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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.
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.
Quoth the intro:
Someone screwed up copying the text there.
Sounds like the CME didn't quite miss EVERYONE...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Proofread! You're shit!
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
"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 was iffy on this myself, so I read slashdot comments. Now it is crystal clear.
In the event of a major CME, just mains power, or possibly anything connected to mains power, would or would not be inoperable. Modern cars, and or, old cars would or would not work; as they may or may not be effected by EMPs which may or may not have similar effects.
Total damages are hard to estimate but could range from longer netflix streaming latency to trillions of dollars.
Hope that clears it up for you.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Think of the Untied States trying to exist with 19th century technology for a couple of months. That's how bad it could be. The big equipment that runs the electrical grid is all custom made by a very few manufacturers with very long (as much as two years) backorder times in the best of conditions. End-user equipment may or may not be affected, but without power it's pretty much useless. Your car may run, but since the gasoline pumps are electric, as is all the equipment that runs the holding tanks, the pipelines and the refineries, you're not going very far with it. Food distribution system collapses without trucks, the rail system deadlocks without control systems, ships stack up in the harbor with no way to offload them. Farmers can only watch their crops whither and die in the field. Banking system goes belly up without the constant credit card traffic.
Perhaps not 'death from above', unless you need surgery (operating rooms almost never have windows), but still pretty fucking catastrophic.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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?
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.
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.