"But if the storm is powerful enough to destroy actual chips and systems it would be very very difficult to recover." That's not out of the bounds of possibili

"But if the storm is powerful enough to destroy actual chips and systems it would be very very difficult to recover." That's not out of the bounds of possibility, during the solar storm of 1859, aka the Carrington event, there were multiple reports of electric sparks coming from telegraph line and terminal equipment and of Morse code operators receiving electric shocks from their keys, etc. Clearly, modern RFI/EMR shielding would protect much of the susceptible solid-electronics but I'd suggest that with such a high level of induced energy there nevertheless would be huge and widespread destruction of poorly protected/shielded equipment, especially so domestic electronics (which would fall into that category). Moreover, it's likely that most satellites would fail or be severely damaged. I'm somewhat surprised that I've not yet seen any authoritative modeling of the effect that a solar storm the size of the Carrington event would have on the world's electrical and electronic systems (if anyone knows of any references I'd be grateful if they'd post them here). Perhaps the reason is that if any do exist then they would likely be classified under national security. I suppose that's sort of obvious, isn't it?