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NASA Warns of Potential "Huge Space Storm" In 2013
Low Ranked Craig writes "Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes 'from a deep slumber' sometime around 2013. In a new warning, NASA said the super storm could hit like 'a bolt of lightning' and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services, and national security — unless precautions are taken. Scientists believe damage could extend to everyday items such as home computers, iPods, and sat navs. 'We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be,' said Dr. Richard Fisher, the director of NASA's Heliophysics division. 'I believe we're on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.' Fisher concludes. 'We take this very seriously indeed.'"
Around 2013? So what, maybe December 2012...
That IS impressive.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I seriously wonder whether I should purchase a few crate-sized Farady cages in preparation, and ensure I have non-magnetic backups of everything.
So would something like an EMP destroy pace makers, artificial hearts, etc.? I know the typical discussion is in regards to someone not being able to listen to their Jason Mraz album on their iPod, but would something like this essentially kill anyone with an artificial/bionic enhancement that controls life support?
Send a rag-tag bunch of misfit ex-astronauts in space with an atomic bomb to place at the center of the storm, to create "a sort of firecracker in closed fist effect", YEEEEEEE-HAW!!!
If they had said it was coming in 2012 it would have generated way more publicity!
Oh, good... I was worried that I'd have to throw out all that canned Y2K food that I have in my basement bunker. (actually, it's technically my mom's basement)
Doesn't worry me seeing as we won't survive 2012 anyway.
If you RTFA, it's not a world ending event. It's just gonna mess up some transformers if they don't turn them off in time.
Disagree != mod troll.
"home computers, iPods, and sat navs"
Why not "Macs, iPods and Garmins"?
You can't plot the weather here on Earth more than 3 days from now accurately, but you expect us to believe you can plot the sun's weather 2 years from now?
I call BS.
With influenza pandemy, Maya's calendar doomsday, $|€ crisis, oil spills, earthquakes...
Or NASa just saw the light and how public fear can me made into profit, using for example big pharma recipes...?
Whatever, only reasonable thing to do about it is to cool down and ignore as much as we can.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
I'd hate to see what would happen if all our energy usage was electric instead of burning stuff.
From one of the links we learn that "..powergrids will temporary switch off some transformers, to save them from the effects..".
What about our computers? Anyone here able to confirm that powered off electronics would not be damaged by the blast?
So would something like an EMP destroy pace makers, artificial hearts, etc.? I know the typical discussion is in regards to someone not being able to listen to their Jason Mraz album on their iPod, but would something like this essentially kill anyone with an artificial/bionic enhancement that controls life support?
No. My titanium ribs act as a Faraday Cage and protect my electronic innards. So after the disaster happens.... I'LL BE BACK.
Why should we expect a worse sun spot maximum than previous maxima?
Nowhere in the two linked articles does it say anything about why it would be worse than 2006.
They don't even talk about the unusually long sun spot miminum we've had.
I was hoping for some science about how that might affect the coming maximum...
Yes, secret plans. Don't worry, when we need to know, they'll be disseminated, presumably by a network of tin cans and bits of string, with a smoke signal backup system.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Does it seem to anyone else that the telegraph routinely confuses "Something up to size X could hypothetically happen some day" with "X IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!!!!"?
I'm not saying this is a bad topic to have a conversation about (in fact it's one of my favorite disaster scenarios to rant about), it's just that if slashdot is going to reference the telegraph, it should frame it as though a new Hollywood disaster movie has been released, not as though it was an actual news item was printed.
Will anyone staying on the ISS at the time turn into the Fantastic Four?
Actually a "Generation" is typically 20-25 years. However, today's electronics are a pretty big advance from those of the late 80s.
I just had a thought, wouldn't it be odd if the only space ships that weathered the space storm were the Shuttles? :o
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So would something like an EMP destroy pace makers
Pacemakers are installed inside a poorly constructed Faraday cage. That being your highly conductive body. Pacemakers historically have occasionally gotten all wound up in high RF fields, but aside from folks working at high power UHF TV station transmitters it has not been a serious issue.
You can "short out" and essentially blow the fuses of a pacemaker. Of course it takes more than enough power to hopelessly electrocute someone, in fact depending on the design you pretty much need to cook them like one of those electric hot dog cookers.
Its pretty much the usual useless scaremongering B.S.
would something like this essentially kill anyone with an artificial/bionic enhancement that controls life support?
Could something worse than we have ever experienced, result in deaths? Just speaking generally, not about any specific threat, and taking a wild guess, I'd say that's a good solid maybe, unless my salary depending on raising money by saying yes, in which case I'd say yes.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Working on the assumption that, in the contemporary west, "generation" means ~25 years, there have been pretty enormous changes in that time. In '85, a 386 fabbed on a 1.5 micrometer process was seriously exciting stuff. In 1960, the transistor was only 13 years old, and seriously retro(but electromagnetically robust) stuff like magnetic core memory was still standard. There were plenty of electric gadgets, though.
Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course.
As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.
GPS and cars are mentioned because its the satellites themselves that are vulnerable. The "ipods etc" stuff in the telegraph, assuming there's any reasoning behind their inclusion in the article at all, beyond scaring telegraph readers, will be just because they need recharged regularly.
What the actual NASA article boils down to is: if the satellite and power companies (disconnecting transformers, etc) react fast enough, we'll be fine. Otherwise, better make sure you have an exercise bike and a car battery handy. And, potentially, access to locally grown food. I'd rather not see how the urban supply chain holds up without the power grid.
Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims.
OMG... Won't someone think of the Decepticons!?!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Dood, when decepticons get at a working power grid, it quickly stops being a working power grid.
I seem to recall that the 1859 solar storm caused the telegraph (the service not the trashy paper) network to run without batteries for some time after it.
Who knows, maybe this will trigger new science for harnessing solar flares/space storms.
It also caught fire.
This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse - Is no cause for alarm ... Only Doctor Hans Zarkov formerly at NASA - Has provided any explanation
Flash will save us all. Except for iPhone/Pad users.
Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course. As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.
The issue you refer is to ground loop currents in the electric grid. The storm creates a difference in the ground voltage between different transformers. This creates a massive current that blows out the transformer.
The real issue is that the devices to prevent this (basically huge resistors) are expensive, rare, and take a long time to manufacture. And when we suddenly have half of the transformers in the US explode at once, the outage will not be brief. There is not a large stock of transformers sitting in warehouses as replacements. Transformers take even longer to produce than those resistors, and we would be waiting months before we could repair most of the grid. That's a huge issue.
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You must be the oldest person on slashdot!
grocery distribution
You're looking at it from a consumer perspective. The real problem is infrastructure.
I can buy a remarkable quantity and variety of food at my local weekly farmers market direct from the local farmers... I would assume that could scale up quite a bit if necessary.
I'm not belittling the other problems, just saying that is possible to buy food, in fact excellent locally grown food, beyond pizza rolls from a walmart supercenter. I/we can eat quite well indeed without making sam walton's heirs richer, or making the new york banks richer by swiping a VISA card.
I would agree that coasties in the heart of big cities and desert dwellers in AZ would pretty much have to starve to death. But the quality of life is already so low in such areas, can you be surprised at the results if an EMP dropped the QOL even further? Not really.
Most of the population has zero/negative net worth, with only 1% or so having almost all the money. Frankly a financial reboot would probably do a lot of good for the country. This coming from a guy who's doing pretty good although not quite in the 1% yet.
The problem you're not seeing is infrastructure. No electricity rapidly means no plumbed treated tap water. The good news is I live in a river community. The bad news is the communities upstream have no electricity to run their sewage treatment plans. Pestilence and disease is going to be the big problem.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's Apple's own fault for rejecting Flash.
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...but Dec21,2012, is a little too close to the end of a long solar slumber to be completely ignored.
I disagree, I'm not having any trouble ignoring it at all.
Weapons of Mass Destruction by Hive? Here you go.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Actually the electrical utilities were looking at stockpiling backup transformers, worried about roving bands of Al Qaeda or Neo-Nazi terrorists shooting up substations with deer rifles. The powers-that-be took one look at the price tag, saw their quarterly bonuses and yearly stock options evaporating, and nixed any sort of actual anti-terrorist preparation that went beyond window dressing. The reasoning seemed to be that if an attack caught them unprepared they'd just be fired and take their millions with them, but if they spent enough money to put a dent in the stock price they'd be out some serious money.
Disaster preparedness; just another victim of the MBA disease.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I appologize, I misremembered the values, and finally found the article again.
There are 5,000 transformers that need the resistors, and they would cost about $40k each. In the grand scheme of things, pretty cheap.
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Nope (I'm an EE), I really do mean dishwasher-sized ohmic resistor.
The power transmission is three-phase power. So, at the common terminal of the transformer on each end of a long transmission line there should be zero net current. Under all normal circumstances there is.
In the event of a solar storm, there is a DC current flowing through the wire, which usually isn't present. This resistor would go between the common terminal and earth ground, and both reduce the current present in the line and dissipate the power. See this picture.
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