Scared about the solar storm

The "dark rift" isn't an actual object. If you look up into the night sky on a clear summer night, somewhere far from the city lights, and allow your eyes to adapt to the darkness, you'll see the Milky Way extending before you. Across it, you will see a dark blotch, obscuring the coreward regions. The "milk" is stars, the "dark rift" is where they are obscured by interstellar dust clouds between us and the core of the Milky Way. These clouds are a more perfect vacuum than we can replicate artificially on Earth. There is no evidence that we are actually passing through one, and even if we were to, you would never notice.

>> Everyone was saying that if a solar storm did occur, it would take out power grids and transformers which could take up to 5 years to repair.

No, not everyone, just a few scientific illiterates on the internet. Again, we have experienced many solar storms this year. Yeah, they can mess with the power grid at times, but there's a simple expedient to prevent damage if an extreme scale solar storm is coming: turn it off. Heck. Many power grids have the equipment to do that themselves. That's what caused the big Quebec outage of 1989. A CME induced a geomagnetic current in a line leading to the James Bay hydroelectric facility, and safety equipment read it as a short circuit, shutting down the line.

So, yeah. The big reason you're scared is where you STOPPED reading.