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One In Eight Chance of a Financially Catastrophic Solar Storm By 2020
An anonymous reader writes "A privately employed solar scientist named Pete Riley estimates there's a 12 percent chance of a massive solar storm comparable to the Carrington Event in 1859 which resulted in breathtaking aurorae across the United States and other temperate regions of the globe. The electromagnetic surge from the 1859 event caused failures of telegraph systems across Europe and North America. A similar storm today could knock out power grids, GPS and communication satellites, data centers, transportation systems, and building and plumbing infrastructures and wreak $1 trillion or more of economic damage in the first year alone, according to a 2008 report from the National Academy of Sciences."
I think a lot of people are very confused.
This won't directly break your car or your computer. It affects long runs of conductive cable.
It will break power distribution and telecom. It might break your computer if it's plugged in, but absolutely will not break your computer if it is not plugged in. Likewise with cars. If you own an electric car, just hope that it's unplugged when this happens.
That's the broken window fallacy. It would immediately suck $1Trillion out of the economy that would have been spent other ways, it would prevent a lot of useful work from being done while the infrastructure was down, and it would most likely be rebuilt in a crappy, haphazard way, not in some nice, well-designed way that would make everything better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Solar flare != EMP
While the power grid would be knocked out by a massive solar flare, your electric car would be just fine. Unless it happened to be plugged in when the power grid was fried...
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Good thing this storm isn't an EMP effect.
What happens is you get large induced currents/voltages in transmission lines (power, cable etc) which smoke things connected to them. This happens because they resonate with the solar radiation.
Small shit like the wires and traces inside of your car resonates at far too high a frequency for that to happen.
As for GPS etc - those die because they are in orbit, either outside the majority of the earth's EM field's protection - or their path happens to make that same protection their death-sentence as it tends to concentrate the radiation into distinct bands/layers.
The sun would still be the sun, and the GPS satellite would be the ant. The earth's EM field would be the magnifying glass. Poof.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Yes, but such a tiny amount that it shouldn't cause trouble.
You run into issues when they are resonant (or near resonant) because that allows standing waves to form - and the stuff that makes it in through the magnetosphere is the lower frequency (longer wavelength) stuff.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...