The Carrington event is my "go-to" argument for "humanity is pathologically short-sighted", even if individuals are not.

It is a statistical certainty that we'll be hit by another flare again - we observe them all the time, but all of them in the modern age have simply missed us.

We know from observations of the last flare what it will do to modern networks - they will all simply fail and some literally catch fire.

Most electrical engineers must have heard about the Carrington event and it should be that all of them have. Each of them should be designing for their system to soft-fail (i.e. not catch on fire) on such an event, and yet none of them do.

The issue is hierarchies and capitalism. If you go to your boss and say, "We need to spend 20% more on this project to protect us from an event which hasn't happened in 150 years, but if it happened again, would take out civilization," you'd be laughed out of the room.