Hello! This is a message from the future, and it turned out that we were lucky — this time.

I've known about the Carrington event all my life, and for decades assumed that we as a society were prepared for another one. But it turns out that in the business world, preparing for expected but rare events is not a way to advance in your career.

Taleb’s “The Black Swan" explains this very clearly, and yet somehow the business world completely reversed they understood the meaning of this and interpret it as saying, "you can ignore Black Swan events,” much to Taleb’s annoyance.

One day we will get hit square on by a G5 solar storm, and most of the world’s microprocessors will cease to function forever.

Whether this is a catastrophe or just a disaster depends on whether our society has already collapsed due to the climate crisis. If we are already in a post-technological world, then such a solar storm would take out some significant portion of the remaining microprocessors, but the remains of humanity would no longer be depending on them so much.

(The difference between a disaster and a catastrophe is that you might be able to recover from a disaster.)