What happens if the power goes out for 30 days? Not one evening. A whole month. Your phone loses signal long before its battery dies, the card machine says “declined”, and the penthouse runs out of water first.
Pick your door before you watch: PHONE, MONEY or RUN? 👇
I switched off a modern town of 1,000 creatures after a solar storm and followed every one of them, day by day, to day 30. Who stayed okay, who struggled and who had to be rescued? And what was behind the locked fourth door? Every number on screen comes from the experiment or a published source; the rules and sources are below.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Tuesday, 7:20 PM
02:27 Hour 6: the money stops
03:49 Night 1: nobody knows
04:59 Days 1-3: everything breaks
07:17 Day 5: the town figures it out
08:13 Week 2: Jackpot
09:38 The Street Feed
10:43 Day 30
11:57 What if?
12:54 The fourth door
THE RULES
• 1,000 creatures, a modern town, grid down for 30 days after a solar storm. Doors: PHONE, MONEY or RUN. Outcomes: okay, struggling or rescued; nobody dies.
• Hour 0: lifts, traffic lights and cards stop; mobile data dies ~hour 2, calls ~hour 4 (Iberia 2025).
• Only cash works; older people carry ~3x the cash of 18–24s (Fed 2025). Shops sell out on day one.
• Floors above 5 lose water when roof pumps stop (NYC 2003). Fridge ~4 h, full freezer ~48 h (FDA).
• From day 3, aid points open, announced only by radio and word of mouth between neighbours.
• Generator fumes cause rescues in the first two days (CDC); solar without a battery switches off (DOE); cars escape only with enough fuel.
• “Twenty fresh starts” = 20 runs with different random seeds. What-ifs change one rule: 72-hour tower batteries, Coinsworth on floor 2, everyone with cash + radio + neighbours.
SOURCES
• ENTSO-E, 28 April 2025 Iberian Blackout reports (2025–26)
• ESpanix, Iberia blackout and its recovery, RIPE 90 (2025)
• Banco de España, Financial Stability Review 49 (2025), blackout and payments
• Federal Reserve, 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice
• AP, 30 Apr 2025 (Barcelona squares); The Local Spain, 30 Apr 2025 (radios); FreshPlaza, Apr 2025 (Portugal shelves)
• US–Canada Task Force (2004), Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout
• GAO-19-296 (2019), Puerto Rico grid recovery
• FDA, Food and Water Safety During Power Outages
• CDC MMWR 58(31) (2009), CO exposures after Hurricane Ike
• US DOE, Solar and Resilience Basics
• Florida Statutes §526.143 (fuel stations and backup power)
• NIAC (draft, 2024), Critical Shortage of Power Transformers
• NOAA SWPC (10 May 2024), G5 Conditions Observed
• NASA (2014), Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012
• Lloyd’s & AER (2013), Solar storm risk to the North American electric grid
• CPUC Decision D.20-07-011 (2020), backup power for wireless sites in high fire-threat districts
• Quarantelli (2001), The Sociology of Panic
• Klinenberg (2002), Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
• Gallup (2023), teens and social media
• Castelo et al. (2025). PNAS Nexus 4:pgaf017. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017
• Wright et al. (2013). Curr. Biol. 23:1554. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.039
• Falchi et al. (2016). Sci. Adv. 2:e1600377. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600377
CREDITS
• Voices: Built with Higgs Audio 2 (Boson AI). Narrator voice based on a speaker from the CSTR VCTK Corpus (University of Edinburgh, CC BY 4.0); character voices based on public-domain LibriVox recordings.
• Music: YouTube Audio Library. Adventure Theme, Mysterious Carnival, The Throne Room, On The Case, Melancholy Lake, Flowers In The Rain, Everything Is Fine, Missing Pieces, Party Waltz (Sir Cubworth); Thomas Jefferson March (United States Marine Band); Tiptoe (Nat Keefe); Sneaky Business, Nutty Comedy (Biz Baz Studio); Cat Circus (Doug Maxwell); Kazoom (Quincas Moreira); Bop Walker (Freedom Trail Studio); Sprightly Pursuit (Cooper Cannell); The Curious Kitten, Gaiety in the Golden Age (Aaron Kenny); Blue Ribbons (TrackTribe)
• Sound effects: Freesound (CC0), Mixkit, Kenney (CC0), Sonniss #GameAudioGDC
Next time, we’re leaving this town behind. Way behind. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.
#blackout #poweroutage #science
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