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UniversalMomentum t1_j1u9tai wrote

Reply to comment by crazytumblweed999 in What do you see happening over the next 300 years to a millennia? In what way will it be different to how it is today? by Serious_Final_989

Why did you pick 1022 instead of a date more like 300 years from now?

I don't think a Carrington Event actually has enough energy to do that much damage. You'd probably need many magnitudes greater energy to really bring down most industry and even then a lot of it would not be effected much because it's not sensitive electronics.

Volcanism is probably the most commonly reoccurring major global disaster beside just good old fashion climate change over time. I don't think disease or nuclear war will change the outcomes all that much really. Most people would still live in almost any of those kinds of scenarios and that means progress would probably just keep going.

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crazytumblweed999 t1_j1ubnkx wrote

I picked 1022 as it was 1000 years ago in order to show the vast difference in how our world looks now as opposed to that point in order to show that speculation on a thousand years in the future is futile. To adress your point, consider the world 300 years ago in 1722. The US doesn't exist as an independent nation, the modern nation state of Germany doesn't exist except as a loose coalition of states under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire, the middle east is almost entirely under the control of the Ottoman Empire and the Mugal Indian Empire is one of the most advanced nations on the planet, dwarfing and dunking on their one day colonial dominators the British Empire. Consider the massive differences between then and now, then try to consider how little of the modern world would have been predictable from the 1722 perspective.

The Carrington Effect's damages were minimal then because the world didn't rely on electricity and electrical signals in the 1800s as much as it does now. Such a solar flare would cripple most electrical devices on the planet, start massive electrical fires in wiring systems and crash virtually all man made satellites. Stop and look around yourself right now and tell me how you plan to survive the next week without electricity of any kind. How much cash do you have in your pocket, assuming you could even find someone who would take it? Do you have a well or do you exist on metropolitan water/sewer? I think you'd find that a lack of electricity would be quite a detriment to your life for as long as it would take to fix and replace damaged systems.

There is a really good YouTube essayist named Lemmnio who does a good video about potential end of humanity scenarios. I highly recommend it, should that be your kind of entertainment. I definable agree that a volcanic winter would be a difficult to predict disaster, but nuclear war would achieve much the same thing. As we've seen from Covid 19 even a relatively mild (by comparison to the plague or the 1918 flu pandemic) pandemic still causes massive problems, all of which effect prediction of future events.

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