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Earth Barely Dodged Solar Blast In 2012
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Coronal mass ejections, with severity comparable to the 1859 Carrington event, missed Earth by only 9 days in 2012, according to researchers. The Carrington event caused widespread damage to the telegraph system in the U.S., and a similar occurrence would be devastating to modern electronics, it is thought. From the Reuters article, 'Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous.' The potential global cost for such damage is pegged at $2.6 trillion."
"Coronal mass ejections, with in 2012, according to researchers."
What..
We had no control over this, and there's no means to mitigate it, and it didn't happen. So lets panic and blog and post video submissions to nerdy websites!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Proofread your shit!
Fred Phelps has now gone to be with God in Heaven. RIP, brave soldier of Christ. RIP.
I guess Lucien Greaves will be making a trip to his grave to turn Fred Phelps' soul gay any day now.
Considering how dependent we are to things that require electricity, perhaps we are lucky we squeaked by...
However, there will always be this threat It is just the nature of the universe. Perhaps it would be wise to consider ways to mitigate or minimumize damage done if such an event happened again. Yeah, it'd be costly to do. However, it certainly would beat the lives lost and damage done if doing the usual "Wait till it happens and then run around like a chicken with their head cut off while pointing fingers at others" approach as these events are not just foreseeable, but inevitable.
Yeah, I know, I'm being a bit picky here, but... dodged?
The CME barely missed; Earth didn't do anything, the lazy git.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We made a road trip to his grave to piss on it but the line was too long.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Too late. I noticed a while ago that the site that turns Dead Mormons Gay, while it says holocaust victims are ineligeble, happily converted Anne Frank for me....turns out, it accepts non-mormons too: http://alldeadmormonsarenowgay...
So I converted Fred already. Too late. Not only is he now Gay for all eternity, he is a Gay Mormon for all eternity, just like Anne Frank.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If they could give a weeks warning or something like that, I think it would be an amazing experience.
I would fly back to my parents and stay with them for the duration.
I think it would be very eye opening and give us all a chance to realize just how dependent we are on everything, and also how we could make ourselves less dependent.
I'm fairly certain in either 2012 or 2013 we did get hit by a significant CME that was enough to cause extremely southern northern lights in the sky. They said days before that it would knock out satellites and it never did. It didn't affect the electrical grid either. So are they saying there was a bigger one that missed us?
I'm pretty sure the people on both sides are fixated at the grade-school level, and our political leaders aren't much further along. I half expect Obama and Putin to "double-dog dare" eachother at some point.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So you have a problem with NASA spending your money on Muslim outreach programs? Islamophobe.
Time to get some serious people in office who understand basics first.
Where are we going to find some of those?
Quoth the intro:
Someone screwed up copying the text there.
No, he went the other way. I understand that Richard Nixon has already named Phelps as Shadow Secretary of State.
Sounds like the CME didn't quite miss EVERYONE...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Coronal mass ejections, with in 2012, according to researchers.
Yea, researchers for the win. According to grammar researchers (with in 2014), no verbs in this sentence either!
I'm sure this is very naive. I'm not doubting, or even skeptical, I just want further understanding.
These claims are always made but never really expand on what the repercussions are. What exactly does it mean that things would be devastating to our modern electronics? Cell phones blowing up in our pants pocket? Computers catching on fire? I doubt those things mainly because something damaging enough to cause a gadget to self-immolate likely would be just as damaging to our biology. Is it stuff as (comparatively) mundane as everything needing to be reset/restarted? I have no doubt that's a huge pain in the ass and can cause legitimate issues depending on venue (satellites, power plants, airplanes, people driving, etc). Significant inconvenience yes and unfortunately deadly for some, but it does not seem like the literal 'death from above' that this comes across as.
Electronic devices suddenly stopping, society is likely recoverable. Electronic devices suddenly self-immolating/exploding, society likely isn't recovering.
[hollywood isn't make things easier either, everything either stops dead or explodes cataclysmic-ally]
um, nice rant but this story's about another thing entirely.
You do realize that even if the government were to shield every power line and transformer in the country, they'd be sending power to billions of doorstops. Pretty much every device you want the government to protect power for has a chip that would completely blown out by a CME of this magnitude. You could maybe plug in something simple like a drill. But your phone, your refrigerator, your tv, your CAR.... They would all be irreperable pieces of shit. And I say irreperable, because if the chips in the devices were blow, so would all the replacement chips in the world, AND all the equipment used to make more.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
The summary says "From the Reuters article", but none of the links point to a story by Reuters. The links go to Nature, Wikipedia and UC Berkeley. The Berkeley article one doesn't mention Reuters; the Nature paper is paywalled, I can't check it's sources without forking over $32, but I would doubt it would rely on a news report as a source.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
I thought the earth had an orbit.. :)
The gubmint spends that much every few years. So, we double taxes for a few years, all the damage is undone. Whew...I'm glad this article reduced the concept to a number of dollars. THAT sure helped our comprehension.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
"Coronal mass ejections, with in 2012, according to researchers."
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Proverbs 21:19
"in 2012" is a bad link to reuters smashed right up against the nature link.
A car's body is grounded to the negative battery terminal. The entire structure is isolated from earth by rubber tires.
If your car's body gets a significant electrical charge imparted onto it the car's electrical systems are going to get fried.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm
No fried transformers, just flipped circuit breakers.
Sometime back some small solar wind even knocked out a satellite. Normally it would not even be a blip in the radar. But that satellite was the link to credit card processing in the pay-at-the pump gas stations. Almost all these gas stations have cut down their employee down to one guy who sells chips and soda. Almost all the bays are self service. When the pay at the pump payment system got knocked out, people had to fill the car and walk in to pay that lone guy. Lines started forming, then the lines stretched, and reached the exit ramps of highways, and the highway started getting blocked. But at the end, after the mess cleared, still there is no incentive to create alternate routing or redundancy in the system.
It costs money to make things secure. To make things robust. But if some company does it the right way and it competes with another company that does not, it is not going to be competitive. Yes, in the long run, catastrophe will strike and the chickens will come home to roost and the corner cutters would find themselves getting the short end of the stick. But, the non-corner-cutter could have been driven out of business before the catastrophe strikes.
So it all depends on the frequency of the odd ball event. If the odd ball event is less frequent than once in a decade, there is no structural incentive for any manager to do the right thing. Most people change jobs once a decade and they will not be there to face the music. This is a systemic structural thing. The race to the bottom is the only race there is.
It might not be a solar storm, or a terrestrial storm. It could be some fiber optic cable being accidentally severed. Or sabotaged. Or an oil spill blocks rail traffic somewhere. So don't think it is mere fear mongering or rationalize it saying solar storms are rare. Systematically our infrastructure has become very vulnerable without redundancy without factors of safety.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Does this mean they will extend the ACA deadline?
Duh...
I harden all my electronics against electromagnetic radiation using tinfoil!
For extra sensitive systems I use the heavy duty stuff,,, It also works better in the BBQ!
The link was broken and not separated from the Nature link. I've updated it with different anchor text to make it more distinct.
I am not thrilled by the way this is framed.. argument is always if 1859 telegraphs broke imagine what it would do to the "modern world" as if there is no more circuit protection today than there was in 1859. The storm might have caused a blackout in Canada but plenty of other areas were hit without effecting service. The leafs went down because part of their system was too weak. While I'm sure if the volume is turned up high enough and you induce blah currents on blah length of transmission it will have blah consequences..it does not necessarily follow we are less equipped to deal with the same 1859 event today.
It did such a good job of dodging in 2012, so safe to assume it can dodge again. Thanks Earth!
To convert it to a modern unit, that's about one Iraq-War's worth.
Table-ized A.I.
Think for a moment.
If the power grid goes down across the country for months or years -- the most likely serious direct consequence -- for any reason -- even if *nothing* else is damaged by the CME (or other form of EMP-related problem), then the consequences of the following avalanching issues in the affected area must be considered:
o No fuel pumped for transport; none delivered -- so no troops, no relief forces unless from the other side of the planet
o No heating fuel, no cooling power -- people will die just from this; if winter, water systems can freeze, more consequences
o No food production -- uh oh
o No food transport -- guess it doesn't matter there won't be any produced -- starving, desperate people everywhere, then dead ones
o No power in hospitals -- more dead people
o Manufacturing stops -- Everything you consume regularly will run out very quickly. Meds. Food. Soap. Clothing.
o Drugs run out -- more people die, others suffer
o Sanitation loses power -- ok, now everyone begins to die -- sanitation failure in our society would be catastrophic
o Starvation
o Disease
o Violence
o Desperation
o Die-off
All these things are inevitable, given just that one simple, scientifically 100% possible consequence. Amidst all that, you know what will work? Almost every weapon in civilian hands, at least until the bullets run out, which could take a while. Then there are knives, hammers, cobbled together spears and pikes, makeshift swords (and a few real ones), you know, the usual stuff of mayhem. Death. Likely the carnage would begin within 24 hours of the food running out, and I think it's pretty obvious what our society would look like a week later. And do you think for a *moment* that a nation-sized relief effort could be successfully mounted by an ally (or an enemy) soon enough and comprehensively enough to preclude that week of madness? If you do, you are far more of an optimist than I am.
It won't mean a thing that you have a car that can run. You're almost certainly going to die. Probably the first time you drive it in front of people who don't have something and think you just might have some of it in your car. Like, you know, food.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. You don't. Refer back to the Carrington event; the telegraph lines in use at the time were not anywhere near that long; they were (electrically and conduction wise) broken up by repeater stations and relay stations at typical intervals of ten miles or so. Even so, enough energy was induced in those lines to set them, and the telegraph offices they were connected to, on fire.
Our modern power grid is similar in most places; broken up by transformers quite regularly, but here's the key difference: a repeater station does not pass along the incoming energy: a transformer will. Not for long, but it doesn't take long. And where we *do* have long lines, those lines are extremely high voltage already, and it will do enormous harm to piggyback even more on top of the normal operating conditions. Installations like the major interties will likely fail catastrophically, and without power, where do you think replacement parts will come from?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The Earth can dodge things? Who decides what will be dodged? A UN Working Group?
Ironically, it would fry the computers and calculators needed to add up 2.6 trillion..
Our utilities are legislated monopolies with fixed fee segments that only cover the cost of operating, and repairs. They are not for profit. Are you trolling?
I am glad to discover that natural disasters cost less than made-made subprimes mortgage crisis.
Capitalism remains the biggest threat to itself.
started to taper off. i miss those days.