Welcome back to our special coverage of the extreme solar storm now crossing North America with the strongest forecast to hit the Earth since 2003. So let's break it down with Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, welcome in. It's good to have you with us. Hey, Bill. A lot of folks here.

It's great to be here.

Yeah. A lot of folks, myself included. It wasn't until the recent total eclipse that I really tried to understand space weather. A lot of folks don't think about. Every day is sunny in space. There's no thunderstorms. But explain what is happening and the significance of what we're experiencing at this moment.

Well, we might think of the sun as a solid object or a disk ask, but it's spinning. About every month, the north and southern parts of the sun, what humans call the north and south parts of the sun, spin a little faster than the middle. This friction and this interaction with all the gasses that make up the outer layers of the sun create these crazy, strong magnetic fields. From time to time, these charged particles get tossed into space. We have both these solar flares where these zaps of electromagnetic energy, photons that you can see in the X-ray region, very high frequency, and these charged particles, both come shooting out away from the surface of the sun. If the orbit of the Earth is in the place where those things are shooting, we get zapped, if I may. Of course, who could forget the Carrington event in 1859, where this thing went on for a week, and it just ruined a lot of telegraph systems, which was the state of the art at that time. The deal is, everybody, the key thing that we have going on here on Earth, which is really good for us living things is this magnetic field.

Inside the Earth is this churning, mountain iron and nickel, and it creates this magnetic field that enables your compass to work, what have you. And so this is what causes the charged particles to come down at the North and South Pole, down toward the middle of the Earth. And it's the speed of those particles passing through the atmosphere that creates the aurora, the aurora and Aurora, Australis. And so it's fantastic. And you guys have been talking about it, and I'm out West here, and when it gets dark, I'm going to be looking, I'm going to be watching where you have clear skies tonight. But the other thing, everybody, that is a real danger to our technological Society, is different from 1859, is how much we depend on electricity and our electronics and so on. It was a pretty straightforward bunch of things that went wrong in Texas back in February of 2021, where the power went out and it affected an enormous number of people. Well, we probably have systems in place to manage this interaction of these charged particles with Earth's magnetic field, but stuff might go wrong the way it did back in 2003 in South Africa, for example.

And this is another thing where we need to evaluate our electrical grid and prepare for this deal because the sun doesn't take a meeting about when it's going to produce one of these things. Yeah.

I mean, do you think that as we are becoming... I mean, it seems to me we're just becoming much more reliant on these things, devices and whatnot. Everything is electric. This is not the days of the telegraph. I mean, do you think we are becoming more susceptible to the effects of a really powerful solar storm, or are becoming more resilient? Where are we in that right now?

The answer is absolutely without question. It depends. It depends on the strength of the event, and it depends how much infrastructure How much of our infrastructure we have prepared this thing. You probably heard somebody remind each other that the safest place to be in a lightning storm is in a car because the metal of the car makes the energy from the lightning go around the passengers inside. And then it's on rubber tires. It's not irrelevant effect. But we don't have infrastructure on all of our transformers. I say this because on a competitive network, I did a TV show, The End is Ni, where we did six world-ending scenarios. The one that really worries me is this very one. This one, episode number three, where we get these coronal mass ejections, CMEs, back to back. If you had really big ones, like he was talking about a third story G5, well, except in space, there's no sound. It would just be These things, if they happen 12 hours apart, hypothetically, you could turn off the electricity in the whole world, which would be catastrophic. None of us, really, in the The developed world could go very long without electricity.

They're survivalists and so on. But just objectively, if nothing else, the refrigeration goes bad and we spoil enormous amounts of food. But all this is all solvable, you guys. And medication. This is all something we understand. But it's the Earth's magnetic field interacting with the charged particles.

But worth worrying about, Bill, even though chances are rare. One study looked back. In addition to the Carrington event, there was another big one in 1921 that started fires in telegraph stations because the electricity was so powerful. They did a study that said if that happened now, given our grid, it would cause a $1-$2 trillion in damage, could take 4-10 years to come back from 160 million Americans could be affected. The geology of the East Coast actually makes it more conducive to these sorts of things. We're thinking about for contingencies not to worry about, I suppose, tonight, but this is as close as we'll get.

Well, You know, we say, Bill, Abby, everything happens for a reason. And that reason, anyone, is usually physics. So we do understand this well enough. We can prepare for this. My personal hero, Michael Faraday coined the noun, electromagneticism. He understood that it's a moving magnetic field that creates electricity. Electricity creates a magnetic field. This wonderful interaction. So we can prepare for this. And you guys, thank you, have been celebrating the beauty of it. These particles will come into the atmosphere and zap up electrons on molecules. And as they fall down, they'll release light photons, and it will be lovely. And those of you who have kept your eclipse glasses, and I hope you have, look at the sun tomorrow. You can see here where I am in about 34 degrees latitude in California, you can see the sunspot right about what you might call 3:30 on the disk of the sun, the position about the three or four o'clock position of the sun. And it's exciting. And so everybody, let's celebrate this. Humankind understands it all. How cool.

Bill Nye, thank you so much for always infecting us with some wonder. We appreciate it. Happy Solar Storm watching.Thank you.Thanks, Phil.

Happy Solar Storm.