The Earth is hit with solar fits all the time, and just how many have sent you screaming to the bomb shelter? Probably zero. In fact, you may have actively sought them out; auroras are an Instagram-ready photo op. Courtesy of your run-of-the-mill coronal mass ejection, there are many of them.

Thanks to Earth’s iron-nickel core, our planet generates a powerful magnetic “force field,” the magnetosphere, which shields most of what the Sun usually dishes out, like solar wind. Far weaker than a CME, solar wind is still a mish-mash of particles constantly released from the corona of our sun. When it strikes Earth’s magnetosphere, the bulk of it glances off like water flowing around a stone. Deadly to humans, solar wind does have benefits; according to the University of Chicago, solar wind acts like a bulwark against cosmic rays, high-energy particles from outside the solar system traveling at near light-speed that rip DNA to pieces.

But Earth does not deflect all solar particles. Some get caught in the magnetosphere itself, riding magnetic lines to the planet’s poles and crashing into the upper atmosphere. As described by HowStuffWorks, these particles transfer their energy to oxygen and nitrogen molecules which then light up, forming an aurora.

Things, however, got a little metal during the Carrington Event.

So how could a burp from a star 93 million miles away fry telegraph wires and give operators electric shocks when the Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere act as shields? The shortest answer is that the Carrington Event was just that big, just that powerful, and just that well-aimed.

Earth was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got the full brunt of what History.com calls “the perfect solar storm.” While the magnetosphere and atmosphere did indeed fend off the deadlier solar radiation of the Carrington Event, so many particles funneled to the poles that the planet gained an electrical charge. Systems already using electricity “absorbed” that charge and experienced a massive power overload. Wires melted, telegraphs fried (igniting the paper), and anyone near either would have got a nasty shock. In fact, there was so much ambient auroral current that telegraph operators who had turned off their batteries continued operating as normal. In essence, electrical technology ran off power flowing in the air.

This phenomenon can happen sometimes — electric transmission lines can “bleed” so much power into the immediate area that fluorescent bulbs will light up on their own without being connected to a power source. This is a handy trick to show local power authorities that their lines might need repair.

In practical terms, the “Electric Age” began in 1880, with Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent lightbulb. In 1859, electric power was still very much newfangled and restricted largely to telegraph systems. Society is far more reliant on electricity and electronics now.

Speaking with CNET in 2018, Francis O’Sullivan, director of research for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative, briefly describes what a CME-related meltdown of the power grid would do in practical terms today:”An event of that scale could be catastrophic if it happened tomorrow. It’s not just the lights going off. It’s bank accounts disappearing. It’s utterly central to everything, including national defense.”

A 2013 joint study conducted by Lloyds of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. estimates that a Carrington Event today would inflict a whopping $2.6 trillion in damages to the United States alone — and that’s on the low end. ScienceAlert warns of a $20 trillion blow. Other economies would suffer equally, or be wiped out altogether.

The internet would cease to be. Phones would be down, so people could not call fire departments to attend to the electrical fires, and the electronics of the fire engines may have critically shorted out. Control of the army of satellites in orbit would be lost. Computers, supply chains, stock exchanges, and nuclear power stations would all crash.

It’s estimated that a Carrington-type CME hits Earth every 150 years, and 1859 was 162 years ago. While a tech-destroying CME is an unlikely event, it only takes one to black out the planet and force us back to using manual typewriters. NASA and other space agencies have a fleet of satellites constantly observing the Sun for solar flares and coronal mass ejections to give us a watchcry to the worst. Here are our warning systems:

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DISCOVR) would be the first to confirm an imminent CME strike on Earth. Even so, it will only provide an advanced warning of 15 minutes to an hour.

Launched in 2010, NASA heralds the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) as “our unblinking eye on the Sun.” Its primary mission is to observe space weather.

A collaboration between the Europeans and American space agencies, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is our literal deep-dive into the Sun. It studies the Sun from corona to core.

A duet of satellites, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) specifically observes the flow of energy et al emanating from the Sun to Earth.

Another joint venture between Europe and the United States, the Solar Orbiter (SolO) studies how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere, the “bubble” reaching far beyond the planets created by solar wind.

What doomed Mars to lifelessness is neither its size nor distance from the Sun, but its lack of a magnetosphere. On Earth, this magnetic field, generated by convection in the planet’s solid iron-nickel core, safely deflects solar and cosmic particle radiation that otherwise damages or even kills living cells, as well as protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by those same forces (via NASA). Earth has the strongest magnetosphere of the inner planets.

Using seismological data from the InSight lander on the Martian surface, scientists found that while Mars has an unexpectedly large core, it is most likely “polluted” with elements such as sulphur that keep it in a liquid state. According to ScienceX, the lack of a solid core means Mars never had a planet-wide magnetosphere. And that means from day one, Mars faced the full wrath of the Sun.

The constant stream of charged particles from the Sun in the form of solar wind would have slowly eroded the early Martian atmosphere away like a river; a coronal mass ejection would crank that “river” into Niagara Falls and rip whole chunks off. NASA surmises the Sun was far more active in its youth, battering the planets with CMEs far more frequently.