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The Underappreciated Risks of Severe Space Weather
circletimessquare notes a New Scientist piece calling attention to a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, which attempts to raise awareness of the dangers of severe solar electromagnetic storms. "In 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington noticed 'two patches of intensely bright and white light' near some sunspots. At the same time, Victorian era magnetometers went off the charts, stunning auroras were being viewed at the equator, and telegraph networks were disrupted — sparks flew from terminals and ignited telegraph paper on fire. It became known as the Carrington event, and the National Academy of Sciences worries about the impact of another such event today and the lack of awareness among officials. It would induce un-designed-for voltages in all high-voltage, long-distance power lines, and destroy transformers, as Quebec learned in 1989. Without electricity, water would stop flowing from the tap, gasoline would stop being pumped, and health care would cease after the emergency generators gave up the ghost after 72 hours. Replacing all of the transformers would take months, if not years. The paradox would be that underdeveloped countries would fare better than developed ones. Our only warning system is a satellite called the Advanced Composition Explorer, in solar orbit between the Sun and the Earth. It is 11 years old and past its planned lifespan. It might give us as much as 15 minutes of warning, and transformers might be able to be disconnected in time. But currently no country has such a contingency plan."
Space weather and asteroids. Don't forget the asteroids.
...Surely there is a single word that could replace "un-designed-for"?...
Surely you should be glad it isn't "mis-undesigned-for", knowing /. editors.
Still on well? check
Grow much of my own vegetables and fruits? check
Have a bow (and arrows)? check
Sounds like another good reason for those who can to take a serious look at getting off the grid, or at least being able to disconnect from the grid and mostly sustain their own needs on the homefront. Kinda funny that wacky survivalists might have the last laugh in an event like this.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Like many others here, I don't prescribe to these doomsday scenarios that get rolled onto center stage every so often.
I remember when the northeast US had a power outage that lasted a few days just a few years back. It was no where near as dramatic or dire as this summary suggests the situation could be. I still had water and gas in Ohio.
Overclockers
There you go!
"It became known as the Carrington event, and the National Academy of Sciences worries about the impact of another such event today and the lack of awareness among officials." Hogwash! Disingenuous shirking of responsibilities! 'officials', which seems to refer to polititians, are not scientists. It is not their job to scan the heavens for signs of danger: they can scarcely do that job here on earth! It is the SCIENTISTS who endure the burden here ... If officials dont know, it can only be because scientists have not told them!!!
Wake up!
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
I live in the countryside. Well, more the suburbs now. Since time immemorial people in rural areas have had to deal with power cuts and blackouts, sometimes lasting days.
Amazingly, the vast majority survived.
Candles, flashlamps, tinned food and a fireplace get you through most of the time. Bedtime usually comes earlier. Yes you can't play video games or listen to your mp3s, but there are book, or at worst other people with which you can occupy your time.
As much as the thought of millions of pampered city dwellers wailing helplessly in the darkness might amuse me, I can not imagine that their lives are so different to country people as to make survival a difficult prospect. Yes, it could take days for the power to come back. But people will make it. Business will make it. Society and civilization as we know it, will probably make it.
Yes. I know that sci-fi-esque stories using words like "electromagnetic", "storm" and "disaster" might worry those with active imaginations. I know that newspapers love to print them next to their ad pages. Someday, someone might even make a Hollywood movie about just such a tale, and then people will really start talking about it. But people must always try to remember that just because someone says something, that doesn't mean they are correct.
May the Maths Be with you!
If any sun within our "galactic cluster" were to go nova a full 52% of the earth surface would receive a lethal dose of microwave radiation, killing any human (and any larger animal) that isn't protected by at least a layer of solid metal.
But don't think the survivors would be that lucky. This event would also create an athmospheric storm so huge it would blow large sections of the athmosphere into space, maybe as much as 20-30% of the total. Air pressure at the surface would drop to about 600 for at least several months if not years. The lowest level humans can survive is well above 700. Even 900 is certainly not fun at all.
The scary thing ? A sun going nova in our galactic cluster "should" occur about once every 20.000 years. Clearly we've been lucky now for 170.000 years at least. Ironically just about the only thing that would survive populated for a few months would be the international space station, if it were located in the shadow of the earth during the blast.
So, basically, we're screwed, there's no hope, the sun is going to put us into a post-apocalyptic stone age.
Well, glad that's over with.
That's just flat out wrong.
ACE might have a better ground network (let's face it, it's easier to talk to as it's at L1), but STEREO-Behind can see areas of the sun that aren't visible from any other solar-observing mission. It's also remote sensing (ie, telescopes), so it doesn't have to wait until it gets hit by an event. (at which point, we're looking at the last 1M miles of a 93M mile trip)
There's also instruments that have proven space-weather benefits on SOHO, but that's even older than ACE. I'm not going to say that ACE isn't the most important satellite in NOAA's eyes for predicting space weather (and some of their space weather folks have even mentioned that they might have to put up a similar satellite when ACE finally fails), but saying it's the only warning system discounts all of the other solar-observing missions used for space weather forecasting.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Seriously? The one place where you could use "irony" correctly, and you choose "paradox"?
Now, let's hunt down Carrington's descendants so that this never happens again!
Scientists also say this is the worst one in decades.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
The risk might not be as great in the near future as described. For one, solar flares large enough to do such damage are rare. Also in now appears that the sun is entering a more quiet phase, the next solar cycle that should have started by now hasn't, and the predictions for max sun spot numbers for the next cycle have been done graded several times. Short wave radio reception will probably not be as good as it was in the past 20 years. The Canadian flare incident happened during one of the more active solar periods, perhaps the last one for next century.
http://xkcd.com/509/
How is space weather relevant, given that there's completely nothing you can do about it? It's not like putting tape on your windows will help keep your electrical grid from frying.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
As a cyborg (literally, if technically) I have to wonder what such a solar electrical storm would do to implanted electronic medical devices, such as my pacemaker. Any knowledgeable insights? If this shuts down, I'm history in seconds.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Everyone should know how to build a basic cooking fire. Everyone should have at least one solar panel. Everyone should have spare water. Everyone should be able to kill & gut a fish, gopher, (or neighborhood dog if necessary). It seems like everyone today looks toward the government for help during emergencies when they should be relying on family and community.
If a big earthquake hits or a big solar flare lands... the government isn't going to get help to you for at least TWO WEEKS.
Don't worry, I'm sure some concerned slashdotter with terrible karma will step up to the plate and flame kdawson for this blunder!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Last time a major TEOTWAWKI event was looming (Y2K), I described the threat to my father in great detail. His response: [shrug] "I'll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book." True enough, my folks' lives are pervaded by self-sufficiency, including extensive wood heat, well water and homegrown food. Society shuts down, they just spend a few minutes adjusting and carry on.
But ... you wouldn't guess that at a glance. They have elegantly integrated the survivalist mindset with modern conveniences, enjoying everything technology has to offer without worries of what to do if the grid shuts down indefinitely. Everything has a low-tech backup, preparations for self-sufficiency are ongoing and already in use.
You can live a "survivalist" lifestyle, and still be fully "wired". The two ways of life are not diametrically opposed.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I really expect more from these guys.
That the power grid in this country would become a set of large antennas during a "carrington event" is an interesting problem. Inducted current would be tremendous. There would be fires, almost certainly, and blown transformers. Fusable links might help with the transformer issue, but I'm sure that some significant amount of transformer capability would be taken offline. Power stations would likely be immune from meltdown, but I don't know if standard trips would keep them all whole. Let's say that some 50% of the generating capacity (very generous), and 70% of the transformers (possibly low), were taken out by this event. A significant inconvenience, to be sure. Nothing that we, as individuals -- and as a society, could not handle. To assume, like the authors of this article, that the most powerful country in the world would simply roll-over is preposterous.
To propose, seriously, that "Modern Healthcare" would end in 72 hours when the emergency generators ran out of fuel -- this is ridiculous. The article's premise that modern civilization in our country would be thrown back to "third world" conditions is also completely without merit. Not to belittle the situation -- it would, in a word, suck. That said, we would rise to the occasion, I am sure of it.
Let's just, for a moment, reflect on how deep the fuel infrastructure is in this country. A power grid is not required for fuel distribution, though some level of power is required. Pumps that pump diesel can be run by generators, many refineries are capable of using their own product to generate power, and distribution of fuel to Hospitals and the like is a standard emergency procedure. Trains, tanker trucks, and ships continue to run. The transportation infrastructure would remain largely intact beyond the boundaries of very large metropolitan areas. The roads would continue to roll, and with it, teams of people working to fix the problem.
First, the plants, then the substations, then the cities and transmission lines. Would it be hard? Of course it would be hard. But we would continue to make it work, to adapt and overcome, and in the process make it better.
Bullshit, FUD and fearmongering...
In a case of a large scale power-system breakdown you don't go and try to bring it all back up all at once.
And you sure as hell don't sit on your ass crying, mourning the end of civilization and your X-box points.
Instead, teams of experienced technicians (you know... all those people with the various degrees in electrical engineering) start fixing the grid so that they can have parts of it running as soon as possible.
1 transformer, 2 transformers, 3 transformers, 4...
You lack the parts? Pillage the dead transformers. There is a PRETTY good chance you can take 2 or 3 dead ones and have 1 working in under 24 hours.
Fix the ones that CAN be fixed, leave the completely messed up ones for later replacement.
Don't have enough power to power the entire town cause the nation-wide system is down? DON'T.
Give one half of town 12 hours of power and then turn them off for the next 12 hours while the other half gets their 12 hours. Or 8. Or 6.
Hell... During the war (I'm from Bosnia) people used to steal cooling oil from the transformers (you can run chainsaws for cutting wood, and even cars on that stuff), artillery shells would explode next to them drilling them up with shrapnel, even the local power-plant got hit couple of times so bad that technicians had to take it off line to patch the pipes in the cooling towers.
Let me tell you... you get used to 4 hours of electricity per day (or less) VERY fast.
You leave the lights on to wake you up when it comes on.
Charge the batteries, cook, wash clothes, heat up the boiler and then go about your business waiting for better times.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Check out spaceweather.com. It has been around for some time, and has some excellent aurora galleries. Besides summarized ACE data, this website also features the techie-cool far side views of the sun from SOHO, computed using helioseismic holography. For the truly worried, they offer for-fee email solar-flare alert services, which also come in handy if you just want to know when to go out to look for auroras. Anyway, most of the site is non-subscription, and it's worth a look.
This is the time of a solar minimum, then the sun is quieter that ever. Literally, it has the lowest recorded activity, ever.
At the same time, I see these articles warning of a nationally nightly connected power grid. At the same time, Gore is arguing for a national highly connected power grid. What I take from that is Gore should not be the one deciding how we structure our power grid. He's plunge the entire nation into blackness for weeks, rather than just a portion of it. With global consequences far exceeding anything global warming can dish out in the next 200 years...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
the problem with a powerful moving magnetic field is induction: it forces eletron flow in wires. emphasis: wires, or any piece of metal with a large ratio of length/ width/ height to the other two dimensions. a wire is a perfect victim for a moving magnetic field because it presents a very long cross section to the magnetic field, and thats what makes the induction powerful
meanwhile, your medtronic device is small and compact, so it doesn't present a large cross section to the magnetic field as it hits the earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is no one here reminded of the floating island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels? You have a bunch of people on a magnetically floating island looking up and worrying about the state of the sun, and thinking that the world is just about to end.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
What about putting some large capacitors in series with the transformers? A capacitor will pass AC without too much trouble, but will block DC currents such as the ones a solar event (or an EMP) will create. Even if the voltage generated is too high, one could use relays across the capacitors to detect DC voltages and use them to trip existing emergency disconnects.
Of course, the big question is (and always will be), how much would it cost?
A satellite can't observe a solar flare from space and warn us 15 minutes before it arrives at earth... any warning that the satellite sends to earth would arrive at the same time (or later) as the radiation it detected.
So, the satellite must be able to detect the solar flare well before it happens, but anything the satellite sees 15 minutes before the flare, we also see on earth 15 minutes before the flare. Maybe the satellite has a clearer view of the sun, but that just means it is a better warning system than instruments on earth, not really an early warning system.
Even consumer grade electronics are designed to handle electrical storms and static discharges.
"Ooooh, the world will end tomorrow!"
Stupid idiots.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Wacky survivalists" is an historically very recent notion. For the bulk of mankind's history, having a well stocked larder-stores adequate to get you through to the next harvest season- and the means to supply yourself with adequate shelter and heat and water, etc based on your own and mostly local sources was quite the ordinary norm. It has only been the last two or three generations where that started to fall out of favor.
We have had numerous examples of much smaller and more localized infrastructure destruction, and the best observations have shown that areas start to suffer fast after a three day outage of general modern technology. Just in time delivery systems and centralized power and water and natgas delivery and so on are the main cause of that.without massive outside the region resupply, that's it, civilization falls apart rapidly. Three days isn't very long. If the event/disaster is much longer than three days, and no outside help is coming in (because the next region over is just as bad off, as the region next to that, etc), you'd see some pretty dire circumstances arise.
Here is one example for the US, we no longer maintain a national emergency bulk food stockpile. It used to be millions of bushels of this or that, dried milk and so on. We maintained that for decades, then they stopped and went to what is called set aside. This is due to farming changes and "the market". We- the government "we"- used to pay minimal price controls and stockpile various surplus foods, in order to maintain our domestic agricultural base through wild market swings and seasonal weather variations, but they more or less stopped that some time ago and now we have no stockpiled food, they sold the last of it off earlier last year finally.
In other words, on a very large scale, we have no backup civilization or big national pantry. It doesn't exist, just not there. The government has zero provisions to help the people in general at any national scale sized event. They have provisions to use military force to "stay in charge", they call it "maintaining continuity of government", that's it. We have a national petroleum reserve as the only exception, and it is in the form of just crude, it would still need refining and delivery-that's iffy enough in such a scenario to even be possible- (and even then most would go to the government and not the people).
On the other hand, there is nothing stopping people from instituting their own stores and provisions and having a personal backup protection scheme, the "wacky survivalists" type method that all our ancestors considered normal and a very good idea. In the community we still call it survivalism, but it has a less scary name now too, "practical preparedness". Here is a plain vanilla example, for roughly the same cash people put into a big screen plasma TV they can have a decent amount of long term dried stored food. For what a cheap laptop or other "must have" electronic gadget of the month costs, you can have a pretty decent gravity powered water filter. The folks in suburbia and in the hinterland get laughed at a lot as having unsustainable lifestyles, but they are living in the only places where you can have a rationally large enough local garden and access to alternative water supplies, etc, along with firewood. Choices one can choose now in other words. All the big cities would collapse rapidly in such a national sized electronic disaster as in TFA, it would become beyond ugly, right up to and including cannibalism.
Basically, the government sucks when it comes to national and practical "civil defense". They only have a military solution. The military doesn't produce anything, it just takes it/spends it/wears it out. Look at the recent articles about the relatively small numbers of homeless in California, possibly our richest state. They can't even deal with such a teeny tiny homeless situation at very low numbers adequately. Extrapolate those numbers from thousands to tens of millions or more and it becomes easy to see the problems...
So it is up to the individual now to decide to incorporate a practical preparedness plan and alter lifestyle a little bit, the article scenario is only one of many potential wildcards that could occur.
Note that the device has three 1.5' leads stretched around my innards. My cardiologist has warned against being too close (whatever that entails) to electric motors/generators, speakers, and other relatively large electromagnetic sources. Specifically he warned against
- cradling a phone on my left shoulder
- doing car maintenance with the engine running
- chainsaws
- music headphones too close to wired areas (like in left shirt pocket)
- and other "you get the idea" moving magnetic fields within range
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If these events generate so much power in the lines, shouldn't we try to make use of this power? Add circuits to store these over-voltages instead of letting them destroy the power grid.
This sounds like it will be as terrible as the Y2K crisis was. Or was supposed to be.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It's funny how they post this doom and gloom story while the sun has been in its quietest state for the past 100 years or so. The sun has been SO quiet, that NASA has had to change their prediction for the next cycle several times already, pushing the start further into the future, and dropping the expected peak of activity.
The solar minimum for this cycle should have occurred around March 2006, and we are still not sure if we have hit the minimum yet.
North Korea is going to attempt to launch a "satellite" in early April. Iran launched one several months ago. Both have the motive and now the means to launch a nuke and have it explode above the US in theory.
The resulting EMP blast would fry things in a similar manner. This is much more likely to occur in the next 20 years than a solar event.
sigh.
It is time to buy some laying hens...
if the source of the magnetic torque is 3 feet from you, extends 5 feet, and the wire in question is 1.5 feet, then it is possible to orient everything in just such a way that a dangerous current is induced
but on the scale of a geomagnetic storm, 1.5 feet isn't enough, i don't think. you'd need a wire a few miles long to pick up on a global effect, i think
again, i could be wrong, but the way my mind is thinking about it in analogy is: your pacemaker is a kid's pinwheel, and a nearby electric motor is a squirt gun. its possible to aim the squirt gun just right and cause the pinwheel to turn. but a geomagnetic storm is like taking a bathtub of water and dumping it on the pinwheel: its more likely the pinwheel won't even move, as the mass of water flows over it, since there's no pressure applied in scale to the object. now, pour that bathtub on a watermill in a river though, and it would push the thing along. the key is scale
somebody else here can probably say what i'm thinking a lot better than this ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But if it was shielded, broadband over power lines would be possible.
And check this out:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/11/1158226&from=rss
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
You should not be obsessing on stuff like that.
Here is something to take your mind off it;
"A Supernova within 15 light years of earth. Unheralded rays of death remorselessly annihilating life as we know it."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/27/1256231&art_pos=3
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from MarketWatch: ... A solar storm similar to the one that occurred in 1859, which shorted out telegraph wires in the United States and Europe, could wreak havoc on electrical systems. Each of the above scenarios can create a powerful electromagnetic pulse that overloads electronic devices and systems.
"A one-megaton nuclear bomb detonated 250 miles over Kansas could cripple many modern electronic devices and systems in the continental US and take out the power grid for a long time.
IAN staff and Frostburg State University physics and engineering professor Hilkat Soysal are teaming — through a $165,000 project recently approved by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program — to create renewable energy-powered, electromagnetic pulse (EMP)-protected microgrids that could provide electricity for critical infrastructure facilities in the event of a disaster."
Also available are an EMP threat assessment (PDF) written for the US Congress and an estimate of economic impact (PDF).
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
-Lok
Does this affect the surface of the planet in shadow?
I guess if it does happen we'll know which side of the planet the sun likes best.
all of the naysayers seem to point out examples that mean absolutely nothing about what we are talking about here
1. "i live in a rural area, everything will be fine"
actually yes, you are right, i agree rural areas will be totally fine. now: tell us about major urban centers, with population densities intrinsically dependent upon regular power, that would experience serious problems
2. "we had a power outage, it wasn't that bad"
yeah: it lasted a few days. we're talking MONTHS here
3. "i come from a place with regular places intermittent power outages, we did ok"
yeah, and life adapts when thats the status quo. we are talking about a highly electricty dependent society, that has had regular pwoer for decades, suddenly without power FOR MONTHS
4. "you can get the transformers up quick, you can cannibalize 2 or 3 and get one working ok"
all the transformers would be destroyed in exactly the same way. there is no backup supply on hand, adequate supply and distribution and installation would take weeks, months
its not the lack of power that is the issue. the issue is the suddenness, the long time period, and the effect on high density areas that have grown accustomed to reliable electrity. so a lot of the naysayers here don't seem to attack the real issue here, and teach us nothing, not a damn thing, about what it would be like for that society which has depended upon regular power for decades, to suddenly not have it at all
and then there is the idea this is all some sort of hollywood movie driven hysterical fearmongering. what? no one is pissing in their pants. its a valid concern, and the fix is not very difficult, and people are talking about it calmly. we cant' do that without being accused of screaming "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" really?
its worth discussing rationally and doing something about it? we have to do nothing about this problem because you think this is false alarmism? well, false alarmism is a real problem in this world. so is a false sense of complacency. it depends upon the nature of the problem. here we are talking about an issue which is relatively easy to fix, a valid long term concern, compared to threats like religious extremism or an asteroid the size of a football field. so why not discuss it rationally and go fix it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
hit that critter at the right time with that taser, and you could kill it AND COOK IT, all at the same time
this is helpful with squeamish city dwellers who will be killing their first wild game for food. just tell them its god's microwave oven at work
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You're assuming that they're going to fail in random ways. What's being described is that every one of them fails in exactly the same way -- which means you can't cobble together a single working one from multiple failed ones.
You're right in that things likely won't fail nearly as badly as they make it out to be -- I know the power companies have the ability to do rolling brownouts, as we used to regularly have them when I lived in DC ... it's only a small step to rolling backouts like you describe after that.
What is going to happen is that people are going to have a horrible jolt to their comfort levels. We'll move from TV to battery powered radios, and have to give up our dependance on pre-made frozen meals. Other than the medical issues described, it's not going to kill us unless we refuse to adapt. We'll probably lose more to riots and looting than directly caused reasons.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I'm just a physicist, but wouldn't installing large inductors DC shorting power lines to ground prevent this disaster, essentially making the grid a high pass filter? Make them sufficiently large so that the scale time is >> 1/60 seconds, and the DC will pass harmlessly to the ground while the AC doesn't even see the short.
Surely there is a single word that could replace "un-designed-for"?
That is a cromulent notion indeed. Somebody should get right on that.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Evolution?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
you are clearly ignorant. this is not meant as a throwaway insult, but a qualitative judgment of your words on the subject matter
here's some intellectual charity:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/electromag/java/faraday2/
start there. follow the links. read. educate yourself
THEN comment
the issue here has absolutely nothing to do with static electricty, or small electronics. it has to do with electromagnetic induction across long powerlines
why is it we have to live in a world where the dumbest amongst us are usually also the loudest?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The excellent BBC documentary series Connections begins with the scenario of a prolonged power grid failure, and traces the consequences in NYC.
Food becomes the major issue fairly quickly, due to the just-in-time economy of the cities. After a month, people are getting fairly desperate, and flooding out into the countryside, where considerable social churn ensues.
How many of you have two months worth of food on hand? Few things skew human behaviour more quickly than hunger.
Food security is the basis of sound social planning, and the weak point of any large city.
Damn those pesky terrorists
It would induce un-designed-for voltages in all high-voltage, long-distance power lines
Slashdot poll: Which word or phrase is a better fit for un-designed-for:
the mormons are already there;-)
"i byde my tyme"
A hundred bucks locally to me would get you a 50 lb sack of rice, similar some sort of quantity beans. Another hundred would buy a lot of canned food on sale. Water is critical though, relying on that tap for the only source is real iffy. Here we have our own well, plus stored water in a few water barrels, plus a local stream and quite large pond. To go with this good quality water filters, in our case, berkeys. And yes, rotate the stock. The saying we use is "store what you eat, eat what you store".
I've been into this sort of thing ever since the cuban missile crisis and then a few years later a whopper big snowstorm that shut everything down for more than two weeks where I was. And when I mean shutdown, even the largest snowplows got bogged down, 4 feet of snow in 24 hours, then drifting for a few days. And very few snowmobiles back then either. It makes an impression on you what happens once normal supply is borked.
You're toast. Rather, your pacemaker is.
Unless you're in (or are yourself) a faraday cage.
Best Slashdot Co
As far as I understand, the changes in the earth's magnetic field induces a current in the long conductors of the grid via the process of magnetic induction. Unless I have the wrong process pegged for this phenomena, should the current induced due to the changes in the magnetic field not be an AC current instead of a DC current (as stated by the article)? Or is the induced current so slowly varying that it can be considered DC from the point of view of the power grid?
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
I think instead of neolithic, which refers to the late stone age and the rise of farming, you meant the paleolithic. Humans are biologically adapted to the paleolithic, I suggest, since it's 99% of our history.
One marker of the onset of farming is the increased average workload. That's the loss of eden: when the hunting is good, the weather cooperative, the food is plentiful and life is easy. Farming depletes bioproductivity, through deforestation and loss of topsoil and displacing wildlife; constant labour is the trade-off for year-round food security.
Longevity estimates of paleolithic life are skewed by risks. If one survived birth (or giving birth), occasional famine (remember longevity's links to low calories), smilodons, malaria or worms or massive infection, being poked by competitors' spears, and genetic diseases, then chances were you were one tough, clever piece of meat, and lasted as long as we do. Certainly the typical diet was healthier in some respects, just not as reliable.
Damn those pesky terrorists
sparks flew from terminals and ignited telegraph paper on fire.
Isn't that redundant? Or are you suggesting the sparks traveled back in time to pre-ignite the paper?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
My business selling stone axes, spears, hide scrapers and other primitive tools will make a killing once the grid goes down!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
NOAA has a space weather prediction center at
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ - we have the data, its just that no one uses it!
fixed quick because it wasn't that big of an impact
now imagine a larger impact. not enough transformer stock to fix the problem
now we're talking 9 weeks without power
"The article cites Quebec in 1989 as an example, yet today Quebec doesn't seem to be the desolate Fallout style wasteland where everyone is fending for themselves and millions die that the article infers might happen."
no one says we're going to go into a mad max scenario. just that, yes, if the entire northern hemisphere had no power for 9 weeks, gee, i dunno, maybe bad things might happen? and maybe we should do something about it? liek maybe the easy quick fixes to our power system to take the transformers offline quickly if they get a warning from NOAA? is that really such a terrible order?
you can't on the edges of your imagination, think that perhaps something bad might happen with a CME and maybe perhaps we should take the small easy prudent steps to guard against it?
why do you feel the need to dispute this? why do you feel the need to attack the most emotionally histrionic interpretations of this scenario when just the prudent rational interpretation of the bad effects is enough to convince anyone calm and rational that the easy steps to guard against another carrington effect are maybe warranted?
why do you think the subject of your post is even remotely valid or useful for anyone considering this issue seriously? or do you lack the perceptive abilities to see that perhaps this issue does need to be taken seriously, and, even that, gasp, the fix isn't a big deal!
no one is thinking we're in beyond the thunderdome territory. nobody serious thinks that. do you got that? why do you think you add anything to the discussion by pointing out that since tina turner is not riding around in quebec in a chainmail bra shouting "two men enter, one man leaves!" that therefore, the carrington effect is nothing to worry about?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What part of 12 months to build them is so hard to understand?
It's not hard to understand but it is probably wrong. You are making the assumption that the government and profit seeking enterprises would not be able to rapidly devote resources to producing transformers and other critical infrastructure. They take a long time now because there is no economic or legal incentive to produce them faster. It is not logical to assume production rates would remain constant. Governments and companies are capable of bending a tremendous amount of resources to a problem if there is sufficient need. Worst case, the government takes control (at gunpoint if needed) of the companies that know how to produce these items and vastly expands their production capacity.
Another mistaken assumption you are making is that it all has to come back online all at once. Even worst case it would not be a case of no power anywhere for 12 months. The grid would recover piecemeal. We are overly dependent on our grid but it's hardly a doomsday scenario. Might be a repeat of the great depression but I suspect most people would get by.
So yes, you are correct that it would be a terrible mess. People would die, economies would suffer massively, wars and disease would be virtual certainties. But be careful how you extrapolate and don't underestimate people's ability to respond to adversity. A horrible mess is not the same thing as the end of civilization.
To propose, seriously, that "Modern Healthcare" would end in 72 hours when the emergency generators ran out of fuel -- this is ridiculous.
European country, having sustained world wars, tend to be really paranoid about being able to survive collapse of public structures. I'm speaking from Switzerland, which is considered even more crazy, even on European standard.
Here around, 72h isn't the maximum time that a hospital can go unplugged from the power grid.
72h is the time that the first line of backup power can handle to guarantee seamlessly uninterrupted power to the most critical part of the hospital. By then the *second line* of backup should have kicked in :
Due to habits dating back from cold war's MAD, some hospitals are designed to be able to continue operating even after a *nuclear strike*. (Thanks to extensive underground shelter, underground facilities were to continue working if the surface is levelled down, vast storage of emergency-related drugs, etc).
There are whole power plants able to sustain the hospital for a really long time.
(Partly feeding on the burning of waste)
Most European countries keep considering catastrophic scenarios and prepare to survive the worst (as en example, recently Switzerland had evaluated its capability to sustain public structures in case of a massive part of the population falling sick to an avian flu epidemic).
As pointed by other /.ers in this thread who have lived through recent wars in eastern Europe : Maybe the level of comfort will drop a lot, but lot of basic public structures are designed to keep working even in case of way more catastrophic failures, people can get really creative in finding work-arounds and repair methods, and the population can adapt quickly.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"ALL ELECTRONICS GOT TOASTED!"
Darth Vader: So what?
"SOCIETY AS WE KNOW IT HAS COME TO AN END!"
Darth Vader: Pfff, what do I care?
"ALL DIGITALLY STORED PORN HAS BEEN ELECTROMAGNETICALLY WIPED!"
Darth Vader: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Why is this problem and solution different from say EMP's from nuclear blasts?
How are the solutions and protection different also? Would things like Faraday cages protect critical infrastructure?
http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/empprotection.htm
http://www.endtimesreport.com/faraday_cages.html
Living in Chile
Actually, you forgot the event of 1908 in Siberia, which, if it had landed 4 hours later would have taken out St. Petersburg, and the fall of 3000 meteorites in Normandy in 1803, both of which were only a small part of a sequence of cometary near misses that goes back at least to the dendrochronological minimum of 4375 BC. It's really quite amazing we're still here at all:
http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterEight.htm
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
How about "fucked"?
The next thing you know the government will be spending money on volcano monitoring.
..along with the Mennonites and Amish and lot of modern back to the landers, who at least partially offset their modern lifestyle and normal employment by having large gardens or smaller niche farms, their own onsite backup or primary power, etc,. This is along with the still existent full time commercial farms, which could be repurposed to more generalized production (including a lot more decentralized energy production, both electricity and liquid biofuels) given enough time and incentive. The larger the farm though the harder that is to do because of all the specialization that is required today.
Personally, as a sort of national priority this year (and I notice the whitehouse first lady has lead by example just lately, I'd take that as a big fat *clue* to the rest of the nation) I'd like to see all of suburbia in the US take half or even just one third of their lawns and put them to "crisis gardens" and I mean now, starting this spring now, no "thinking about it", just do it. Just for backup purposes for the nation as a whole. Cheap to do, no exotic tech needs to be developed, and could pay off handsomely in averting some bad scenarios down the road... because you never know about those black swan events.
The way I look at it is binary, you are either a survivalist (or "prepper"), or a non-survivalist. Whoops! That "non" part can get pretty ugly, and quick.
will last more than 72 hours because a truck will come and refuel them. This is not the day the earth stood still. We will be able to keep hospitals open even if we have to get the diesel out of the storage tanks with buckets.
Nullius in verba
In the described scenario one possible upside is that a large majority of the fat people in this country would actually get thinner and healthier as a result of the fast food chains being out of commission. Studies have shown that calorically deprived (but not starving or mal-nourished) organisms tend to be healthier in the long run and those that had an abundance of calories. Those that didnâ(TM)t would most likely die and ultimately clean up the gene pool (and yea, some thin people would die tooâ¦sheesh).
Based on past and current historical parallels. When an entire nation collapses, I mean borked to smithereens, the military usually de evolves into just armed looter gangs, that's the only logistics they cover. It is only in smaller crises that they stay practical and actually can contribute some help, anything larger than a local regional event..all we have is other examples to look at. So we look, and that is what is there to see, it gets to warlords and looting and so on, bad stuff. The main article is referring to such an event as the bulk of our modern technology would be toast, so all bets are off then, and our only other examples are all bad news. If you think it would be different here for some magical reason...hmm..good luck with that.
Even back in our historical "great depression" days, the scale of disaster wasn't the same, not even close, we are talking in this situation the basic modern infrastructure gone over the entire nation. And even looking at our most recent large regional disaster, hurricane katrina, the government itself made it worse by stopping a rather huge flotilla of state residents going in with personal boats to try and save people. The government actually caused massively higher loss of life that needed to have occurred by throwing their normal response of military "must maintain all levels of command and control!!" option at the problem instead of just allowing the people to be more proactive in their own defense and being more flexible. They chose to not be flexible, and this was done on purpose, because they have different priorities. This is just data, we even covered it here on slashdot when that was going on.
And if you personally think it is a bad idea to not be personally prepared.. to have no backups for your day to day life's necessities...again..good luck with that! Different strokes man! Have fun, hope it works out for you!
However, observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth. "It arrived faster than we can do anything," Hapgood says.
so a replacement for ACE won't help. Rather than launching an expensive satellite, it sounds like the solution is to build more spare transformers and train more installation crews.
this didnt even required a burping sun..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977
Since when does "being prepared" equate to being a "wacky survivalist"?
The astronomical observatory which I mostly operate from is too remote to be "on-grid", so is run off a large-capacity and relatively efficient wind/PV-based system, and has been for years.
More recently we transferred the staff and observers residences in the nearest village to a grid-tied system, which is otherwise identical to that on the mountain.
This area of the world can be cold and snowy. Gathering firewood is just something you do, a routine, as is having a well-stocked pantry for those occasions when the access road is blocked. Everybody has a diesel, gas or wood-fired stove, most long pre-dating the existence of the observatory. In some places hey just make sense.
IIRC, the fix for this problem is to put a nonlinear resistance in the line connecting the transformer core to the earth ground. The issue is excessive DC currents in the transformer core that mess up its usual magnetics.
I believe northerly utilities are now doing this as a matter of practice. The main issue is how far south the impact would occur. Last time (late 80's or early 90's), the effect was roughly as far south as the Mid-Atlantic states.
If the resistance needs to be switched in, 15 minutes is plenty of time for a SCADA system to send out the commands.
The communications impacts are also a concern, but they don't affect fiber, and can be mitigated in shielded nodal devices.
I'll concede on that one readily, and like when they call out the guard for other flood situations or fires. Then yes, constructive and useful things happen. The permanent works the engineers do would be classed as productive wealth creation then. Too bad the will and funding weren't there for the engineers to make those NOLA levees just a scosh better in advance though. We'll have to place the blame there at a higher governmental level. I did have a theory though, a ten cent levee and flood control surtax on drinks and restaurant meals in new orleans for some years previous-a dedicated fund- might have provided more than enough cash to do a better job. We have some precedent, road repairs from fuel taxes. NOLA is known to be a party town, a very modest surcharge, low enough to not matter to people there or tourists, but high enough to start to accumulate serious coin, might have helped.
The overall lesson though is still valid, you just can't completely rely on the Federal government all the time.
Just search for "Discovery Channel - Solar Storm - pt 1", on YouTube and follow the rest of them.
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Nope, haven't forgotten that, am aware of it, and also at the elevators and so on as well (although a lot of elevators had a very hard time keeping up with demand this year from a propane shortage for winter wheat). It is still MUCH lower than back when we maintained national food stockpiles. We had enough to provide some minimal basic foods for everyone for more than one complete growing season (and we fed poor folks domestically and used it for food aid overseas a lot back then), now we are at at best hoping this years growing season is OK all the time. *Hope* is the keyword there, because there is no backup. We will this year if harvests go good have a little more grains than last year, because of the economic slump. As to produce, California farmers are mostly SOL this year because of the drought, they just got their taps shutoff recently, that will cause some shortages as they are the largest producers. And, there's very little carry over of foodstuffs that can be stored sans refrigeration, some, but nothing like there used to be, the stuff gets sold or used quickly. If you are interested here is a (google cache) article from last year talking about the last of the official grain stockpiles being sold off.
And the other part of the equation is we were talking originally about some big electronic disaster, space weather wildcards. This would really impact getting stuff-food- delivered around and more food actually grown again the next season. The whole interconnected system needs to be up and working..for the whole system to be up and working. We can survive a small percentage downtime as long as it is spread out all over, this is what we do today, that's normal, but a general sudden drop in modern tech would devastate not only ag production but about everything else.
The whittling out toothpicks from tree branches industry would do OK though ;).
One could say that engineers
'have failed to postulate or conceive their designs adequately'.
Unfortunately about 85% of readers would not comprehend the sentence.
Centralized power distribution is the flaw in this system.
Power should be generated where it is required, not
transmitted over massive wire grids of net power loss and waste.
Lots of silly apocalytic blogs these days. But the new solar cycle will be churning by 2013.