[delfinom]

But solar flares that powerful are an actual serious threat, and have been recorded throughout history. It's just we have been so lucky to develop a heavy dependence on electricity in a quiet period.

The Carrington Event is the "most recent" in 1859 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

That would in the 2000s cause serious damage

>In June 2013, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the US used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the cost of a similar event in the present to the US alone at US$600 billion to $2.6 trillion (equivalent to $698 billion to $3.02 trillion in 2021[28]),[3] which, at the time, equated to roughly 3.6 to 15.5 per cent of annual GDP.

NOAA currently puts Carrington Events at a 1 in 500 year occurrence on Earth.