Aside from covid of course…
My prediction is a texas-style grid failure but with a wider scale. Where I live, the electrical infrastructure is crumbling and there were a number of 1-2 day long outages this year which is new. Also a generally very poor area so little resources or motivation to fix or reinforce anything.
People in this thread are worried about the electrical grid. Somebody in another thread mentioned the Carrington Event. This sort of an end of civilization event isn’t exactly likely to happen. But for fun here’s some stuff from the page that I edited down…
The Carrington Event was a powerful geomagnetic storm in September 1859. A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere and induced the largest geomagnetic storm on record. The storm created strong auroral displays and caused serious damage to telegraph systems. A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid.
[…]
In June 2013, [it was estimated that] the cost of a similar event in the present to the U.S. alone at US$0.6–2.6 trillion, which at the time equated to roughly 3.6% to 15.5% of annual GDP.
I really don’t understand why this scenario wasn’t made into a major Hollywood disaster movie a long time ago. It’s super filmic.
Fuck the GDP cost, there is no fucking way in hell society ever recovers from the universe deciding to flip the switch on the electrical grid to off.
