Epilogue Over the Horizon
It’s hard to make predictions—especially about the future.
Attributed to Yogi Berra
The year is 2012, the peak of solar maximum 24. Most citizens of the industrialized nations carry personal communicators, hybrid devices that serve as a cell phone with worldwide access, a pager, an instant messenger, and a Web browser with high-speed access to a satellite-based Internet. Any time of day, from anywhere on the planet, the modern citizen can check her bank account, talk to her son about his science fair project, order her groceries, and submit her plan for restructuring the sales division of her company. She is never out of touch because the personal communicator routes its signals through a string of geosynchronous satellites hovering around the world. She takes for granted the idea that she can work or chat with distant colleagues all the
time, whether on the beach, in the office, or on the front porch of Grandma’s 200-year-old farmhouse in the sticks.
Our twenty-first-century citizen knows that when her plane lands tonight—she is cruising on a supersonic jet from Beijing to New York along the polar route—her home will be coolly air conditioned, thanks to the solar panels on her rooftop. Her neighbor won’t be so lucky, as his muggy house is still tapped into the local power grid. Since no electric power plants have been built in the past 10 years, he must endure rolling blackouts at least once a week. Lightning storms and the occasional geomagnetic storms play havoc with an overloaded system.
Pulling up the day’s news on her communicator, our modern citizen notices that plans for the international Moon base are proceeding rapidly, with move in scheduled for 2017. But she also reads that NASA and the European Space Agency are struggling with the design of the spacecraft that will carry the first human crew to Mars, as major questions remain about the effects of longterm human exposure to radiation in space. In a small side article, she notes that NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has passed the heliopause, the outermost edge of our solar system. She opens her e-mail account to see an offer to participate in an initial public stock offering for a Russian space tourism company that is planning to launch an orbiting hotel for civilian passengers; they also plan to offer solar sailing cruises around the Moon. The proposed hotel will include private rooms for couples, with a three-day visit to low-Earth orbit costing about $500,000 per person. She saves the message, thinking about how she might surprise her husband for his birthday.
At about the time she summons the terrestrial weather report, the plane’s pilot pipes in over the intercom. As predicted by the Space Environment Center, the Sun has erupted with activity this afternoon. The flare is near the top of the scales of intensity. A solar particle storm should begin in about 10 to 15 minutes, so the plane will have to divert from its polar route. The disturbed ionosphere will not allow high-frequency radio communications and airlines require continuous contact with aircraft. And ever since
that big class-action lawsuit in 2009, the airlines have been scrupulous in avoiding any chance of exposing passengers and crew to unhealthy doses of radiation. The plane is diverted to Seattle, and the flight will now land at least four hours later than planned.
The coronal mass ejection (CME) that ripped off the Sun in conjunction with the flare is traveling at about 5 million miles per hour, with arrival expected in 19 or 20 hours—in the middle of the next workday on the East Coast of the United States. Forecasters are warning the power companies to brace for a wicked magnetic storm, which likely means that many cities along the East Coast will be forced to endure preventative rolling blackouts, disrupting commerce for the day. The NASDAQ has already declared a day off from stock trading tomorrow, as there is too much risk of garbled transactions now that all of the “buy” and “sell” orders are relayed by satellite. Other markets are beginning to follow suit.
About an hour later, the captain adds more bad news to our modern citizen’s day. He tells passengers that the solar particle event has temporarily crippled the radio communications system at the airport and that Global Positioning System signals are distorted, so air traffic controllers are having difficulty managing the flow of aircraft into a foggy airport in Seattle. Traffic is backing up, and they may have to divert the plane to Portland or Vancouver. It looks like our modern citizen will be spending another night on the road and will miss her daughter’s softball game tomorrow.
Our daydream for the year 2012 is part cautionary tale, part crystal-ball speculation—though not quite the wondrous leaps made by Jules Verne or Arthur C. Clarke. The way we use technology to work and play is evolving daily, and while the specifics of a device like a personal communicator are yet to be worked out, it is easy to speculate that we will be communicating in some unthinkable way just a decade from now. After all, just a decade ago the World Wide Web barely existed (at least from a public point of view) and cellular phones operated more like children’s walkie-talkies. Today, a Finn in Helsinki can buy a Coke
from a vending machine by dialing a number on his cell phone and the cost of the Coke appears on his phone bill.
Our scenario for 2012 is not such a stretch. Every one of the space and communications phenomena described in our future citizen’s life has already been discussed in laboratories or industry boardrooms. We know that many industries are interested in moving messages and data through a satellite-based infrastructure—that is, routing the information through radio beams to satellites rather than expensive wires on the ground. And in order to build that infrastructure in a cost-efficient way, satellite companies will have to make choices about the hardiness of their spacecraft. The current trend in the industry is to build and launch more satellites with less protection, to expect some catastrophic failures, and to replace the losses with other satellites in waiting. The next solar maximum will certainly put that business plan to the test.
As for electric power systems, all one needs to do is pick up a daily newspaper to see that a new energy crunch is developing in North America. With growing interest in environmental issues over the past three decades and the explosion of the suburban “not-in-my-backyard” mindset, very few new power plants have been built. The public and the power industry have been too afraid of nuclear accidents to build new fission plants, too concerned about clean air (or, conversely, corporate profits) to build new fossil fuelpowered plants, and too impatient to work out the cost issues for solar, geothermal, and wind power. Yet demand for electricity has increased exponentially, and the supply has remained stagnant. The existing electric power systems of the world are already being stressed by surging demand, and when the system is stressed, it is more vulnerable to equipment failures and blackouts due to terrestrial and space weather.
With the demise of the Soviet Union, the polar airline routes between North America and the booming economies of East Asia have become busy highways, cutting the flight time significantly. But these highways are vulnerable to space weather, and unexpected diversions to Tokyo and other landfalls are a fact of life. Those passengers who are inconvenienced today probably have no
idea that a warning from the Space Environment Center was the real reason for the diversion.
Space tourism may not boom in time for the twenty-fourth solar maximum, but the time is rapidly approaching when the everyday citizen might pay to venture into the realm of the astronauts. Dennis Tito opened the door by buying a trip on International Space Station Alpha in the spring of 2001. In Russia, emerging capitalism and a surplus of unused space expertise will surely lead to new space ventures. Even in the United States, the U.S.based Planetary Society and other partners had scheduled for 2001 the launch of the first solar sail, a technology that uses the pressure of sunlight—rather than rockets and liquid fuel—to push and accelerate spacecraft just as the wind pushes a sailboat across the sea. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies were also making plans for incorporating solar sails into future missions, perhaps for the next fleet of space weather monitoring craft. Solar system cruising is on the horizon.
In order to prepare for this future, NASA, NOAA, the European Space Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Air Force are queuing the next generation of spacecraft to study storms from the Sun. In an ambitious plan that has been percolating since 1999, NASA and its partners have been designing and proposing a program to both study and monitor the Sun-Earth system for practical purposes. They call the program “Living with a Star.” Instead of starting from purely scientific interests, scientists and engineers have been considering the utilitarian issues, the impacts and effects of space weather. Basic researchers are working with forecasters, military and commercial satellite specialists, and other industry and applied science groups to define the data sets and the spacecraft that can best improve our understanding of space weather.
Early plans call for five different types of spacecraft. One satellite will observe the Sun and its interior workings from much closer range than ever before (about one-third the distance from
the Earth to the Sun). A pair of “sentinels” will fly at two wide angles ahead and behind the Sun-Earth line, allowing scientists to see CMEs and other phenomena developing in three dimensions. A solar wind monitor—comparable to ACE—will fly on a solar sail. A pair of satellites will crisscross Earth’s radiation belts to study the development and movement of satellite-damaging particles. And a constellation of miniature satellites will swirl in low-Earth orbit, studying how space weather connects to the Earth’s ionosphere and atmosphere. Launches are expected to begin late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and mission managers hope to have the whole fleet in place to watch the twenty-fourth solar maximum, much as the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics program has allowed researchers to dissect the current solar maximum.
Computer simulations of unprecedented sophistication will complement these new data. Currently, several groups of physicists are working to produce simulations that will allow, for example, solar observations to predict the density, speed, and magnetic field inside a CME as it slams into the magnetosphere. By 2012, space weather will likely be more like current-day meteorology, with more spacecraft and ground stations available to monitor all the key parts of the system and end-to-end models of the flow of energy from the solar interior to the Earth’s surface. Space weather forecasting—assuming that governments continue to fund the satellites and observatories—should improve in its accuracy as scientists come to better know the conditions that provoke storms on the Sun and in the space around the Earth.
But many questions need to be answered before we can get truly comfortable living in the atmosphere of our nearest star. “Is a CME just a cute trick, or is it something the Sun has to do?” asks JoAnn Joselyn, a longtime scientist at the Space Environment Center. “And how do solar events evolve? Is there steady progress, or is it all a big burst?” Researchers also are perplexed by the day-to-day workings of the Sun, such as what makes the corona so much hotter than the visible surface and what accelerates the solar wind. Closer to Earth, space physicists wonder what parts of a
CME really affect the magnetosphere and how the magnetosphere and radiation belts can focus pedestrian plasmas and disorganized solar energy into raging, satellite-killing particles.
“In addition to understanding the relationship between flares, CMEs, and proton events—we still don’t really know what causes them, I think—we also need to understand what is causing the solar activity to vary on decadal and century timescales,” says Päl Brekke. “The key to these questions lies beneath the surface of the Sun.”
The biggest mysteries of all rest on the borders between solar physics and climatology and between space physics and medicine. The atmosphere of Earth is warming for reasons we have not yet been able to fully decipher. Human activity certainly plays some role in climate change, as do other processes of wind and water. But since the Sun is the primary driver of climate on Earth, doesn’t it stand to reason that solar variability must somehow affect the habitability of the planet? Only time and observation can tell us.
As for the biological aspect of space weather, we are forced to consider—as we become a space-faring race—whether we can survive out there. Science fiction conjures up all manner of dangerous aliens and starbursts and quirky, mind-bending ripples in space and time. But the more immediate danger comes from our own Sun. Humans and other earthly life forms evolved within the protective shell of the magnetosphere and the atmosphere, shielded from most of the harmful solar and cosmic radiation. As we prepare to venture beyond the life-preserving cocoon, we will quickly find out how much our life depends on the invisible magnetic force field around our planet. Perhaps we really do need shelter from the storms from the Sun.
