While you didn't see it, feel it, or even read about it in the newspapers, Earth was almost knocked back to the Stone Age on July 23, 2012. It wasn't some crazed dictator with his finger on the thermonuclear button or a giant asteroid that came close to wiping out civilization as we know it, though -- no, what nearly ended us was a massive solar storm. 'If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,' says Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive solar storm.