(Natural News) The Met Office in the United Kingdom is warning that massive solar storms that occur on an average of about once every 100 years are coming and that, without adequate warning, they could wipe out most technology on earth, hurling much of the world back to the 18th century.

The country's national weather service says Britain could be "crippled by huge electrical disturbances caused by storms in space unless a satellite network is built that can detect them coming," The Sunday Times reported last week.

Naturally, the U.K. would not be the only country affected. Such massive solar storms would also wreak havoc on technology the world over, having the greatest negative impact on the most technologically advanced countries.

"We find that for a one-in-100-year event, with no space weather forecasting capability, the gross domestic product loss to the United Kingdom could be as high as £15.9bn (about $20.4 billion)," The Met Office study said. "With existing satellites nearing the end of their life, forecasting capability will decrease in coming years, so if no further investment takes place, critical infrastructure will become more vulnerable to space weather."

According to NASA, the U.S. space agency utilizes its entire network of "Heliophysics missions" to study space weather, in part for the purposes of detecting and/or predicting solar storms. NASA also partners with additional U.S. agencies "to fulfill the space weather research or operational objectives of the nation," the agency says on its website. Primarily, this is accomplished through an existing fleet of satellites mostly belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency said.