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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!
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.
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"?
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]
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()
Yeah, you could be there with your parents in the moment you realize no one is shipping more food to your area because all the trucks, planes and ships are inoperable.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
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
You seem to think that the damage comes from stuffing too many electrons into a box. That's not how it works at all.
A Faraday cage shields its contents, period. A magical tether to Mother Earth might make you feel better, but it makes no difference to Maxwell's equations.
To put it in simpler and more specific terms, cars (and airplanes) frequently survive direct lightning strikes with no damage to their electrical systems. The energy from even a Carrington-level event, over the area of a car, is miniscule compared to the energy of a lightning strike. I'm not even sure it would exceed the energy of the static you build up scooting across the seat and then touching the door handle.
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.
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.
Oh my, AC has absolutely no idea about how electricity works.
Electricity always flows in a loop, every time, without exception, period. No loop, no current. No current, no energy. Sometimes the loop includes the capacitance of one disconnected piece of metal next to another, but that also limits the current, and therefore, energy. Sometimes the insulation breaks down, or the field is strong enough to cause an arc to jump the gap.
If welding on your vehicle caused a problem it is because you put the ground clamp in the wrong place, and current passed through something it shouldn't have, which could be because something you thought was a good ground wasn't. Battery connected or disconnected makes no difference.
I've had a couple mufflers welded on. The guy has never disconnected my battery; though he usually clamps an additional ground to the frame to absorb the energy.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Where do you live? Wherever it is, your situation is unusual.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I am glad to discover that natural disasters cost less than made-made subprimes mortgage crisis.
Capitalism remains the biggest threat to itself.