Solar Storm could've knocked modern civilization back to the 18th century
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
http://news.yahoo.com/earth-survived-near-miss-2012-solar-storm-nasa-222404357.html
...the most powerful in 150 years
Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century," NASA said.
...the most powerful in 150 years
The National Academy of Sciences has said the economic impact of a storm like the one in 1859 could cost the modern economy more than two trillion dollars and cause damage that might take years to repair.
Comments
Here I am trying to figure out what this means and it seems either too catastrophic to prevent and we just have to accept suffering the consequences or there is something to be learned by telling the world that it almost happened, but I don't see that message included.
Part of living well is taking care of business. Another part is recognizing there are some things that are impossible to prevent and we shouldn't stop living because disasters are possible.
Maybe we would end up with superpowers, like the Fantastic Four.
Humans have to stay here and argue, not realize where we really stand in the universe.
What?! After you.
Planet Earth may not seem like the safest place some times but so far we know of no other such safe place for humans to be in the universe. The if we did happen to some how discover such a place it's almost certainly lethal to try and get there.
Meanwhile, if we are worried about a few solar sparks taking out our technological infrastructure that is something we could try and protect better.
After all, if we cannot handle that we are not going to fare well in those far of galaxies and planetary systems.
“Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?”
http://www.scybolt.com/homework/canticle.html
I suppose we could appreciate what we have now and be sure we don't lose what's left of the knowledge of how to survive without all of the modern technology.
How many people know how to fabricate/manufacture mechanical tools, etc the way it was done before we became so dependent on computers and automation?
I'd have to say about 3 billion and still growing. There are a lot of Asians that do quite nicely without technology, and do better with it.
North Americans and Europeans are just the most likely to struggle.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/392.full
I might be inclined to agree with them.
By the way, there is no going back to the 18th century. All the easy to harvest resources we exploited then have since been depleted. Coal, oil, iron, etc etc. If you don't have the technology to reach "the hard stuff" then it's stone age for you.
-Phil
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/
"...According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair..."
"...In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley ...published a paper in Space Weather entitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years. ... The answer: 12%...."
I like my DIY How-To books on paper. They're cheap these days as so many libraries are ditching their paper books for digital. Fools!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
Check out the "Carrington Event" of 1859. Wikipedia is a good starting point as ever.
"Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies."
If this kind of thing can take disrupt pre-electronics era communications then the delicate transistors driving the of internet today have no chance.
Get back to tubes with heaters, that what I say:)
I think when loads of charged particles coming from the sun hit the earth's magnetic field, they swirl around, create huge conductive plasmas that act like huge antennae high above the earth (Auroras! Awesome!). All those charges surging around are like on-going EMPs which can induce huge currents into power lines. If the lines don't have some sort of protection, these induced currents can overload the transformers and blow them up good.
Real good.
THE SKY ALMOST FELL!
THE SKY ALMOST FELL!
Sheesh.
"sheesh" not a word used much in English so I had to look it up.
sheesh - exclamation - used to express disbelief or exasperation.
So which is it? You don't believe there is perhaps a problem? You are exasperated because we don't understand something that you do?
True, the sky did not fall.
Like building your house next to a volcano, or living in a hurricane area, these volcanoes do erupt, hurricanes do happen, people get hurt and die.
Are you suggesting we should not think about taking some precautions?
And the sky didn't almost fall. It did fall, it just missed.
I was wondering about this long lines thing.
Seems possible that if such an event happened things like satellites might not even notice. They don't have huge inductive loops. They are not grounded.
http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf
Sure, conceptually it's easy to disconnect the grids and ground the lines, etc. But how do you do it if you haven't installed any switches to make that happen? How do you disconnect for real and on what level of notice? And how do you handle the millions of people in the cities who will be living without power for hours or days until the storm subsides? In a hurricane, you evacuate a city or two, open up a bunch of shelters away from the coastline. In a solar storm, how do you care for the population of an entire megapolis... or ten?
Global BSOD!
How? It is difficult to say. If you were a devout Mormon, you would already have a 2 year supply of food in your home and alternatives to depending on an ATM and supermarkets.
If you expect FEMA to do it all, you might be quite disappointed.
I don't actually recommend becoming a Mormon, but being aware of your own preparedness is certainly a step in the right direction. And I do admire that the Church of Latter Day Saints assures families that they have reserves even in lesser events, such a super-hurricane, an ice storm, a flood, or a long-term layoff from work.
BTW, I do refuse to have an ATM card and prefer to deal in cash with paper bookkeeping records. And I keep a few candles around for whenever a typhoon brings down Taiwan's power. Improvements have been made. Fiber optic communications are not going to get hit by solar storms. And underground electrical distribution is less susceptible to solar radiation as well.
As far as Lloyds is concerned... they want to raise insurance premiums and reduce payouts... always have. ( I am deeply concerned that the insurance industry is trying to drive national policy more and more as they have gone from about 2.5% of USA's GNP in the 1960s to something like 7.5% of GNP today.)
No switches? Have you ever looked at all the fuses in a power line distribution network? They are there to contain damage... lots of them... at least one at every transformer.
I would not ask you to do anything that I am not prepared to do.(which does not mean much, If I was a loon or a lemming!)
As the latest posts, we can not "hide" on earth forever; resources are limited. population is growing. 90% of the
large fishes are extinct.(commercial) WHEN our sun goes Nova, we are going to be crispy critters.
It is not looking good for the home team.
Procedure;
make a plan to LEAVE!
1> build an economic engine that will sustain the space faring culture. 32 trillion dollars a year is a good start.
(Too hard, skipped that, working on my second 32 trillion!)
2> Make a starship habitat underground. Get the culture used to training, building, maintaining, and living in that
enviroment. It will be a shock. Those that can not take the real "starfleet" training, leave the program. It will be
tough, no doubt.
3> Robotic teraforming and habitat building. Send robots to the Moon, Mars, etc, to start building the habitats
for the culture. CO2 can be "cracked" on Mars to produce O2. (CO2 pushed across a hot Zirconium crystal,not dilithuim crystal!)
( for robots, Parallax Products, of course!)
4> build the "star ships" and begin the journey!.
Will have to develop "force fields". Check out Dr. Podlenktov's work on Tensor beam, very interesting!(I may have spelled his name wrong)
Alternative energy sources, like Hydrogen and Tensor beam power generator.
All you gotta do is.................
Strategy is the heart of survival and the soul of success.
Humans are a messy lot.
-Tommy
No doubt, we have to build the infrastructure on earth to start. If we do not start, we are definitely finished.
The sky almost fell. Sooner or later it will fall. Will our worrying about it delay that eventual fall by one picosecond?
You do not have to build your house on a volcano or where hurricanes happen. Even if you build it in a cave the cave opening will still be under the sky though.
My only thought is sheesh.
-Phil
Waiting for FEMA, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, or the UN to step in will never be as good as taking care of yourself and moving to an area with a normal infrastructure for an interim period ASAP..
transformers, etc, and move them into place in advance - in other words add slack to the system - something private
energy companies are never going to do without legal compulsion, so people in the know are simply campaigning / lobbying
to get more awareness of the issue in government. Some of the estimates say it would take ~9 months or such to manufacture
replacement hardware as things stand, enough time for severe political unrest to develop.
Yes satellites will be taken out too, there is a possibility of GPS suffering outage too, so having replacement satellites stockpiled
is also a wise precaution.
Incidentally there would be the benefit of auroras bright enough to read by, visible at nearly all lattitudes, so people would be
tolerant of a week or two's disruption I reckon, but months would be dangerous.
I suspect early warning will mitigate most of the risk, but stockpiling transformers etc is still a wise policy, its not as if the
basic design will change anytime soon, and the electrical infrastructure is only likely to grow anyway (charging Elon Musks
cars and so forth!)