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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."
Yes, it could take days for the power to come back
Try months or years if the event is large enough to destroy transformers on a region or nationwide scale.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So let me get this straight.
You're suggesting that because a freak event may or may not happen in someone's lifetime that they should consider living a life that they personally found miserable, so that they could point and say "Hah! I told you so!" for a few days before everyone gets power back and start playing on their XBox's in their nice warm heated houses again?
I'm not convinced it's worth drastically altering your life away from what you know and enjoy for something that may or may not ever actually happen and when it does would realistically just inconvenience you for a short period of time before getting back to normal (it wouldn't be as bad as the summary/article suggests anymore than we'd be getting blown up by terrorists daily if we listened to the Bush/British governments).
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.
It's a question of the odds. A major electrical storm occurred within the last couple of centuries. A major asteroid impact - of the sort that would do worse damage to a wide area (not just knock down some trees in Russia) - haven't seen one probably since we dropped down from the trees.
Whether you're losing sleep over it is one thing. whether we, when awake in the daytime, should be hardening our electrical grid against surges from space - well, that's a real question. Prudence doesn't mean just acting when you get scared enough that you can't sleep at night.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If you don't think loss of the entire power grid would deeply affect your life, I have to wonder where you live (and that's being kind)
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.
There are a number of potential problems that us pampered city dwellers have to deal with in the case of an extended power outage that simply aren't as much of a problem in rural areas, such as:
1. Traffic lights being shut down, which can grind traffic and thus commerce to a halt.
2. Crime.
3. Panicking people who don't have the sense to just wait it out.
And of course, most everyone who works in technical jobs is out of work until the power comes back on.
I am officially gone from
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired. The situation if so drastic would right itself due to economic forces that encourage such.
What part of 12 months to build them is so hard to understand? Even if that timescale could be shortened do you think the infrastructure exists to produce large numbers of these items in a short period of time? Yes the situation would eventually right itself through economic and other factors. Yes the human race would survive. But you'd still have hundreds of millions of people without power and the benefits of modern civilization for months. Almost every single piece of technology that supports civilization (particularly high population density civilization) depends on the electrical grid
I could imagine alongside you all day, but it won't ever come to pass. Have fun RTFA.
It has come to pass in the past. Within the last 200 years as a matter of fact. If a similiar event happened today (the whole point of the article that you apparently refuse to read) it would wreck havoc with modern infrastructure. In 1859 all that existed to disrupt were telegraph networks. Today our entire civilization depends on infrastructure that is vulnerable.
Sticking your head in the sand and refusing to even read the article might be typical /. behavior but all it accomplishes in the end is to confirm your ignorance.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
"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.
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