Jul 26, 2014 11:38 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

If a particularly violent solar storm had hit the Earth in the summer of July 2012, civilization would have more than likely been sent back hundreds of years.

According to the Guardian, a multi-institutional team of scientists published a study describing one of the largest Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) on record traveling at a blistering pace of 3,000km per second. Earth would have powerless against it and the storm would have disabled any and all electronics.

Daniel Baker, of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, contributed to the study, published in the Dec. 2013 edition of Space Weather.

"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," Baker said in a recent press release. "I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did. If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire."

In a more recent issue of Space Weather, Feb. 2014, Pete Riley, a physicist at Predictive Science Inc., published a study pegging the probability of another serious CME hitting Earth within the next 10 years at 12 percent.

"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," Riley said in the release. "It is a sobering figure."

The July 2012 storm would have disable cell phones, GPS systems and really anything that relied on electricity. Since many urban water supplies rely on electricity, many people would not have been able to get running water, the Guardian reported.

The storm would have caused about $2 trillion dollars in damage, NASA calculated, which would have been about 20 times that of Hurricane Katrina.

Reuters reported the storm missed because the CME site was pointed away from Earth at the time of the eruption. That same site was dead set on Earth one week earlier.

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