A Plan to Stop Solar Storms From Sending Us Back to the Stone Age
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.
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To make the StormWall system work, scientists would need to detect early indications of a particularly nasty coronal ejection and track its progress through space, both from the ground and with a deep-space observation satellite, says Walsh. From there, an international panel would have to agree on a course of action and then press the button to deploy the system, he adds.
There are many engineering challenges that would have to be surmounted to make such a system operational, says Cohen. A significant expense would be the launch itself: The system would require 838,000 pounds of ionizable material—lithium, barium or sodium—to be lofted to an altitude of 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface. That’s 68 times as high as the orbit of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. That altitude is critical because that’s the point in space at which the ionized material could follow what the researchers call “natural highways” in space, giving about six hours of protection before drifting away.
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