What if a Carrington-class solar storm knocks out grids and satellites?
A Carrington-class storm is a pure tail-risk vol event: VIX spikes and high-beta (Nasdaq, crypto majors) is sold first, with grid/satellite operators and insurers the idiosyncratic losers. No clean modern market analogue exists; the nearest behavioral rhyme is the reflexive VIX spike of the June-2025 Israel-Iran strike, where vol popped then mean-reverted within days. Forward angle: the real, under-priced leg is physical-infrastructure damage (transformers, LEO satellite constellations) that a one-day vol move won't capture — a multi-week disruption, not a flash scare.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the Tail risk horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A Carrington-class solar storm disrupts satellites, grids and communications. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.