Actually if we were thrown back to, say, the 1970s or 1980s, I'd consider that a pretty cool thing to happen.

No RFID passports, no biometric surveillance, no drones. Oh, and no gene-manipulated food either, yay.

No buggers with cell phones ringing in the theater and in concert. No FUCKING cell phones!

And no Facebook, Twitter, and all that crap!

Also I could wear bell-bottoms, grow long curly hair, have a mustache and wear a gold necklace and look cool doing so.

There is some type of facility, a tower of some sort, that if that was either hacked or damaged, it would cause the whole internet to go down. I heard of it on a report. Let me see if I can find it.

A solar flare could hit the Earth tomorrow and return modern society to the dark ages.

Is it possible? Sure. Is it worth worrying about? Not so much.

There is always a way for the world to end. Somehow it keeps on ticking...

Carrington event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

"Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies"

"Aurorae were seen around the world, those in the northern hemisphere even as far south as the Caribbean; those over the Rocky Mountains were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning."

. a lot of dangerous situation had to be dealt with (shutting down and containing all the nuclear plants until the control systems could be brought back up,

Fukushima went out of nuclear reaction becouse of cooling system colapse after electric shorting beacouse of tsunami injected water.

We may aplause ourself that humanity will survive, but after masive damage to ecosystem it may just go off as well.