Solar storms don't harm people directly — they induce electric currents in long metal, meaning the power lines, pipelines and undersea internet cables we've strung across the planet are exactly what they attack

On the night of March 13, 1989, a coronal mass ejection that had left the Sun two days earlier slammed into Earth’s magnetic field, and the entire Hydro-Québec grid collapsed, leaving six million people in the dark on a…