Science Quote by Kanya Kusano

That opening, “I do,” lands like a small correction with big implications: someone has asked whether worry is warranted, and a physicist is refusing the comfort of shrugging. Kusano isn’t selling panic; she’s asserting permission to take a low-probability, high-consequence threat seriously. The phrase “extreme event” is doing careful work. It’s technical enough to avoid tabloid disaster-talk, but ominous enough to remind you this isn’t about pretty auroras. It signals the kind of solar storm that can knock out satellites, degrade GPS, fry transformers, and ripple through everything that pretends to be “the cloud” but still depends on very physical hardware.

Her pivot to “We want to protect our society” is the real tell. This is risk communication as civic argument: space weather is framed not as an exotic astrophysics problem but as infrastructure policy. The pronoun “we” recruits the listener into responsibility, subtly pushing the issue out of the lab and into government planning, utility investment, and emergency management. It’s also a hedge against the stereotype of the aloof scientist; Kusano places herself inside the social contract.

“Space-weather disaster” is a deliberately jarring compound. It collapses the distance between outer space and ordinary life, implying that modern society has built a brittle dependency on invisible systems. The intent is to make preparedness feel rational rather than paranoid: the stakes aren’t astronomical, they’re political and practical.