On the 1–2 September 1859 the Earth was hit by a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) which fried the telegraph network and caused the corona borealis to appear at the equator. On July 23rd 2012 another CME missed the Earth by nine days.
The effect on the nascent electronic communications in 1859 was disruptive but the system remained operational after the solar storm. If one of these mass ejections hit the Earth today the effect on our electronic, digital AI world would be catastrophic destroying most of our satellites and collapsing the global communication network almost entirely.
It is estimated that it could take several years after such an event to restore the systems we are now entirely dependent on in the industrialised world.
Would our modern societies survive an event on this scale?
Shielding and surge protectors when connecting to the power grid.
Years ago now, a lightning struck our neighbor's electric meter, in the back of his house. Which had to be replaced.
But by striking the electric meter, it created a power surge in the line, across his and our back yards, into our own mains. In our house, it fried our modem and it fried one smoke detector, which had AC power. Fortunately, that was the extent of the damage to us.
The shields and surge protectors are insufficient in CME's on the scale of the Carrington Event and are finally missing from the majority of the world's power transformers. NOAA do have a satellite in place that would give a few hours warning so that parts of the grid could be shut down but that would only mitigate the effect not prevent it.
The vast majority of people would not be casualties of the event itself but of the aftermath. Trying to live in a pre-digital age world for as long as a couple of years.
Один стежок, но вовремя, стоит девяти.
The issue is that these events only have to happen once for there to be a problem.
After the 'event' planning always tends to be less efficient than spending a few shekels in advance. In the UK there is a proverb "a stitch in time saves nine". It is more meaningful in the original Russian of course but it refers to the contingency of repairing things early rather than late.
Miyake events.
993 - 774 = 219 years. 10 полных солнечных циклов. Но это могли быть и взрывы сверхновых где-то не далеко.