Dennis Quaid warns that a solar storm like the 1859 Carrington Event—with a 100% probability of occurrence—could collapse America’s power grid, killing 90% of the population within months as infrastructure fails. Despite $100B protection plans stalled by utility lobbying, solutions like substation relays exist but lack urgency. Human-made EMP threats from adversaries like Iran or North Korea further escalate risks, while China and Russia outpace U.S. grid hardening. Quaid urges a Manhattan Project-style mobilization before catastrophe strikes, framing it as a survival imperative overshadowed by political division. [Automatically generated summary]
Dennis Quaid is one of the most famous actors in the world.
He's been in about 150 movies spanning almost 50 years, and he is at the same time a really interesting and engaged person with a lot to say who thinks a lot and thinks freely.
He's also an accomplished musician.
But he has a project coming up that you probably ought to know about.
We thought it was definitely worth telling you about, and so we're grateful that Dennis Quaid is joining us on set right now.
It's called Grid Down Power Up, and it's about an issue which concerned me really for quite some time.
They did a segment on 60 Minutes about this, but basically there is a 100% probability that our son Generating what they call a GMD, which is a solar storm that hits our Earth and the magnetic field that we have around the Earth and can fry everything that is electric above the ground, including our entire grid.
They call it a Carrington event, which happened in, I think it was 1859. And at that time, basically, we had telegraph lines as far as electricity goes.
And it fried our entire telegraph system that was set up.
And so imagine what that would do now with a very large storm, which there's a 100% chance of it happening.
That was a 100-year event, they called that one.
I'm not good at math, but 1859. The trillions of dollars that it would take to replace all that, plus we wouldn't even get to spend those trillions of dollars because it would take out not only the electricity, but all of our entire infrastructure and our society runs our electricity.
We don't know how to live without it.
There wouldn't be any water in your tap.
You couldn't get gas for your car because the whole system is broken down.
Everything that we rely upon would be gone.
The food would melt in our refrigerators.
There would be, and they predict within a year, about 90% of the population would be dead from starvation, disease, or, you know, people, it gets back to the stone age again.
This is the sun that we rely upon every day in these solar storms that happen.
And they happen with frequency.
You've seen, everybody's seen, you know, pictures of the sun where, you know, the storm is happening and these flares come out and they're ejected out into the solar system.
And we just, you know, like in packets.
And we, I think it was 2014, we barely missed one by five days that went across our path of orbit around the sun.
And it's going to happen.
And then, you know, once it hits the Earth, there's a 50% probability of it either being us or the eastern hemisphere.
Yes, there are simple things that we could actually do.
That could be built in that would, you know, not only for the military, which we'll get to, but civilian infrastructure to protect it, that relatively inexpensive compared to what it would cost if an event like this happened.
And overall, over time, it'd probably be about $100 billion, about the same that we just gave to Ukraine.
You know, to protect them from the Russians.
And it would be money spent.
Plus, also, in the process of doing this, it's like a space program.
You find out all kinds of other things that actually help society and advance us in our technology.
But it basically relays...
Protective relays that could be put at our substations and transformers that in an event like this happens, kind of similar to kind of a surge protector that you have in your computer.
That sense that there's a surge like that and cut it off to protect it frying our transformers.
I grew up at the height of the Cold War where we had duck and cover.
I lived in Houston, which was within that circle during the Cuban Missile Crisis of getting hit and probably would have been hit by the bomb.
And it's scarier today than it was then.
At least we had mutual annihilation and we had deterrence based on that.
That we wouldn't pull the trigger because your adversary was going to destroy you, too.
And today, that club has grown to where it's not only Russia, the United States, it's North Korea, that everybody knows, Pakistan, India, Iran, which they...
I believe they already have the nuke.
They just don't have the delivery system for it that could reach the United States.
And if they don't have one, they're going to have one within six months to a year.
And it's really...
We've been approaching it.
Well, they don't have the delivery system.
They don't have the ICBMs that can deliver that all the way to the United States.
They definitely could hit Israel, though, who they're committed to destroying.
But they also have their terror organizations.
And it's gotten to the point now where it's getting so condensed.
You know, these suitcase dirty bombs, whatever they are, you could definitely rig one of those up and hook it to a Scud missile, put it on a cargo ship just off the United States coast, send it up to a certain altitude, explode it, and what they call a super EMP, which is electromagnetic pulse, which is the same thing as a geothermal event with the sun.
If you send up a missile, a nuclear bomb on it, it exploded at 400 kilometers above the Earth in space, basically.
You won't see it.
You won't see the explosion because it's in a vacuum of space.
You won't hear it.
No people will be killed.
But the gamma rays, which are thrown out...
From that, would encompass most of the United States and take out this very same grid, which could cause a power outage all across the United States up to months, even a year.
And we'd have the same scenario that we described before.
So, I mean, you hate even to game it out, but, like, if that happened, if huge parts of the United States had no power for a year, I mean, that would be an extinction event for a lot of people.
Yeah, just one, what they call a super EMP, and that has to do with the altitude where it is exploded, you know, from the center of that covers...
Certain area whereas if you were lower down you would only be able to cover that much area because it spreads out in a circle So and just fries everything so why I mean I know there are a lot of things to worry about yeah a lot of things are failing at once obviously but This seems like you might want to move it toward the top of the list of things to worry.
Yeah, I would I would think so I really would think so but it's And indeed the You know, the Russians and the Chinese have done so much more to harden and to protect their infrastructure than we have.
And so it gets down to that whole thing about survivability, you know, being able to survive an attack and to attack someone and then being able to survive when they retaliate.
And they've got that going for them.
Make somebody like, you know, Iran, who, it's a fraction of what their military budget is, and they know they can't defeat the United States, but, I mean, even a simple terror group, if you get their hands on a Scud missile and a nuclear device, you can really do some damage.
And I don't know why that our government has not been informing us more about this.
Back during the Cold War, when I was a kid, I was, you know, in the fourth grade, we kids were informed about what could happen, what to do if something happened.
It would be easier to live in the country, of course.
And people who live in the country, you know, Would probably have better ideas, better knowledge of how to survive after an event like this.
But it's a scary proposition.
I mean, there needs to be education and there needs to be something done about it.
And done about it pretty quick.
I mean, these protective relays that could be installed in the Transformers, starting with that.
I mean, we have the technology.
We know how to do this.
It's not something mysterious that we have to get involved in.
What we do need is something like a Manhattan Project that we had back during World War II, where the Germans, we knew that the Germans were trying to develop a bomb, and so we got there quicker.
And somebody to cut through all the bureaucratic red tape and be vested with the authority to...
Yes, you would think that, but that's not the way it works.
Obama sent this to Congress to get it done, and then it gets caught in FERC and NERC because they're controlled by...
The lobbies of the energy lobbies, they'd have to spend money, which they don't necessarily want to do, because it costs a lot.
Yes, it would cost a lot.
I think the government should help in this.
And there's so many of them, too, scattered across the United States.
They're locally owned, most of the energy companies.
There's an energy company in South Carolina that is really doing something about it.
And there have been some cases where, you know, we've had energy companies that are making moves to protect the grid, but that's only one little part of the grid.
You know, when it comes down to it, they depend on the one next door to them and the one next door to them.
And he called me up because he created this movie, Grid Down, Power Up.
That's the name of it.
Asked me if I wanted to be involved, and I'd seen that 60 Minutes episode about the geothermal event happening like that.
And I just said yes, because I remember it really frightened me when I saw it.
And I, like everybody else, had just gone on and forgotten it, because we have so many threats that are right in front of us that this gets pushed to the background.
And it's always the one you don't see, you know, that gets you.
It gives us feet of clay, basically.
You know, we may be the big, bad, great, greatest nation on Earth, the United States, but in some ways, all of this technology, this highly industrial complex that we've built has feet of clay because of...
Because it was, when I grew up in Houston, I wanted, you know, John Glenn went up.
I was in the second grade that rolled the TV and everybody that replaced wanting to be a cowboy, everybody wanted to be an astronaut back then.
And so I grew up wanting to be and then along came the book and I read it like in two days and wanted to play Gordo Cooper because he was my favorite astronaut back then.
He was the youngest one.
He was like the rock and roll astronaut.
And then I couldn't believe it.
I got the part.
And then it turned out Gordo Cooper lived three miles from me in L.A. No way!
So I called him up, and we became good friends.
And he turned me on to a flight school, and I learned to fly.
I got my pilot's license from that.
And still flying.
Fly jets now, in fact.
But it was like the ultimate boyhood fantasy, that role.
And it took nine months to do it.
Chuck Yeager, legendary Chuck Yeager, was on the set every day.
So you were saying off camera that when you started, I think your first movie that you were in or around was 1975. How long did it take to make a movie then?
It was at least three months to make a movie back then.
Because of the cameras, you know, you shoot one side of a scene, then you've got to, what they call, turn around and shoot the other person going the other way and seeing the background the other way.
And the lights and the cameras that we had at the time meant that it was at least, you know, a two to four hour turnaround.
So you just sit in your trailer and wait for that to happen.
But if you're on, if you're taking, you know, months out of your life to go to a location far from your home and you're in this, like, biosphere with the other actors, I mean, that's like its own world, right?
It's supposedly kind of owned by Norway, but it's also...
The same place where we had our listening post, observation post during the Cold War, if the ICBMs were coming over from Russia because they'd come over.
And then two miles from where we had ours, the Russians had theirs.
So now in my act, when I get up to playing this song, I call his wife, Lisa, and...
And we all leave a message where the entire audience says, hello, Chris.
It's good.
But I found that myself, it's about me as well, because when you get to after a certain age, after 60, people start giving you undue respect for things.
My autobiography is going to be called My Lucky Life because I've really gotten a chance to do so many kinds of things that I never would have thought I could have done.
And at this point, you know, my movie career, which has been so fantastic and so fulfilling, really, I enjoy it so much more now, making movies, because I'm not trying to get anywhere.
And so how do we get to that place where we can have that transition of power?
Like we did not so long ago where at least people could tolerate it without having to, you know, basically have a coup in one way or another, a military coup.
We really are, I'm afraid of us becoming like a banana republic like that.
They're scarier than the word 68. I mean, Kennedy...
Bobby Kennedy was shot.
Martin Luther King was shot.
All the riots, you know, cities were burning.
We knew who the leaders were back then.
Now it's just this kind of underground, simmering rage on both sides.
I, you know, setting aside who's right, who's wrong, or whatever, I just think we need to find ways to unite.
And America's always found a way to unite.
I mean, things, back when they were forming the Constitution, you know, there was a guy, there was...
Who was it that came?
The other senator, in fact, in the chambers.
It got really bitter.
It was always about to fall apart.
It's fragile.
And Reagan is right.
Our democracy can be lost in a generation.
It only takes a generation to lose it.
I think we need to educate our kids what a great country this is, and that we're, in spite of our way we don't agree, that we agree that we're Americans.
And so, God bless us, and, you know, I just like to see cooler heads prevail.