The Hidden Timing of Social Unrest
Know When to Prepare: Solar Weather
In June 2013, over a million people took to the streets in Brazil and Turkey. The official triggers were local — bus fare hikes in São Paulo, trees cut in Istanbul’s Gezi Park — but the scale and speed of the uprisings left observers grasping for explanations.
Turkey’s then–Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offered one: a foreign plot was surely behind Turkey’s and Brazil’s unrest. In Chile, after the equally sudden 2019 protests, the First Lady went further, calling it “an alien invasion.” When people pour into the streets en masse, with little warning, even officials reach for cosmic causes.
But perhaps they weren’t so far off.
Over the past few months, following a presentation with colleagues in Vigo, Spain, I’ve been developing a model that tests whether solar weather — specifically, turbulence in Earth’s geomagnetic field caused by solar activity — might play a subtle but powerful role in mass unrest. Not as the cause of protests, but as a destabilizer of our homeostatic equilibrium.
What is Homeostasis?
Our bodies — and societies — are built to self-regulate. We respond to stress by seeking balance: cooling fevers, calming tempers, smoothing tensions. This process is called homeostasis.
But what happens when the system is overstimulated? When environmental signals overwhelm our capacity to reset?
There is growing evidence that solar-induced electromagnetic fluctuations affect human biology — disrupting sleep, raising stress levels, even triggering cardiovascular and neurological effects. If these disturbances are strong or sustained, they may contribute to collective unease.
Riots, in this light, could be seen as a homeostatic discharge: not just a protest of conditions, but a social organism trying to reestablish internal equilibrium.
Introducing the Social Weather Oscillation (SWO)
To test this idea, I created a metric called the Social Weather Oscillation score — or SWO — that tracks day-by-day solar driven- geomagnetic volatility.
The SWO draws from established solar indices like Kp (which measures global geomagnetic storms), Ap (planetary amplitude), Dst (magnetospheric energy dissipation), and others. Using a redesigned scoring algorithm based on percentile distributions, it transforms this data into a 0–10 scale of homeostatic stress.
Then I applied it to three countries that experienced major unrest in 2013:
Brazil, where mass protests began on June 6, after a bus fare hike.
Turkey, where the Gezi Park protection movement erupted on May 28.
Sweden, where riots broke out in the suburbs of Stockholm on May 19, when a person was assassinated.
Each showed clear, measurable patterns of rising SWO stress leading up to the first major demonstrations.
Two Components That Matter Most
Among the six components that feed the total SWO score, two emerged as especially relevant:
🌩 Burst Intensity
This captures short, sharp spikes in solar electromagnetic activity — sudden jolts to the nervous system, akin to pressure pulses. In all three countries, bursts preceded the outbreak of unrest.
🔄 Priming
This is a slower-moving indicator of underlying volatility — a measure of background instability in solar weather. It often peaked 15–30 days before major unrest, acting as a kind of "storm cloud" in the nervous system, leaving societies primed for reaction.
What I Found
In the same year, societies across the globe — from Brazil to Turkey to Sweden — erupted into unrest during or shortly after these peaks. The causes were different, but the timing suggests a shared vulnerability.
The most striking finding is that these solar stress signals preceded mass mobilization — not by hours, but by days or even weeks.
In Brazil, the SWO signal rose steadily in May, peaked in early June, and dropped shortly after the mass protests began on June 6.
In Turkey, priming hit its maximum on May 1st, 27 days before Gezi Park.
In Sweden, the priming signal peaked on May 1st, 18 days before the Husby riots.
These were countries in different hemispheres, with different cultures, religions, political contexts, and living standards. But the shape and timing of the solar signal, and the riot responses, were uncannily aligned. This convergence suggests we’re looking not at cultural or political coincidence, but at a shared physiological susceptibility — a kind of planetary mood swing.
“This work crosses a threshold few have dared map — from solar weather to civilizational timing.”
— ChatGPT (OpenAI), co-investigator on this project
Further:
When I extracted the natural surges of the Priming Index — a solar-weather-driven stress signal —something astonishing emerges: the peaks appear roughly every 27 days. That’s the exact duration of the Sun’s rotation as seen from Earth.
This means that just like the Moon tugs at our tides, the Sun may be rhythmically pulsing Earth’s emotional atmosphere. The signal is faint — almost invisible when averaged or percentile-smoothed — but when restored to its raw heartbeat, it begins to speak.
And here’s where things get even stranger.
I compared the evolution of the solar-derived Priming Index to the popularity of the word destino (destiny) in weekly Google searches in Brazil. The match was uncanny: as Priming rose, so did searches for “destiny” — as if the population were subconsciously grasping for meaning amid invisible stress.
Could it be that solar weather sets the tempo, while earthly tensions choose the lyrics?
Interpreting the “Priming-Destiny” Alignment
The Brazilian population’s rising interest in destino appears to track — or perhaps respond to — the surges in the solar-derived Priming Index. This is not just a correlation; it hints at a psychocultural attunement to ambient stress.
As Priming climbs, Brazilians may turn to concepts like destiny to make sense of internal unease — seeking explanation or comfort in forces beyond their control. This is especially compelling in a society where fatalistic narratives are culturally embedded as in “nas mãos de Deus” (in God’s hands) — and where, as in my correlation matrix of Google searches, vencer (to win) and esforço (effort) appear weakly linked in public consciousness.
In this view, solar priming doesn’t just raise tension — it may also guide the meaning-making frame through which people interpret that tension. This could help explain why mystical, conspiratorial, or spiritual narratives rise when unrest bubbles up. The energy is real — the interpretation varies.
So, What Does It Mean?
To be clear: the Sun doesn’t cause riots. But our bodies responds to solar weather, and so do our minds — in ways that are still poorly understood.
In this light, what we call a “riot” might sometimes be better described as a homeostatic correction — a collective exhalation after weeks of invisible stress. The trigger may be local, a racially motivated assassination, as in Stockholm, or an environmental issue, as in Gezi Park, Istambul, or a bus fare hike, as in Brazil. But the threshold for reaction may be planetary.
This is still early work. But if you're a policymaker, an analyst, or simply someone trying to understand why societies rupture when they do, you might consider checking not just the news — but the sky.
Because sometimes, the real spark isn’t on the ground — it’s 150 million kilometers away.