We've done a lot to develop protections for these systems after the Quebec incident, and we saw multiple providers, including PJM, actively need to use these protections over the weekend.
And this storm was significantly lower in intensity than the Carrington event.
Why would you conclude that, because a far weaker storm than one that has occurred in modern history didn't destroy civilization, that the fear of a far stronger storm is overblown? We don't have to guess what the damage would be from that sort of storm - we know why it caused the damage we did, and we can understand the damage it would do to modern infrastructure if not protected against.
If we continue to harden the grid against these storms, we might well be able to survive a Carrington (or stronger) level storm, but it will be because we took the proper precautions because we understand how big the risk is.
That's extrapolating a lot from a low G5 storm. This wasn't a Carrington event. And storms can be worse than a Carrington event, even though that's unlikely.
One of the leading hypotheses for the Ordovician mass extinction, the second largest ever, was a stray gamma ray burst. Earth regularly goes through mass extinction events and probably will continue to do so until the day all life is extinguished for good once it's encompassed in our dying star.
The interesting thing about these mass extinction events is twofold. The first is that they are (1) extremely improbable and (2) will continue to repeatedly happen. And they will never suddenly become more probable. The day before the Ordovician mass extinction kicked off would have very likely been just like any other normal day, even with modern tech. Somebody always wins the lottery sooner or later. The same would also be true even if only one ticket was sold a day. And tickets for the latest drawing have been on sell for about 65 million years.
> One of the leading hypotheses for the Ordovician mass extinction, the second largest ever, was a stray gamma ray burst.
Wikipedia currently characterizes it as more of a trailing hypothesis:
A minority hypothesis to explain the first burst has been proposed by Philip Ball,[100] Adrian Lewis Melott, and Brian C. Thomas ... Although the gamma-ray burst hypothesis is consistent with some patterns at the onset of extinction, there is no unambiguous evidence that such a nearby gamma-ray burst ever happened.
As an individual, you are responsible for yourself, and preparing for every improbable event would not be a good time / life enjoyment trade off.
As a society, we are responsible for not only our society, but we also set the stage for the entire future of the human race. Though an improbable event probably won’t happen tomorrow, we can say with a certain amount of assurance that it will happen in the future.
Therefore we can and should prepare for these events.
