warehouses, we only have enough food to feed the population for 30 days.
After 30 days, there is no food, and, in fact, after 72 hours, the emergency generators that keep the food cool run out of gas, and its food starts to spoil.
As people slowly realize the extent of the catastrophe, supermarkets become battlegrounds.
- First thing I would do is get away from any grocery store, because that will immediately become a target for looting.
If there's no way to pay for your groceries, what are you going to do? Are you gonna stand there with a handful of change? This isn't happening.
It'll be a smash-and-grab situation.
And cash is not just a problem in supermarkets.
The entire global financial system runs on electricity.
Like most people around the world, this family in Denver has very few dollars on hand.
Today, only 10% of money exists as cold, hard cash.
- The bank doesn't have a pile of money sitting in the vault for you back there that you can then access.
It's a bunch of bits, dots, and dashes that are stored in electronic computer systems that will be inaccessible.
So, suddenly, your lifetime savings could be wiped out.
It is likely that we would revert to a barter economy.
As the world tries to cope with the blackout, not everyone is in a state of chaos.
In some houses, like this one, 40 miles outside of Denver, the lights are still on.
This family is part of the worldwide community known as preppers.
They get their power from solar panels.
Glowing lights make them a magnet for neighbors, who bring over food that is spoiling in freezers and refrigerators.
They are happy to help for now.
- You will have a source of electricity.
Even if it's minor, you'll still have enough electricity to be able to run little things that would allow you to survive and actually be a hub for your neighborhood for people who aren't as fortunate as you.
But on the horizon, the glow from a burning Denver is an ominous backdrop.
A world without power is about to turn into a world of anarchy.
And no one is prepared for the nightmare to come.
- The people living in big cities or the suburbs They would die.
In a sense, we're really talking about the collapse of civilization.
A chunk of the Sun has smashed into the earth.
The massive power surge from this solar storm has overloaded and destroyed the world's entire electric system.
Without power, how long can we survive? As modern society descends into a state of turmoil, food becomes the number one priority.
People in cities across the world head into the wilderness and begin hunting deer, raccoons, squirrels, birds, and anything else they can find.
- We're a nation of 320 million people right now.
A hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not sustainable for 320 million people.
Even if people were survivalists, there wouldn't be enough food to hunt or fish.
And for many people, this will be their first time trying to kill their own dinner.
3/4 of Americans have never gone hunting in their lives.
- It's going to be absolute chaos when thousands of complete random individuals with absolutely no experience in hunting go out hunting for the first time.
You're gonna be shooting at anything that moves.
Pretty soon, human casualties will outnumber deer casualties.
As people across the globe try to cope and survive, they are also trying to make sense of this disaster.
Most have never heard of a solar storm.
But this isn't the first time it's happened.
The last huge coronal mass ejection to strike Earth hit just before the dawn of the electric age.
- In September of 1859, the mother of all solar flares hit the planet Earth.
It's called the Carrington Event.
Astronomer Richard Carrington was analyzing the Sun, and saw this gigantic solar flare that took place on the Sun.
17 hours later, the skies exploded in auroras, and the world's first primitive electrical system, the telegraph, crashed and burned.
- Telegraph operators record enormous anomalies; Fires, sparks taking place, and telegraph wires being electrified as if by magic.
It took months to repair the telegraph system, but the impact on civilization was relatively minor because in those days, the telegraph was the only electrical system on Earth.
The era of widespread electrical power was still a few decades away.
In modern times, there have been more recent episodes as well.
In 1989, a much smaller solar storm blacked out the Canadian province of Quebec.
And we had a dangerously close call in 2012.
- In 2012, there was an enormous coronal mass ejection from the Sun.
Fortunately for us, the bundle of particles crossed Earth's orbit about two weeks after Earth was at that location.
Just three weeks after the solar storm takes out the world's electrical grids, modern society as we know it falls further into a state of anarchy As people scrape and claw to get their hands on vital resources like food and gasoline, only the strong survive.
- You! This is my property! Don't be don't be stupid.
- We can just leave with these two gas cans.
We're not - We will devolve into a tribal state.
If you are starving to death and you have any semblance of weaponry, you will try and take over somebody that has more than you so you can survive longer.
Outside Longmont, Colorado, the prepper family has retreated to their well-stocked and isolated cabin.
Right after the disaster, they welcomed their neighbors and shared what they had.
But now they become targets - Those without any moral scruples will see this as, "You got something I want, I'll kill you for it.
" As quasi-military groups run rampant across the globe, chaos reigns, and nobody is safe.
But it pales in comparison to the nuclear disaster about to engulf the planet.
Scientists have long documented coronal mass ejections, giant chunks of the Sun's surface that break free and slam into Earth.
If one hit our planet today, would we survive? Six weeks after a solar storm has taken out the world's electricity, millions of people are starting to die.
With the collapse of electric-powered water and sewage systems, survival now depends on water from polluted rivers, streams, and lakes.
- You've had human wastes and hospital wastes and industrial wastes back-flowing into lakes and rivers.
It would truly be fatal for people to be doing that.
People living in hotter climates are particularly vulnerable.
In places like Mumbai, Baghdad, and Phoenix, some try to survive by sheltering in place.
But with triple-digit temperatures and no air conditioning, modern houses in Sunbelt cities are essentially unlivable.
- If you're living in, say, Phoenix, it's 110 degrees, 120 degrees, and the air conditioner shuts off.
What are you going to do? Most of these communities have elderly people in them.
These people are going to die.
The living conditions are no better for people in icy environments.
The loss of electricity also wipes out most forms of heating.
From Russia to Canada, Norway to Japan, Korea to the northern US, millions in cold climates face a frozen death.
As modern society crumbles, and people fight to survive, the crisis is about to go nuclear.
The fuel rods that power the world's 400-plus nuclear reactors have to be kept cool 24 hours a day, otherwise they would melt down and spew deadly radiation.
Operators keep them cool with a constant stream of cold water Water that's pumped with electricity.
When the solar storm hit and caused the global blackout, nuclear reactors like the one in Gravelines, France, kept the cold water flowing with emergency generators.
- They have emergency generators to keep them running, which will run out of gas in about 72 hours, and then they have battery systems, which will last about a week.
Now, even the batteries have died.
As the cool water stops flowing over the nuclear rods, they start to heat up.
- The reactor cores will actually explode from steam explosions And you get radioactive debris scattered into the winds that will travel for hundreds of miles and cover huge areas with radioactive materials.
Towns and cities near the world's 400 nuclear power plants are right in the line of fire, and without warning, they succumb to the deadly radiation that fills the air.
The global blackout has now reduced the world's population of seven billion to just two billion.
And the solar storm isn't done wreaking havoc.
A lethal chunk of the Sun has smashed into the Earth.
The massive power surge from this solar storm has wiped out power everywhere.
Three months into the disaster, billions are already dead.
With no food, no clean water, with transportation and communications obliterated, mass starvation, dehydration, deadly epidemics, and social chaos sweep the planet.
And now it seems like the sky itself is falling.
When the solar storm hit, it short-circuited thousands of satellites in space.
Now they plunge into the atmosphere and rain fiery debris onto a desolate planet Earth.
How did modern society crumble so quickly? The last time a giant solar storm hit the Earth's atmosphere, 150 years ago, the so-called Carrington Event, people lived without electricity.
It was simply a way of life.
Transportation, industry, and farming used steam and animal power.
Water systems were fed by gravity, muscle power, or steam pumps.
Refrigeration didn't exist, so every major city was ringed by local farms.
But in the high-technology 21st century, a majority of the world's population is not equipped to live like this.
- So you can't just say that "well, let's turn off "the electricity, and we go back to where we were in 1800, and people lived just fine back then.
" - We don't have the 19th century infrastructure where all of this was done by hand.
The harvest back in those days was not shipped across the country, but it was consumed locally.
And you had an infrastructure that would use horses and wagons to bring it into the cities where it would be consumed.
That is all gone.
Another difference is population.
150 years ago, the world's population was only 1.
3 billion, and there were frequent famines.
It is now over seven billion, and famines rarely happen thanks to things like modern agriculture, advanced fertilizers, and refrigeration, all of which require electricity.
- We couldn't possibly maintain a population of about seven billion if there were a loss of electricity and power for one or two years.
Billions of people would die.
After seven months, abandoned cities in hot desert climates where water is next to impossible to find, like Phoenix, Dubai, and Las Vegas, have dissolved into ruins.
And survivors have headed for more fertile terrain.
- Where I would want to be I would want to be near a fishery, a lake.
If you also think of a great orchard where there are fruit trees and things like that.
You can live a long time from the bounty of nature like that.
I would also want to be upwind of any nuclear reactor or large industrial facilities that are likely to create toxic clouds or environmental damage.
The land surrounding nuclear power plants, like France's Gravelines, have become radioactive wastelands.
People in these areas are either dead or they have moved to safer ground.
Incredibly, one year after the disaster struck, power hasn't been restored.
Families like the preppers in Colorado, who fled to their well-stocked cabin, have fended off gangs of bandits and protected their resources.
It hasn't been easy, but they survived the first year.
These preppers and others who have weathered the solar storm begin planting basic crops to see them through the first meager post-disaster harvest.
Meanwhile, people begin jerry-rigging systems to restore small-scale electricity.
- It'll be kind of this steam-punky hodgepodge thing going on.
You'll be able to make a fire, which heats water that can turn a simple turbine and create electricity.
After enduring the worst disaster known to mankind, civilization slowly starts picking up the pieces, and the flickering sparks of electricity are also the flickering sparks of hope.
- I do believe we will be coalescing back into smaller survival groups that get their act together, get a social structure going again, get a legal system, a fair system of living together, and then try and rebuild from there.
But will it work? And how could this whole catastrophe have been avoided? The world's electrical grid has gone up in flames, destroyed by a solar storm from the Sun.
Just over a year after the disaster, 90% of mankind is gone.
Without modern agriculture, without water systems, transportation, industry, or medicine, billions were killed off by starvation, violence, lawlessness, and disease.
But for those with the will to survive, there is a flicker of hope, especially now that small-scale electricity is coming back on.
- You know how many solar panels there are out in the middle of the desert? Head there.
Grab some.
Find a battery.
Connect it up.
All is not lost.
We just kind of hit the reset button at this point, and we have to start again.
While survivors soldier on, trying to rebuild modern civilization will be a daunting, uphill battle.
Large scale electric power will be much more difficult to come by.
It takes a huge industrial complex to build and transport gigantic new transformers, and that has vanished.
- Even with our current modern civilization, unaffected by a catastrophe, it's very hard for us to replace even one transformer.
For a civilization which has now had the props knocked out from under it, it's hard to imagine that it would be possible for that to happen.
The level of worldwide devastation caused by the solar storm is exactly what scientists predicted when the U.
S.
Congress held hearings on the subject in the early 2000s.
- Congressional studies here in the U.
S.
state that about 90% of the population would be dead.
That's 300 million people.
- And on a global level, out of the population currently of about 7 to 7 1/2 billion, that means there would be less than a billion people still alive.
The Congressional hearings also stated solar storms are just part of the threat to our electrical grid.
A similar phenomenon of massive blackouts could be caused by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in space.
The energy released would cause an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
- They were first discovered in 1962, when both the Americans and the Russians detonated in orbit nuclear weapons.
And both the Russians and the Americans were surprised at how long these waves reached and knocked out the transformers.
National security experts warned for years that if terrorists exploded nukes in space and triggered an EMP, modern society could be devastated.
So various government plans were hatched to harden and protect the electrical grid, which would safeguard it from both electromagnetic pulses and solar storms.
- Hardening narrator: But little was done.
Most electrical systems are run by private companies, not governments.
- Try to tell any utility executive that you meet anywhere that that's what utilities ought to be spending their money on, and you will not get a pleased response.
Everybody's saying, "Well, no, that's not my job.
It's yours.
" "No.
Wait.
It's yours.
" Others were skeptical that terrorists had the capability to detonate nukes in space.
And as for a giant solar storm, there hadn't been one in the 120 years since mankind became dependent on electricity, so many government officials had a hard time believing scientists' warnings.
- What response did we get? We got the giggle factor.
Politicians simply giggled at us, and said, "What? "This is something from Hollywood.
You guys don't need any money.
" - Nobody has ever really lived through anything of this nature, so it's very difficult for people to even fathom its existence.
Experts in the community insist that the threat of a solar storm is very real.
But they also believe the whole nightmare can be avoided, and survival can be assured if the right precautionary measures are put into place.
- The chance of another event which could paralyze civilization is about 1% per year.
That means in one decade, there's perhaps a 10% chance that all our electronics will be wiped out.
We'll be thrown back 100 years into the past.
Here are a few common sense steps: First, reinforce the grid.
Create redundant systems, backup systems.
Train emergency crews so that they know how to get the power stations up to speed again.
We know how to prepare for it.
We know what to do.
The question is money, planning, changing our orientation, because it's not a question of "if.
" It's a question of when the Sun blows its top again.
- This is the violent universe telling us that really we're pretty weak on the global scale.
And there are forces out there that we have to contend with in a very real way.
- We know that this type of event is going to happen.
Our star is the most relevant thing in the universe because it's the thing that's going to affect us.
It gives life, and it can take it away just as quickly.
- There would be massive death and destruction.
There's just no two ways about it.
Will you be ready when doomsday strikes? Can any of us survive? 150 years ago, a giant solar flare heaved a chunk of the Sun into our planet.
It knocked out the world's first primitive electric system, the telegraph.
Experts agree: The next strike is overdue.
What would happen if the same size storm struck our modern world right now? Would we survive? - Think of the chaos in the opening days after a solar flare hits the Earth.
- There's very few cultures on this planet that know how to function without electricity.
- Go! Go! - It could create havoc on a scale not seen in human history.
The disaster that blows out the world's electrical power and paralyzes civilization begins on the surface of the Sun.
Scientists monitoring the Sun suddenly notice a huge, violent explosion called a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
- Wow.
- Whoa.
- The detector is completely saturated with protons.
- A coronal mass ejection is essentially a piece of the Sun.
It's a large blob that gets hurled out of sunspots and off into space.
Ripping through space at over one million miles an hour, this solar storm will hit Earth in 17 hours.
And it won't be the first time.
Scientists believe these deadly blobs of the Sun's surface strike our planet roughly once every 100 years.
- That virtually guarantees that within our lifetimes or that of our children, we will experience a catastrophic geomagnetic superstorm.
Now, as the scientists watch - It's hitting right there.
- Yeah.
- That's early tomorrow.
- Early tomorrow, right around 6:00.
- These are gonna be big.
They race to alert the world's electrical companies - We've just issued a warning.
That a massive surge of electricity is about to come crashing down.
The solar flare slams into the magnetic field that surrounds the earth, triggering a truly global effect.
As far south as the equator, the skies light up in auroras brighter than any in living memory.
- It'll be an otherworldly experience, almost psychedelic, all these green and red colors, sometimes purple and blue.
As the atmosphere becomes electrified, power surges into high-tension lines and transformers from pole to pole.
- The electrical grid will go bye-bye.
Wires will fuse.
High-tension lines will explode.
Transformers will turn into large hunks of fused metal.
Anything that runs on power will be immediately affected.
In Denver, Colorado, it's a peaceful, starlit night when all of a sudden the power goes out, and a family making dinner gets a nasty surprise.
- You get shocked, because there would be very strong and sudden currents flowing through these wires.
- You would have sparks.
You would have fires.
You would have short circuits of anything electrical.
- Let's go! Everyone out of the house now! Let's go! Let's go! The same thing is happening in cities all over the world on land and in the air too.
In Berlin, New York, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere, air traffic controllers switch to emergency generators and try to get planes out of the sky.
But in the cockpit, GPS signals go haywire.
- You're gonna get a GPS signal that's gonna look terrible.
It may tell you you're way over there, when instead you're right here.
- You look down.
Perhaps you can see the lights of a city.
Wrong.
The city lights are all knocked out.
- If this happens in the middle of the night, probably hundreds of thousands of people are gonna die from crashed airliners trying to get down when they run out of fuel.
With communications down, most people don't yet realize the event is global.
It seems like just a typical local blackout.
But for scientists and national security experts it's a worst-case scenario.
They know that without electricity to provide food, water, energy, communications, transportation, and everything else that makes modern civilization possible Mankind is facing the worst catastrophe in recorded history.
- Compared with even a nuclear war That would be terrible, and a lot of people would die, but losing the electric grid would kill a lot more people.
Scientists believe that once a century, a gigantic chunk of the Sun's surface, a coronal mass ejection, slams into Earth.
If one hit our planet today, would we survive? 12 hours after the lethal solar flare strikes, electrifying the atmosphere, high-tension wires and transformers have been obliterated, wiping out power across the world.
Outside Denver, engineers assess the damage and realize the destruction is unprecedented.
- Our transformer systems actually would fuse.
The wiring inside would just simply melt down and fuse.
Big problem, though, is your high-transmission lines.
You're gonna see a lot of them Where'd the wires go? It's because the overload was so intense, they just literally exploded off the pylons.
Giant transformers, which convert energy between two or more devices, are the backbone of the world's electric system.
They take up to two years to build, and national security experts warn that there are no backups.
- They are very hard to replace.
There's only two countries in the world that build them for export: Germany and South Korea.
They weigh hundreds of tons.
Bridges have to be reinforced.
Roads have to be widened.
There's only a few flatbed railcars in the whole of North America that are capable of moving one of these things.
In places like Denver and every other urban metropolis, the solar flare's power surge sparks countless fires when it charges into homes, offices, and most catastrophic of all, gas pipelines.
- This can cause sparking, which can cause explosions in the natural gas pipelines.
In fact, you can get firestorms in cities.
For those caught in the fiery inferno, rescue will be impossible.
At the same time, the blackout disables vital pumps that maintain water pressure.
- A lot of municipal water supplies are actually run by electric pumps.
If there's no electricity, there's no electric pumps keeping this water supply active.
- No water to drink, no water to flush toilets, provide sanitation.
The lack of electricity also siphons off another key element to modern civilization: Gasoline.
Every day, the world consumes 94 million barrels of oil, most of which is pumped through pipelines using electricity.
Without electric power, even those pipelines that didn't explode in the initial surge would shut down.
And the gas that's already at your local station is also out of reach.
- The pump at the gasoline station is electric, so you can't even fill up your five-gallon can that you've got in the garage.
- You're gonna have people lined up a mile long, in panic, trying to get gas, or also get petrol for their electrical generating systems.
The destruction of the world's electrical system creates havoc in ways many people never imagined.
Take elevators.
Without them, high-rise cities become death traps.
- You have a elderly couple that has their beautiful penthouse on the 50th floor.
They have to do the equivalent of hiking up a 500-foot cliff just in the hope of getting a one-liter bottle of water.
Their life expectancy is just about zero.
The modern food system is also totally dependent on electricity for growing, harvesting, transporting, and refrigerating.
All of that has instantly collapsed.
- In our regional food warehouses, we only have enough food to feed the population for 30 days.
After 30 days, there is no food, and, in fact, after 72 hours, the emergency generators that keep the food cool run out of gas, and its food starts to spoil.
As people slowly realize the extent of the catastrophe, supermarkets become battlegrounds.
- First thing I would do is get away from any grocery store, because that will immediately become a target for looting.
If there's no way to pay for your groceries, what are you going to do? Are you gonna stand there with a handful of change? This isn't happening.
It'll be a smash-and-grab situation.
And cash is not just a problem in supermarkets.
The entire global financial system runs on electricity.
Like most people around the world, this family in Denver has very few dollars on hand.
Today, only 10% of money exists as cold, hard cash.
- The bank doesn't have a pile of money sitting in the vault for you back there that you can then access.
It's a bunch of bits, dots, and dashes that are stored in electronic computer systems that will be inaccessible.
So, suddenly, your lifetime savings could be wiped out.
It is likely that we would revert to a barter economy.
As the world tries to cope with the blackout, not everyone is in a state of chaos.
In some houses, like this one, 40 miles outside of Denver, the lights are still on.
This family is part of the worldwide community known as preppers.
They get their power from solar panels.
Glowing lights make them a magnet for neighbors, who bring over food that is spoiling in freezers and refrigerators.
They are happy to help for now.
- You will have a source of electricity.
Even if it's minor, you'll still have enough electricity to be able to run little things that would allow you to survive and actually be a hub for your neighborhood for people who aren't as fortunate as you.
But on the horizon, the glow from a burning Denver is an ominous backdrop.
A world without power is about to turn into a world of anarchy.
And no one is prepared for the nightmare to come.
- The people living in big cities or the suburbs They would die.
In a sense, we're really talking about the collapse of civilization.
A chunk of the Sun has smashed into the earth.
The massive power surge from this solar storm has overloaded and destroyed the world's entire electric system.
Without power, how long can we survive? As modern society descends into a state of turmoil, food becomes the number one priority.
People in cities across the world head into the wilderness and begin hunting deer, raccoons, squirrels, birds, and anything else they can find.
- We're a nation of 320 million people right now.
A hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not sustainable for 320 million people.
Even if people were survivalists, there wouldn't be enough food to hunt or fish.
And for many people, this will be their first time trying to kill their own dinner.
3/4 of Americans have never gone hunting in their lives.
- It's going to be absolute chaos when thousands of complete random individuals with absolutely no experience in hunting go out hunting for the first time.
You're gonna be shooting at anything that moves.
Pretty soon, human casualties will outnumber deer casualties.
As people across the globe try to cope and survive, they are also trying to make sense of this disaster.
Most have never heard of a solar storm.
But this isn't the first time it's happened.
The last huge coronal mass ejection to strike Earth hit just before the dawn of the electric age.
- In September of 1859, the mother of all solar flares hit the planet Earth.
It's called the Carrington Event.
Astronomer Richard Carrington was analyzing the Sun, and saw this gigantic solar flare that took place on the Sun.
17 hours later, the skies exploded in auroras, and the world's first primitive electrical system, the telegraph, crashed and burned.
- Telegraph operators record enormous anomalies; Fires, sparks taking place, and telegraph wires being electrified as if by magic.
It took months to repair the telegraph system, but the impact on civilization was relatively minor because in those days, the telegraph was the only electrical system on Earth.
The era of widespread electrical power was still a few decades away.
In modern times, there have been more recent episodes as well.
In 1989, a much smaller solar storm blacked out the Canadian province of Quebec.
And we had a dangerously close call in 2012.
- In 2012, there was an enormous coronal mass ejection from the Sun.
Fortunately for us, the bundle of particles crossed Earth's orbit about two weeks after Earth was at that location.
Just three weeks after the solar storm takes out the world's electrical grids, modern society as we know it falls further into a state of anarchy As people scrape and claw to get their hands on vital resources like food and gasoline, only the strong survive.
- You! This is my property! Don't be don't be stupid.
- We can just leave with these two gas cans.
We're not - We will devolve into a tribal state.
If you are starving to death and you have any semblance of weaponry, you will try and take over somebody that has more than you so you can survive longer.
Outside Longmont, Colorado, the prepper family has retreated to their well-stocked and isolated cabin.
Right after the disaster, they welcomed their neighbors and shared what they had.
But now they become targets - Those without any moral scruples will see this as, "You got something I want, I'll kill you for it.
" As quasi-military groups run rampant across the globe, chaos reigns, and nobody is safe.
But it pales in comparison to the nuclear disaster about to engulf the planet.
Scientists have long documented coronal mass ejections, giant chunks of the Sun's surface that break free and slam into Earth.
If one hit our planet today, would we survive? Six weeks after a solar storm has taken out the world's electricity, millions of people are starting to die.
With the collapse of electric-powered water and sewage systems, survival now depends on water from polluted rivers, streams, and lakes.
- You've had human wastes and hospital wastes and industrial wastes back-flowing into lakes and rivers.
It would truly be fatal for people to be doing that.
People living in hotter climates are particularly vulnerable.
In places like Mumbai, Baghdad, and Phoenix, some try to survive by sheltering in place.
But with triple-digit temperatures and no air conditioning, modern houses in Sunbelt cities are essentially unlivable.
- If you're living in, say, Phoenix, it's 110 degrees, 120 degrees, and the air conditioner shuts off.
What are you going to do? Most of these communities have elderly people in them.
These people are going to die.
The living conditions are no better for people in icy environments.
The loss of electricity also wipes out most forms of heating.
From Russia to Canada, Norway to Japan, Korea to the northern US, millions in cold climates face a frozen death.
As modern society crumbles, and people fight to survive, the crisis is about to go nuclear.
The fuel rods that power the world's 400-plus nuclear reactors have to be kept cool 24 hours a day, otherwise they would melt down and spew deadly radiation.
Operators keep them cool with a constant stream of cold water Water that's pumped with electricity.
When the solar storm hit and caused the global blackout, nuclear reactors like the one in Gravelines, France, kept the cold water flowing with emergency generators.
- They have emergency generators to keep them running, which will run out of gas in about 72 hours, and then they have battery systems, which will last about a week.
Now, even the batteries have died.
As the cool water stops flowing over the nuclear rods, they start to heat up.
- The reactor cores will actually explode from steam explosions And you get radioactive debris scattered into the winds that will travel for hundreds of miles and cover huge areas with radioactive materials.
Towns and cities near the world's 400 nuclear power plants are right in the line of fire, and without warning, they succumb to the deadly radiation that fills the air.
The global blackout has now reduced the world's population of seven billion to just two billion.
And the solar storm isn't done wreaking havoc.
A lethal chunk of the Sun has smashed into the Earth.
The massive power surge from this solar storm has wiped out power everywhere.
Three months into the disaster, billions are already dead.
With no food, no clean water, with transportation and communications obliterated, mass starvation, dehydration, deadly epidemics, and social chaos sweep the planet.
And now it seems like the sky itself is falling.
When the solar storm hit, it short-circuited thousands of satellites in space.
Now they plunge into the atmosphere and rain fiery debris onto a desolate planet Earth.
How did modern society crumble so quickly? The last time a giant solar storm hit the Earth's atmosphere, 150 years ago, the so-called Carrington Event, people lived without electricity.
It was simply a way of life.
Transportation, industry, and farming used steam and animal power.
Water systems were fed by gravity, muscle power, or steam pumps.
Refrigeration didn't exist, so every major city was ringed by local farms.
But in the high-technology 21st century, a majority of the world's population is not equipped to live like this.
- So you can't just say that "well, let's turn off "the electricity, and we go back to where we were in 1800, and people lived just fine back then.
" - We don't have the 19th century infrastructure where all of this was done by hand.
The harvest back in those days was not shipped across the country, but it was consumed locally.
And you had an infrastructure that would use horses and wagons to bring it into the cities where it would be consumed.
That is all gone.
Another difference is population.
150 years ago, the world's population was only 1.
3 billion, and there were frequent famines.
It is now over seven billion, and famines rarely happen thanks to things like modern agriculture, advanced fertilizers, and refrigeration, all of which require electricity.
- We couldn't possibly maintain a population of about seven billion if there were a loss of electricity and power for one or two years.
Billions of people would die.
After seven months, abandoned cities in hot desert climates where water is next to impossible to find, like Phoenix, Dubai, and Las Vegas, have dissolved into ruins.
And survivors have headed for more fertile terrain.
- Where I would want to be I would want to be near a fishery, a lake.
If you also think of a great orchard where there are fruit trees and things like that.
You can live a long time from the bounty of nature like that.
I would also want to be upwind of any nuclear reactor or large industrial facilities that are likely to create toxic clouds or environmental damage.
The land surrounding nuclear power plants, like France's Gravelines, have become radioactive wastelands.
People in these areas are either dead or they have moved to safer ground.
Incredibly, one year after the disaster struck, power hasn't been restored.
Families like the preppers in Colorado, who fled to their well-stocked cabin, have fended off gangs of bandits and protected their resources.
It hasn't been easy, but they survived the first year.
These preppers and others who have weathered the solar storm begin planting basic crops to see them through the first meager post-disaster harvest.
Meanwhile, people begin jerry-rigging systems to restore small-scale electricity.
- It'll be kind of this steam-punky hodgepodge thing going on.
You'll be able to make a fire, which heats water that can turn a simple turbine and create electricity.
After enduring the worst disaster known to mankind, civilization slowly starts picking up the pieces, and the flickering sparks of electricity are also the flickering sparks of hope.
- I do believe we will be coalescing back into smaller survival groups that get their act together, get a social structure going again, get a legal system, a fair system of living together, and then try and rebuild from there.
But will it work? And how could this whole catastrophe have been avoided? The world's electrical grid has gone up in flames, destroyed by a solar storm from the Sun.
Just over a year after the disaster, 90% of mankind is gone.
Without modern agriculture, without water systems, transportation, industry, or medicine, billions were killed off by starvation, violence, lawlessness, and disease.
But for those with the will to survive, there is a flicker of hope, especially now that small-scale electricity is coming back on.
- You know how many solar panels there are out in the middle of the desert? Head there.
Grab some.
Find a battery.
Connect it up.
All is not lost.
We just kind of hit the reset button at this point, and we have to start again.
While survivors soldier on, trying to rebuild modern civilization will be a daunting, uphill battle.
Large scale electric power will be much more difficult to come by.
It takes a huge industrial complex to build and transport gigantic new transformers, and that has vanished.
- Even with our current modern civilization, unaffected by a catastrophe, it's very hard for us to replace even one transformer.
For a civilization which has now had the props knocked out from under it, it's hard to imagine that it would be possible for that to happen.
The level of worldwide devastation caused by the solar storm is exactly what scientists predicted when the U.
S.
Congress held hearings on the subject in the early 2000s.
- Congressional studies here in the U.
S.
state that about 90% of the population would be dead.
That's 300 million people.
- And on a global level, out of the population currently of about 7 to 7 1/2 billion, that means there would be less than a billion people still alive.
The Congressional hearings also stated solar storms are just part of the threat to our electrical grid.
A similar phenomenon of massive blackouts could be caused by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in space.
The energy released would cause an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
- They were first discovered in 1962, when both the Americans and the Russians detonated in orbit nuclear weapons.
And both the Russians and the Americans were surprised at how long these waves reached and knocked out the transformers.
National security experts warned for years that if terrorists exploded nukes in space and triggered an EMP, modern society could be devastated.
So various government plans were hatched to harden and protect the electrical grid, which would safeguard it from both electromagnetic pulses and solar storms.
- Hardening narrator: But little was done.
Most electrical systems are run by private companies, not governments.
- Try to tell any utility executive that you meet anywhere that that's what utilities ought to be spending their money on, and you will not get a pleased response.
Everybody's saying, "Well, no, that's not my job.
It's yours.
" "No.
Wait.
It's yours.
" Others were skeptical that terrorists had the capability to detonate nukes in space.
And as for a giant solar storm, there hadn't been one in the 120 years since mankind became dependent on electricity, so many government officials had a hard time believing scientists' warnings.
- What response did we get? We got the giggle factor.
Politicians simply giggled at us, and said, "What? "This is something from Hollywood.
You guys don't need any money.
" - Nobody has ever really lived through anything of this nature, so it's very difficult for people to even fathom its existence.
Experts in the community insist that the threat of a solar storm is very real.
But they also believe the whole nightmare can be avoided, and survival can be assured if the right precautionary measures are put into place.
- The chance of another event which could paralyze civilization is about 1% per year.
That means in one decade, there's perhaps a 10% chance that all our electronics will be wiped out.
We'll be thrown back 100 years into the past.
Here are a few common sense steps: First, reinforce the grid.
Create redundant systems, backup systems.
Train emergency crews so that they know how to get the power stations up to speed again.
We know how to prepare for it.
We know what to do.
The question is money, planning, changing our orientation, because it's not a question of "if.
" It's a question of when the Sun blows its top again.
- This is the violent universe telling us that really we're pretty weak on the global scale.
And there are forces out there that we have to contend with in a very real way.
- We know that this type of event is going to happen.
Our star is the most relevant thing in the universe because it's the thing that's going to affect us.
It gives life, and it can take it away just as quickly.