Black Sky Events: Can Humanity Survive a Global Technology Shutdown?

Nearly eight billion people today share our planet’s resources: more than four times the population the earth sustained 100 years ago. How have infrastructures and resource production changed to make this possible? And what are the Black Sky events raising growing concerns for our civilization’s future?

Humanity has not yet experienced a Black Sky disaster – a long-duration, subcontinent-scale power outage resulting in cascading failure of all business and societal sectors. Should this give us confidence that we need not plan and invest in order to counter such catastrophes?

What Has Changed? The Tech-Driven Integration of Everything

Historically, most life-sustaining resources were produced locally, using equipment and resources that could also be sourced nearby. Intrinsically inefficient and highly limiting, such methods do not scale up to support today’s billions. They did, however, give humanity considerable built-in resilience. Disasters striking in one location could have only a minor impact on other regions.

The systems that sustain, empower, and entertain us today have evolved far beyond their roots, empowered by new technology and closely interlinked connectivity. Sometimes referred to as the metagrid, modern infrastructures, product, and service sectors worldwide are tied together by a tightly interwoven webwork of connective tissue.

That connectivity changed everything. It had a revolutionary impact on the pace of technology development. It led to unprecedented growth in productivity and an expanding flood of inventions that have fundamentally changed how we live. Manufacturers in all sectors today can bring components from anywhere, use AI-framed automation to produce products, and ship those products anywhere (soon by drone), with orders coming in through globally interconnected communication services and payment arranged through the tightly interwoven layers of international fintech service companies.

Unfortunately, unlike historic methods, it also brought us a new, civilization-scale risk: Black Sky events.

Black Sky Events: A New Class of Civilization-Scale Risk

In today’s metagrid-connected world, Black Sky-scale disruption would quickly spread across the globe. In short, global catastrophe.

Why?

The flip side of interconnectedness is interdependency: the operation of nearly every business depends today on the continuing operation of a vast number of other businesses in many sectors. That means disruption in any major sector can quickly lead to the disruption of all other sectors. If the disruption is serious enough, it can lead to a Black Sky Event, with the restoration of nearly everything stalled, waiting for the restoration of nearly everything else.

In other words, with everything connected, severe turmoil in any major sector can be “contagious,” causing serious disruption that could affect many other sectors and quickly go global. If the disruption is extreme, it could mean large-scale, long-duration infrastructure collapse.

What Could Cause a Black Sky Event?

Scientists refer to events that could trigger such complex catastrophes as Black Sky hazards. What are they?

Malicious Threats

Imagine a severe cyber-attack on our national power grid, what do you picture? Blackouts, sufficient damage, survival of our critical infrastructure limits diminished?

Now consider a ransomware attack that shuts down too many of the interdependent layers of the world’s financial/banking/credit/insurance systems. If interdependent fintech services can’t be quickly restored, grid transmission companies won’t be able to buy resources, shipping companies won’t be able to buy insurance, water companies will have no way to pay for processing chemicals, and the list goes on.

The tap runs dry, the refrigerator gets warm, and the food, cash, gasoline, cell phones, groceries, pharmaceuticals, wholesale, retail, supply chains, and so on all stop.

The same happens if some miscalculated military adventurism launches a few nuclear warheads and an EMP attack shuts down the grid.

But what if, by some miracle, global peace breaks out? Would that solve the problem?

Unfortunately, no. Natural hazards could bring on the same nightmare.

Extreme Solar Storms

In recent years the sun has fired huge chunks of its corona off into space about three times per year, and solar scientists tell us the sun is becoming more active.

Just consider the previous occurrences: in 1862 and 1921, before the national grid, and the one that missed the earth in its orbit by one week in 2012.

So, what about the next time? If the next Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) happen to run into the earth, and it’s a serious enough solar hiccup, it could cause grid disruption on a global scale.

Megaquakes

As the geographic reach of our infrastructures grows, risks from serious earthquakes rise. Geologists recently discovered a good example of this, with eight states in the middle of the US sitting on a seismic zone that saw multiple magnitude 7.0 quakes in 1811-12. No structures were damaged because there were no structures 200+ years ago. Today, that zone includes regions through which many of North America’s most important gas pipelines pass, bringing fuel to the generators that light up the eastern half of the country.

When will the next megaquake strike that region? No one knows, but geologists give it a 7-10% chance in the next 50 years.

COVID-19+?

A high morbidity pandemic – a virus as contagious as Omicron but with far higher fatality – could be especially problematic. If we can’t find and protect enough heroic operators to keep our utilities and critical supply chains running, our civilization could slide into a particularly agonizing Black Sky reality.

Climate Change

The investments needed to shift the power grid and other industries toward green are happening and even accelerating, and that’s good news for the wild swings of fires, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and droughts costing lives and straining resources all over the world. But if grid resilience policy, investments, and planning don’t keep up with these accelerating changes, “blackstart,” the core grid restart process after a widespread outage, may not happen fast enough to sustain the population.

How Serious Is Black Sky?

In a Black Sky catastrophe, most or all of the grid would go down, and outage regions will have no choice but to bootstrap their grid segments back up on their own, a long and delicate process. This is anything but fast and subject to multiple collapses and restarts, which means the shutdown will last long enough to cascade into the collapse of all other sectors. And since grid restoration depends on the operation of many of those other sectors, they all go down – and can only come back – together.

This means success will require unprecedented coordination in the middle of unprecedented disruption and chaos.

A monumental challenge.

The Good News

Somewhat surprisingly, preparing for such catastrophic events is not a mystery. Nothing will make the threats and hazards disappear. But we know what it will take to shift Black Sky recovery from an impossible goal to a manageable challenge and what it will take to give our children a chance to write the next chapter in our civilization’s evolving history.

If the core vulnerability putting us at risk is interdependency, the solution to the dilemma is collaboration. Critical sectors can be restored if they work together in a staged process that gradually brings them back up if they have the unique tools they’ll need to make it all work. What are they?

The Five Critical Tools Needed to Solve the Black Sky Dilemma

1. Black Sky Communication

To recover from such a catastrophe, all the key players will need to work together, exchanging the plans, resources, and data needed to restart our infrastructures. Yet the normal communication services that tie everyone together won’t be available. A widely deployed, Black Sky hazards-protected, high-capability emergency comm system with unlimited scalability could interconnect all the key players without the grid and national telecom networks.

2. AI-Tech for Chaos Management

In a Black Sky event, with everything’s operation depending on everything else, the chaos will be beyond any human’s imagination. Yet an AI-enhanced “digital twin” of the disrupted, interconnected infrastructures could examine the consequences of different operator decisions, race through all options at computer speed, compare the results, and offer prioritized recommendations to each operator.

While not yet available, this approach can be implemented using current technology.

3. Emergency Power Upgrade

Emergency power systems today are available at nearly all critical facilities. Most will operate for hours, sometimes a few days. But in a Black Sky event, a complete shutdown for weeks would be optimistic. Long before that, the recovery will stall.

What can we do?

The Fukushima Insight

When Japan’s Fukushima reactors’ emergency generators failed in 2011’s 15-meter tsunami, the operators had limited time to power up sensors and reset critical valves to stabilize the reactors. As history records, they failed. What happened?

The only source of power was the full-scale emergency generators. And they were underwater.

Since Fukushima, some leading nuclear plants have added small, separate emergency power modules designed to operate just the highest priority devices for long durations. All critical facilities will need to do the same, adding a long-duration Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) module to their emergency power systems.

4. Black Sky-Class Blackstart

Once these three capabilities are in place, the remaining critical priority is ensuring grid restart can actually happen in extreme Black Sky scenarios. What is the concern?

Grid operators in developed countries have not yet had to implement their blackstart plans, and as a result, worries over their adequacy have grown in tandem with the growing complexity of power grids and their supply chains. What will it take to ensure blackstart plans will be adequate in a Black Sky event?

For a Black Sky scenario, blackstart plans and facilities will need to ensure the earliest possible restart for critical infrastructures that are essential for saving and sustaining lives. There will be no time to find and repair damage to blackstart systems; they will need dependable protection against the full set of Black Sky hazards. And with today’s accelerating evolution toward low carbon generation, they will need to operate securely in tomorrow’s restructured grid.

5. Whole-of-World, All-Sector Black Sky Training Exercises

Of course, to be effective, any Black Sky tool must be exercised and teams trained. And for an all-sector international crisis, the training and exercises must also be multi-sector and international.

One example is EARTH EX® the all-scale, all-sector Black Sky training exercise for private corporations, individuals, and governing bodies to build crisis readiness and develop awareness and responses.

Final Word

Our tech-powered society has changed at breathtaking speed. We have integrated the thin layers of infrastructure, products, and services that cover our world to give our civilization capabilities humankind could never before imagine. And, at the same time, creating an unprecedented challenge.

If we wish to sustain our new tech-powered world for ourselves, our children, and future generations, we will need to find the will to do what we can to secure that world.