When we say relax, we mean you can relax for now. We can (and have) had far more intense storms than July’s. An extreme storm can short out “telecom satellites, radio communications, and power grids”. In short, a chaotic and costly disaster on a global scale.

When this may happen, we don’t know. The best the world can do is prepare for it. For the average person on the street, our main option is to make an emergency kit and stress out about it. And from data we collected using Consumer Research, the number of people doing the latter is on the rise.

The online solar storm conversation unsurprisingly peaks when there are solar storms. The biggest spike is from a solar storm that hit Earth on 2021’s Halloween weekend. The extra spooky timing clearly got people talking.

The second highest was when a storm took out some high-profile devices. This one hit in February 2021 and took out 40 SpaceX satellites that had been launched only the week before. Sorry, Elon.

But what’s more notable is the general rise in the conversation size since 2021. Outside of the spikes, more and more users are talking about solar flares and geomagnetic storms. Maybe it’s simply due to a few storms occurring close together, but what if it’s part of something bigger?

Talking space

We decided to investigate. We turned to the r/space, a subreddit dedicated to all facets of the cosmos. Here’s how many users post there every month.

We’ll return to the huge spike this month but first, let’s look at poster activity over time. Ignoring July this year, the number of posting users peaked in April 2019 after a steady rise across the three years prior. Activity then wobbled and began to decline until late 2020. We’re not surprised as we were all a bit distracted that year.

Levels moderately rebounded into 2021, in no small thanks to the successful landing of the Perseverance Mars rover in February of that year. Overall activity rose until 2022 when things stabilised.

What’s the cause of this recovery, though? There is no end to the topics discussed on this subreddit, but there are some that recur a lot. While “space” and “time” are the largest topics, other big players are more homegrown.

NASA, SpaceX, Elon Musk, Blue Origin, and Jeff Bezos are all huge drivers of conversations. While their spacefaring activities play their part, their relationships are also important. In particular, fallings out and legal proceedings involving the three organisations had many people talking. People are there for the science and the drama.

While NASA was more mentioned than SpaceX on the r/space subreddit, if we look further afield, SpaceX pips NASA to the post when it comes to their subreddits. At least until recently.

Considering SpaceX is just 20 years old compared to NASA’s 64, the former has built a reputation to rival the latter. From being the new and innovative kind of the block to a CEO skilled at generating headlines, we shouldn’t be surprised. When it comes to Reddit communities, for a long time, SpaceX had cultivated a far healthier one.

That looks to be changing, though. Since 2021, the number of users posting to r/SpaceX has been falling, while NASA’s numbers have remained steady. In 2022 they’re practically neck and neck, with early signs NASA is set to take the crown.

But why? Maybe our solar flare data can give us a hint.

The technology, the drama, and the cars shot into space by SpaceX, and similar companies, are all well and good. There’s no denying it’s been exciting and impressive. But what if people are moving on and becoming more interested in our place in the universe instead?

This could explain why solar flares are sparking more conversation than usual. The magnetic storms they cause expose us, showing that for all our technological advances, we’re more at the mercy of freak solar activity than we ever have been. The Romans certainly had no need to worry about them.

Meanwhile, climate change increasingly wreaks havoc worldwide as we struggle to take the action needed to curtail it. It’s quite the existential predicament that has us pondering just how fragile and small our green and blue planet is.

But as pessimistic as this sounds, is this realisation more positive than it seems?

A blue marble in an endless sea of marbles

In 1972 the Apollo 17 crew took a photo of Earth. The shot became known as The Blue Marble and is one of the most reproduced images in history.

A stunning image, it also came at a special time, which imbued it with a special meaning for many, as explained in this Genome Biology article by Gregory A Petsko.

Depressingly, the context all sounds very familiar. Nevertheless, Petsko argues the picture had a positive effect. It shows that the Earth is alone but that we are not. Instead, it highlights a shared bond between humanity: we all share this rock, and we better look after it.

With environmental concerns more severe than ever and the threat of events like solar flares playing on our minds more than usual, could a new, awe-inspiring image help to focus our energies in a positive way and bring us all closer together?

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Webb’s First Deep Field, the first operational image taken by the JWST.

This photograph is “the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken.” It includes thousands of individual galaxies and yet covers only a tiny portion of the night sky. Each speck of light contains millions of stars, some over 13 billion years old.

It’s a staggering demonstration of the immensity of our universe, the reality of which is hard to fathom or conceptualise. But this relatively simple image goes a long way in doing so. The longer you stare at it, its magnitude becomes more apparent.

There’s also the Cosmic Cliffs of Carina Nebula (pretty sure that’s the name of a 70s prog album), which is not only a breathtaking image but reveals previously hidden galaxies.

The magnificence of these, and other images, was not lost on the internet. The JWST and its results quickly went viral.

Since then, JWST has been mentioned by 356k users online, with thousands still talking about it each day. This also caused the spike in r/space activity we mentioned earlier. Of course, we can’t ignore the memes either.

The huge reaction tallies with what we’ve said already. People’s interest in space, and our place in it, looks to be growing. The JWST images have come at the right time and proved that.

Just like The Blue Marble, they have shown how small, fragile, and alone our planet is. But while one image looks outwards and the other inwards, they have the same effect. They reinforce that what we have is all we have, and that’s Spaceship Earth and our fellow passengers.

The question now is, how long can we keep the voyage going?

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The Brandwatch Bulletin team