Avi Loeb

By the way, that's around the time when humans appeared on Earth.

So we published in Nature a paper showing that this passing star could have triggered basically the enhanced rate of

of comets raining down on Earth and changing the climate on Earth, we don't tend to think that we are affected by our environment.

This is true on short timescales, but every now and then there is some catastrophic event that could be triggered by our cosmic neighborhood.

By the way, the sun itself, about 150 years ago, had an eruption that...

If it happened today, there would be a loss of electronic technological equipment, including all the satellites around there.

Wow.

At the level of probably a trillion dollars or so.

Jeez.

In the 19th century, there wasn't much technology that could be destroyed by a huge solar flare.

It's called the Carrington event.

And so it could happen anytime.

We are not protecting our infrastructure against that, against giant solar flares like the Carrington event.

Such a thing should happen once every few hundred years, you know, and it could happen anytime.

We just...

Once it happens, of course, then we will start protecting our technologies against it.

But our technologies are less than a century old, you know, modern science and technology.

I mean, quantum mechanics was discovered just a century ago.

So during that short period of time,

we didn't have any giant catastrophe on Earth.