Despite what many headlines have been saying, there is no web apocalypse on the horizon.
Worries about such a months-long catastrophe began brewing on social media platforms not long after a 2021 study titled “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Web Apocalypse” suggested that a significant solar storm could severely damage web cables — specifically those under the ocean that connect continents and help power the worldwide web. (The study was presented at a knowledge communication conference in 2021 but has yet to seem in a peer-reviewed journal.)
Last week, misinformation that builds on fictitious warnings from NASA breathed recent life into those “web apocalypse” concerns, that are once more flourishing online. They include unfounded claims about an impending solar storm that may trigger global web outage inside the following decade, and the way NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which was launched in 2018 to check the sun and its weather from up close, can save the web “from death by solar storm.”
Listed here are three debunked falsehoods which have gone viral on social media channels comparable to YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
Related: Solar flares: What are they and the way do they affect Earth?
NASA hasn’t issued any warnings about a web apocalypse
The present panic is fueled by a non-existent NASA alert about an imminent “web apocalypse.”
Most falsehoods consult with an article published by the space agency in March about its efforts to predict solar storms using artificial intelligence. In that article or elsewhere on its website, NASA has not used the expression “web apocalypse.” As a substitute, it stems from the identical 2021 study, whose sole writer, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, recently told The Washington Post that she regretted using the phrase and that her paper “just got an excessive amount of attention.”
The net fears are also amplified by peer-reviewed research from earlier this yr that showed the sun may arrive at the height of its current activity in 2024, a yr ahead of previously predicted. While scientists do, in truth, expect major solar storms to occur after solar activity reaches its peak, there isn’t a evidence to support the viral rumors that the following major solar storm will cause the web to go offline.
The consequences of major solar storms on electric grids and communication systems are well documented, so it’s “good to be wary and perform continuous monitoring and evaluation of the sun-Earth system and the heliospheric system,” Vishal Upendran, who’s a research associate on the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California, told Space.com. Nevertheless, “more studies are needed to make any strong statements regarding the strength of solar storms,” he added.
Scientists have not predicted a deadly solar storm in July 2025
Despite a myriad of claims about how the sun could kill the planet, there aren’t any science-backed predictions that a deadly solar storm will occur in 2025.
Forecasting the severity of harm that solar storms could cause on Earth is complicated, in accordance with Upendran. For instance, because the sun nears its peak of magnetic activity, structures on its surface turn out to be increasingly complicated, making them difficult to include into models.
Furthermore, the solar flares shed by the sun are 3-D structures that interact with Earth’s magnetic field system, which can be a 3-D structure, in ways in which are usually not fully understood and thus tough to model.
“These are complex systems, and it will be improper to make a powerful statement on the occurrence of any superstorms,” Upendran told Space.com. He and his team have developed an artificial intelligence model that uses satellite data about solar wind to generate forecasts of solar storms as much as half-hour before they occur. “The most important strength of our model is that it will possibly provide forecasts inside seconds, and provides results every minute with a time horizon of half-hour,” he said.
The team hopes their model will provide sufficient advance warning for satellite operators, power grid managers and telecommunication firms to take their systems offline temporarily or to maneuver satellites to safer orbits to cut back damage, if possible.
Such predictions may very well be useful throughout the increased solar activity, which official predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimate will occur in July 2025. That is when the sun’s magnetic activity that provides rise to sunspots and solar flares will reach its peak strength, but there aren’t any official estimates of the damages solar storms might cause when that point comes.
The Parker Solar Probe just isn’t a distraction for ‘The Great Reset’
Misinformation has also been circulating that NASA is using its Parker Solar Probe mission to save lots of the web as a façade to support The Great Reset, which began as a worldwide policy initiative by the World Economic Forum to assist the economy get better from the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been woven into countless conspiracy theories.
“This implies we are usually not capable of connect with one another, we are usually not capable of call one another, we are usually not capable of go on the web and far more,” an individual in a viral Facebook video said, in accordance with a fact-checking service called PolitiFact.com. “But this also implies that they’ll execute the Great Reset in silence without anyone knowing it.”
The video was flagged by Facebook for fake news and has since been removed.