15 ms·

If America Lost Its Electricity: An Electromagnetic Shock

181 points by clra 9y ago

grecy 9y ago
Moving through West Africa I admire the resilience of people here. In many places, the power being ON is the surprise, not when it's OFF. I often wonder what would happen to the world if we lost power, or running water, or grocery stores, or really any of our "fancy" infrastructure. In my experience and estimation, a massive percentage of people in Developed countries would wither and die, while undeveloped countries would continue to function almost exactly as they do now. I think there is a lot to be said for knowing how to grow your own food, hunt your own meat, build your own shelter, etc.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  Most, if not all, of us here on HN would be out of our normal jobs. There isn't really any immediate need for developers when there isn't any electricity.
  - grecy 9y ago
    Think bigger. Almost overnight you would have no access to food or clean drinking water. There would certainly be no gasoline, heating, cooling, showers, etc. You wouldn't even be able to "get" money - ATMs won't work and you certainly won't be able to use your smart phone. So you would not be able to buy life necessities even if someone were selling them. A job will be the last thing you think about.
    - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
      I was mostly being tongue-in-cheek. Of course we wouldn't care about a job at that point...its also why I have the required amount of necessities ready to go in case it does.
      - kwhitefoot 9y ago
        > the required amount of necessities ready to go What is the required amount? And where where would you go?
        Caveman_Coder 9y ago
        I should say I have my required amount of necessities... Where would I go? It depends
    - zyb09 9y ago
      I think what he is trying to say is, that developers will be useless dead weight in this kind of post apocalyptic scenario. Everybody will be out of there normal day jobs, but a lot of people can contribute to survival with their skillset. Doctors, mechanics, farmers, caretakers, hand labor, etc. will be in high demand. Office people & developers, not so much.
      - talmand 9y ago
        Am I one of the rare developers that grew up in rural USA that has remnants of what are now known as survival skills but I just consider as childhood fun? I always tell my team that if things go bad then I'll be the one keeping them alive.
        zyb09 9y ago
        You sound like a good guy to be around :)
        talmand 9y ago
        I like my team, I'll keep them alive. That way when society returns our children will be able to take over our webdev duties.
      - logfromblammo 9y ago
        We are not dependent upon any specific technology. We are "fixers", and computers are just our hammer that makes everything else look like a nail. Take them away, and the other, lesser tools in the toolbox are still there. I intend to attach myself to a raider strongman, to provide solutions to their difficult problems, such as how to crack an entrenched survivalist's defenses and get his stockpile out. I'm a decent hand at basic chemistry, too, like organic extractions and distillations. There are many potential princes, and Machiavelli only needs one of them.
  - dsq 9y ago
    All developed countries have numerous storage depots, the existence and location of which are only accessible in some online form. Even offline digital form such as a downloaded wikipedia. So a computer-literate person might be of use to a post downfall warlord, plunked down before a laptop powered by a diesel generator and ordered to "do the magic" perl scripts to retrieve all Costco warehouses within a fifty mile radius...
- nopinsight 9y ago
  Growing food is not that hard. If necessity calls for it, people can learn to do it sufficiently well from books and neighbors. More challenging issues are access to clean drinking water and fertile land, safety from pillaging, and getting proper medical care.
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    >Growing food is not that hard. If necessity calls for it, people can learn to do it sufficiently well from books and neighbors. Disagree. It's pretty hard, from a cold start, to reach the point of producing a significant number of calories independently. It's a far cry from keeping a veggie/herb garden, and even harder in turn to do it over a number of successive years. Also, if we're specifically considering a scenario without power, the preservation of that food through the year is a major challenge in itself. >More challenging issues are access to clean drinking water and fertile land, safety from pillaging, and getting proper medical care. Absolutely agree.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    I encourage you to watch the first episode of James Burke's original Connections, if you believe that.
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    Wouldn't winter come and kill all your crops? How much food are you planning on growing?
  - GlenTheMachine 9y ago
    I grew up in a farming family, and I run a hobby sheep farm. Supplementing your food supply with a family garden isn't that difficult. Completely supplying yourself and your family with enough calories to live via farming is enormously difficult, both in terms of physical labor and in terms of skillset. It also takes at least 45 days, from a standing start, to get anything edible, and that's if you are willing to suvive completely on turnips (which have the shortest yield period of any domesticated vegetable crop). Corn, beans, and potatoes, which are going to be the crops that provide the bulk of your calories in a survival situation, require roughly 100 days to yield, and they only grow during the right season. Furthermore, without either industrial fertilizer or an established farming system that includes animals, you will only grow those crops once before your land begins to be depleted and your yields in subsequent years will drop until they are no longer survivable in approximately year three. You are growing the animals as much or more for manure as for meat. And none of that includes the vagaries of the weather and various plant diseases that can decimate your crop. Basically, if you don't have access to fresh water, you're doomed immediately. If you don't have at least a 12 month supply of food in your basement, you're doomed in two to three months. If you haven't already implemented a closed nitrogen system using composting and animal agriculture, but happen to have land, seeds and a hoe, you're doomed in two to three years. If you have done all of those things you can probably survive for a decade ot three, if you can outlast the looters. For reference, the pioneers who cleared the forests in the midwest would go in on year one and girdle all of the trees. Then they'd go back home. In year two, they'd plant turnips and pumpkins, which would grow among the dead trees, and they'd survive on those for the first couple of years as the stumps rotted. It took several years to establish a sustainable farm. The pioneers who went eg to Utah, where there were no forests, would plant immediately, but the first crop was just seed potatoes, which they would harvest and store - they couldn't carry enough to eat, and were essentially bootstrapping a potato crop from what they could carry. They carried enough food to survive through a complete growing season, augmented by hunting and foraging. It was a hard life, they were living hand to mouth, and they already knew what they were doing.
- adventured 9y ago
  That's a nice fantasy I suppose. You're no doubt aware of how much West Africa's population has increased since WW2, such that they now have hundreds of millions of people. Most of those people - as in the West - can only exist due to increasingly advanced, connected economic and technological systems. Nigeria's population as an example, has gone from 45 million to 186 million since 1960. That extreme population growth has equally big requirements that are necessary to keep all of those people from dying. In a given year, the West is directly responsible for tens of millions of people being alive in Africa. Routine food aid and supply, sometimes preventing famine and random general food scarcity. This has been a non-stop effort for decades and continues in many places across Sub-Saharan Africa. Medication supply, preventing millions of deaths from everything from HIV/AIDS to TB to malaria to infection. That includes invention, manufacturing and delivery of drugs. Outbreak intervention. The substantial response to the 2014-2016 ebola outbreak as an example, which stopped it from becoming a catastrophe. A massive percentage of people - represented by typical extreme population growth curves of the last ~50 years - in low development nations would die in your scenario. If you need a recent example of how fragile the lower development nations are (in part due to their commonly vast population expansions and weak supporting infrastructure), you need look no further than the global food riots from the commodity bubble of ten years ago, as it dramatically rocked the world's poorest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_price_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_pri...
  - username130917 9y ago
    I dont think food aids were responsible for the massive growth in Nigeria's population though improved healthcare definitely played a role in that. I think the biggest contributor to population growth has been the consistent susidizing of the local economy from oil income. Also, Nigeria was able to handle the ebola epidemic that got to its shores with little to no outside assistance.
    - notfromhere 9y ago
      its petroleum fertilizer. places like mexico were famine-ridden in the 40s until they figured out how to make industrial fertilizer
- tpeo 9y ago
  Is "resilience" really the word for what's on your mind? As far as I understand, "resilience" is the ability to recover from loss. But if electricity is rare enough to be treated as a gift rather than a given, should it be considered a loss when it goes away?
- mirimir 9y ago
  > I think there is a lot to be said for knowing how to grow your own food, hunt your own meat, build your own shelter, etc. That's true enough. The problem is the people with guns, who will take all that from you. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very depressing read. Its scenario is worse than grid collapse, in that nothing could be grown. But there wouldn't be much commercial agriculture without electricity.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Having a .45 as your disaster/emergency preparedness plan only works in places like CA and a few other coastal states where the odds are very low that any random other person is packing. I would not advise it.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      It doesn't scale well, though. Especially because serious looters will have probably hit National Guard armories, before getting to you :( Indeed, once things get bad enough, the most serious looters will be former police and military.
      - Danihan 9y ago
        My personal fantasy always has me going underground for about 10 years, then coming out once any violent purges are over, well-rested and ready to repopulate. Resilient, like a cockroach. I always think that particularly when I watch "The Walking Dead." I'd just find a nice bomb shelter and try to write my the great American novel for about 5-10 years. No trying to seek out other survivors, no trying to rebuild, etc. I mean, I'm pretty introverted (and also very overworked at the moment,) so really that just sounds like a nice vacation. Maybe in reality I'd get tired of it pretty quickly. But being bored and lonely for a few years still beats ending up as cannibal jerky hands-down.
        dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        Combine the best of both. Carjack your way to the boondocks with everything you need. Box truck + travel trailer + contents of a Walmart garden center would be a damn good start. /s (should be obvious)
- pjc50 9y ago
  > In my experience and estimation, a massive percentage of people in Developed countries would wither and die, while undeveloped countries would continue to function almost exactly as they do now. Well, yes. That's what the infrastructure is for. Do not romanticise places without infrastructure; there you simply have a much higher risk of dying from something that westerners would consider preventable. Like maternity. Growing your own food works until there's a crop failure. Who here is old enough to remember the Ethiopian famine of the early 80s, possibly the first and most shocking western TV news coverage of a famine?
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    OPs position seems to be that primitive societies are more resilient against any event that disrupts technological capabilities. I agree with that. Your position seems to be that primitive societies are a horrible place to live and if it's a choice between the two, no sane person would argue for a return to primativism. I agree with that too. There's a 'third way' that seems to be gaining some ground among luddites, preppers, off-gridders and primitivists. The idea is to take full advantage of modern technologies but also devote a portion of resources and time to maintaining the capability to do things 'the old way'. So, be 'on the grid' but combine it with on-premise solar/wind/hydro/genny. Use all the appliances in your modern kitchen but go into the woods a few times a year and test your ability to make fire from sticks. Buy goods from the supermarket but still grow a portion of your food at home. This third way is far from flawless. It's still a gamble, not unlike Pascal's Wager: You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world, and you're double-spending to maintain both in parallel. But if you can approach it as a hobbyist, it can be a pretty fun and challenging pastime to get invested in.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      This is veering into the "prepper" debate, which the Economist clearly wanted to set up with their disaster-porn writing in the article. But the key question has to be: individual or collective resilience? Yes, it's not a straight up conflict, but I do think things could be greatly improved if people kept asking questions about collective preparation for crises, improving the civic and governmental responses to them, and (in the case under discussion) not ignoring problems simply because they are uncomfortable and expensive.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Too many people for hunting meat to be remotely viable, probably by at least a 100, maybe a 1000. Everyone growing their own food is subsistence agriculture, and that cannot support the population, either.
  - adam 9y ago
    Thanks for bringing up this simple fact. Being skilled in hunting, fishing, etc. still doesn't mean you're actually going to be able to find game with any kind of sustained outage going on, unless you are in a very remote part of America given the numbers of people (and fellow skilled hunters) who will be in your same predicament.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Eventually, they'll be hunting each other. Until the population drops back to the subsistence level. But of course, international aid would kick in, well before it got to that. One hopes, anyway.
    - BatFastard 9y ago
      It would take years to get into place the infrastructure needed to supply aid for 300 million people. But the population would be greatly reduced by that time.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Yeah, you need to be realistic.
  - athenot 9y ago
    It's a first world fallacy that you need to eat steak every day—or any other large animal for that matter. It doesn't take a lot of land to raise chickens and with a few, you already have more eggs than you know what to do, ergo you can pool that with neighbors. Someone can own a cow, which requires 1 acre of pasture but produces enough milk for many families. If you want to see what this looks like at scale, just look at the countryside in Europe a century ago. Villages are mostly townhouses all huddled together, often with long-stretching back yards supporting vegetable gardens, and fields all around. Is that hard work? You bet! A lot more physically demanding than city life. But also more sustainable. The downside of course being that there's so much focus on basic sustenance that few people can devote time to occupations of the mind (which is primarily what cities are devoted to). It seems over time the 2 models have fought each other and the city has won, but a question to ask is if this has been at the cost of resilliency. To me, this is the attraction of suburbia. Not the nice lawns (though I have one) or country clubs, but the ability to have one foot in the city and keep at least a toe in the countryside, with my own vegetables.
- abraae 9y ago
  I wouldn't compare it to the lifestyle of someone in West Africa, but we have an off grid cabin that we built the infrastructure up from nothing. Such excitement to achieve the milestones we take for granted back in the burbs. A fire pit. Rain water tank. A sheltered long drop to crap in. Solar electricity. Hot running water and a sink. A shower. Internet. Every one achieved was a huge leap forward in comfort. It really helped me get perspective on what you really need to live, and cured us of any desire to strive for a bigger and bigger house with immense walk-in wardrobes.
dEnigma 9y ago
"But the scale of the potential impact is mind-concentrating" I've never heard this expression before. Is it common in English? Sounds to me like it is a descendant of "mind bottling" which again is a corruption of "mind boggling".
- qqg3 9y ago
  Mind-blowing. Mind-boggling. These are the only two I think I am familiar with, never heard 'mind-concentrating' before nor does it make much sense.
- _petronius 9y ago
  I've definitely heard the phrase "concentrates the mind" when describing something so concerning that it takes away attention from other things to be dealt with. It's quite uncommon, though. "Mind-concentrating" makes sense as an adverbial formulation of that phrase.
- jpbutler 9y ago
  I believe it's a reference to Samuel Johnson's quote: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
  - dEnigma 9y ago
    Interesting, hadn't heard about this.
- Angostura 9y ago
  Just The Economist being a little playful with language. It primes the reader with the connotations of phrases such as 'mind-blowing' but then steps away and uses under-statement. The result is a mildly humorous collision in the reader's mind.
equalunique 9y ago
In South Florida, the 3 days since Irma have been hell. Without power, homes have become saunas.
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  The majority of Florida's population growth coincided w the widespread introduction of air conditioning.
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    The majority of population growth in the entire south coincided with AC.
    - BoiledCabbage 9y ago
      > The majority of population growth in the entire south coincided with AC. That's pretty hard for me to believe. People had been living in the South since before the formation of this country... Do you have any stats to back that up?
      - 0xfeba 9y ago
        Google provided these: https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/06/cities-might-not-exist-without-air-conditioning/2399/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/06/cities-might-not-exist-... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepin-it-cool-how-the-air-conditioner-made-modern-america/241892/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepi... https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/024/ https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/024/
  - equalunique 9y ago
    This I would agree with. Actually, having grown up in Florida, it really irks me when I go up north and stay in households during the summer. It seems like Floridians take air conditioning seriously, whereas northerners don't see it as a priority. Growing up in a hot place and always wanting to be in a cool place, sometimes it's just odd living with people who grew up in colder places that yearn for warmth.
andyfleming 9y ago
I remember seeing an announcement about an action by Obama to prepare for this. Not sure how much substance there is to it, but thought it might be relevant. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/10/13/executive-order-coordinating-efforts-prepare-nation-space-weather-events https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/1...
sandworm101 9y ago
Why are rock climbers needed to get people out of lifts? Ive been stuck in a couple. Opening the doors and climbing out didnt involve ropes, let alone a fire department.
- Mc_Big_G 9y ago
  A couple? I'd love to know where this can happen multiple times to the same person so I can avoid it like the plague.
  - sandworm101 9y ago
    I used to work in film/TV. Power failures. Fire Alarms. I was in one elevator that stopped because the overweight sensor was tripped. Getting out is normally just a matter of forcing the doors.
- planteen 9y ago
  I thought the same thing. I lived in a crappy building in college where the elevator broke all of the time. I just used the stairs, but some people insisted on using the elevator. They would pull the doors open and climb out on a floor. Not only that, as a rock climber, what the hell are you going to do to help somebody? Set a rope at the top of the shaft somehow, rappel onto the elevator car, open the door, and give them a jumar? Or setup a haul system? Most casual rock climbers are not proficient at these things to the point where they should be attempting rescues.
philfrasty 9y ago
Very good book on this topic based on a scenario-study from the German government. Study was researching what happens to society in case of a large scale energy outage. https://www.amazon.de/dp/3442380294 https://www.amazon.de/dp/3442380294 https://www.amazon.de/dp/1784161888 https://www.amazon.de/dp/1784161888 (English) Study (German) http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/pdf/publikationen/berichte/TAB-Arbeitsbericht-ab141.pdf http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/pdf/publikationen/berich... Study (English) http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/en/pdf/publications/books/petermann-etal-2011-141.pdf http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/en/pdf/publications/books/p... edit: study added
- sarnu 9y ago
  I can second that, this book is really worth reading.
- baxtr 9y ago
  Why do you think the book is good? I've read it too, but I was not impressed. a) style and story was actually quite boring from my point of view b) I believe that the systems we have in place are much more resilient than people think (my dad was an electrical engineer building grids all over the world, I got my hypotheses from him :)) Really just asking, since I'm interested why this book is so well received
  - wil421 9y ago
    Agreed, Dad is an EE as well. From what I gather it would be easy to cause localized disruption but harder to cause a long lasting total outage. Then again this is US only. I've been to Nicaragua before when lightening hit a power line. It took them over 3 days to get power back to the portion of the country I was in. It was such a common issue everyone has generators they would switch on, from hotels and restaurants to homes.
macintux 9y ago
Wait, 5-10 billion USD for something that would prevent the complete collapse of civilization and Congress won't pony up the money?
- bbctol 9y ago
  Unless voters make it a priority, Congress won't do a damn thing. EDIT: Which is how democracy should work!
  - talmand 9y ago
    I do believe that trying to prevent the collapse of our civilization is one of the expected duties, with a high priority, of an elected official.
    - macintux 9y ago
      That's the key distinction between a democracy and a republic. In a republic, we expect our elected officials to be smarter than we are about how to spend money.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  You find this surprising?
  - macintux 9y ago
    I was surprised the price tag was so low.
- jerf 9y ago
  It probably isn't as irrational as it sounds. I wish I still had a link to it, but I saw a more serious analysis that points out that the amount of ground an EMP nuke can cover has the radius go up linearly as the yield increases, and that the nuke that North Korea had would only be strong enough to knock out a radius of some rather small number of miles. I don't quite recall exactly but I want to say it's on the order of ten. At this point, it's pretty likely that the EMP radius of the North Korea tech is smaller than its inaccuracy if they actually tried to hit us right now, meaning they might just nuke a 10 mile radius in the ocean, or in the mountains or something. The idea that one little nuke from North Korea could take out the whole of the United States in one shot is fantasy, so defending against that is not necessarily a high priority. For further evidence for this, consider that if entire countries could be nuked back to the stone age so easily, the Cold War likely would have ended differently, and much sooner. You want to take about "taking out the entire United States" in one shot, look to the Big Nuke in the Sky. Or those targeted terrorist scenarios. (Which are still harder than they sound, honestly. Trying to coordinate such strikes such that they all go off at once without a hitch and with no possible response sounds easy to those who have never tried it, as if it's as easy as just telling everyone to fire at 11:32am or something. But there's a lot of issues between the idea and the reality. There aren't all that many instances of that working in history, and even the ones that come close still have failures, like 9/11 did.) But the simple reality is probably that it is impossible to insure society against this level of disaster. We already have 7 billion people in the world, very few of which are willing to agree that they can forgo food and water and such now to help insure against such things, and the system basically hums along at capacity. To build such hardened infrastructure would require that we raise the standard to the point that the system would then be humming along at well over capacity, which basically means in the attempt to prevent the disaster we'd be bringing the exact same disaster upon ourselves.
drewg123 9y ago
How vulnerable are off-grid solar setups to this sort of EMP?
- thinkcontext 9y ago
  Charge controller, inverter and blocking diode could be fried. Keep spares in a Faraday bag.
  - snowwindwaves 9y ago
    What about all the junctions on the solar cells? They are no different from other transistors
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  Nuclear EMP would mean Nuclear war, which means there's not much sunlight getting through anyway
kensai 9y ago
At least our Bitcoin won't be lost since our wallets will be decentralized. Still, I won't be able to pay anywhere near the blast zone! :p
- amluto 9y ago
  No, it'll be lost. With widespread telecom failures, the miners won't be able to reliably communicate, so the network will partition and will reorganize at random. People love to think of Bitcoin as impervious, but it's subject to the CAP theorem just like every other distributed system.
  - shawabawa3 9y ago
    It will certainly struggle but there are clear rules for how bitcoin will behave in a network split - the chain with the most work wins. As long as the network comes back up at some point no bitcoins will be lost. Some might be double spent though
    - Cerium 9y ago
      Which I think agrees with the parent post right? If there is a network partition, and people attempt to keep using bitcoin, then there will be consistency issues.
    - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
      you might end up with a number of isolated BTC forks though. E.g. imagine if all transatlantic/transpacific communication was lost for a few days, america would have it's own chain, and people would not be willing to switch to a fork without their transactions on as they wouldn't be able to recover they goods they traded for the BTC at the time of the transaction
      - Diederich 9y ago
        It's kind of worse than that. The various (temporary) islands, by default, would not make any decision to 'switch' to different islands. As islands reconnect, each time that happens, the larger island wins, and the smaller island automatically switches over.
devmunchies 9y ago
the chaos scenario lasted for 6 months and they estimated 7m people dying. So is the lesson to have 6 months worth of food and water storage in your home and maybe some propane tanks?
- in_cahoots 9y ago
  No, because as soon as other people catch on to the fact that's you're relatively well off, you've got looters to deal with. You'd need a way to hide your supplies and the discipline to ensure that nobody else can catch on.
  - mullen 9y ago
    Or a gun or two.
- defined 9y ago
  You need about 1 gallon of potable water per adult person per day. For 6 months and a household of three people, that would require 540 gallons (2052 liters) of water. That's about 110 water-cooler sized bottles of water. I'm not sure where in your home you would fit that. A small swimming pool would easily hold that, but keeping the water clean and potable would be very difficult. I would guess you'd need to have a special water tank made, and to avoid detection or damage, it would probably need to be underground. How the water would stay drinkable is another challenge. Just saying that the logistics around long-term survival appear to be daunting and expensive. Maybe those "crazy" survivalists are not so crazy after all.
  - drusepth 9y ago
    For water, you probably have much better luck finding a place (home) next to a natural spring, while leaving the storage available in your home/bunker to food rations and other supplies.
aequitas 9y ago
There is this interesting old documentary with a similar premise called Connections by James Burke: (first episode) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s01e01-the-trigger-effect_tech http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s... It uses the 1965 New York power outage as starting point for the discussion on how modern society relies on technology and the consequences of a breakdown. It then goes through the technology tree from the humble plow all the way up to aerospace and how seemingly unrelated things cause us to end up in our current technological state (like how a excess of linnen lead to cheaper paper and widespread literacy). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
- TremendousJudge 9y ago
  Connections is absolutely brilliant. It's definitely one of my favorite TV shows, ever. Definitely worth checking out
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  The opening scene, and Swissair flight number, gave me chills re-watching it recently. Coincindence, but one hell of a doozey. Great series as well.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I don't recall anymore the name, but once I read SciFi book where mankid was back into the middle-age kind of society, with computers and electricity sources relegated to some sort of temples. It was kind of interesting.
- arnioxux 9y ago
  I have fond childhood memories of the 2003 blackout in NYC[1]. Few cars were driving around because traffic lights were off and intersections became all-way stops. It was around ~90 degrees so food was going to spoil very quickly unrefrigerated. The surprising thing that happened next was that people started up impromptu block parties with people pitching in ice cream and all the meat they had in their fridges for BBQs in the streets! Being city folks, you don't really trust your neighbors let alone talk to them. But I got to meet a lot of them that day and it turns out people aren't that scary and are very willing to help one another in times of need. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
tryingagainbro 9y ago
If all it takes is $4 billion to secure it and we don't, we kinda deserve it to happen. The same country has and is spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan.. On the other side, someone mention Pascal's Wager: storing a few basic needs and self defense weapons (were legal), costs practically nothing now but it could save your family's life. It's not a sure way but it's much better to have them then not. Even in cramped apartments you could store stuff for a week or two; in private homes, you're talking months. IIRC, tap water in dark areas with a drop of bleach for liter will last for quite a while. Think 55gallon drums, replaced every so often.
- brentm 9y ago
  Agreed. It leads me to believe that $4b is either inaccurate or it's not as simple as clearing $4B from the budget and selecting a couple of contractors.
  - hwillis 9y ago
    Nope! It's probably quite accurate. The article opens with the March 1989 geomagnetic storm which caused massive blackouts in Canada. Canada implemented upgrades like the ones the US should get, to a cost of 1.2 billion[1]. Of course the US grid is significantly more powerful but the Canadian grid is spread much more sparsely, making it more vulnerable- regardless, the cost is certainly within the same order of magnitude, as the US grid only consumes ~8x more power and Canada is larger. It really speaks more to the absurd level of war spending than anything else- and it truly was absurd. Trillions in direct, congressional spending. We shipped 12 billion on pallets[2] to Iraq and lost it, and most people don't even remember it. The cost of revolutionizing the US power infrastructure is literally peanuts compared to what we have spent in the middle east. [1]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-power-grid-is-getting-smarter-but-is-it-tougher-1.1053093 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-power-grid-is-getting-smar... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
- legulere 9y ago
  Having weapons makes it more likely for violent acts to happen. Additionally there's a high risk that you will hurt yourself. And then there's the effect on the society: a society based on trust is more productive and safe than a society based on mistrust.
flipfloppity 9y ago
The article doesn't even mention the Carrington Event in 1859, which actually hit earth (with limited damage due to lack of widespread electronics). On the spectrum of existential threats, this one seems to be fairly underrated.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
BatFastard 9y ago
If the North Korean's were not considering this before, they surely are now!
seszett 9y ago
There's an old (1943) but good, Sci-Fi book about the disappearance of electricity. It's French (Ravage by René Barjavel) but apparently an English translation exists (Ashes, Ashes) [1]. It takes place in 2052, but in a world mostly comparable to ours regarding reliance on electricity. Especially active reliance for some things that do not just become dead or useless, but immediately dangerous. I expect it not to be very well known to US and UK readers, but I think it's worth the read, in France it's usually considered to be among the best and most important Sci-Fi stories. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes,_Ashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes,_Ashes
jessriedel 9y ago
See this introduction to the global risk of geomagnetic storms from the Open Philanthropy Project. http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/geomagnetic-storms-introduction-risk http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/geomagnetic-storms-intr...
prokes 9y ago
One book that examines this scenario is "One Second After" by William Forstchen [0]. It involves a coordinated EMP attack over America and the effects on a small town in North Carolina. In the same vein as The Road but more detailed in how society devolves i.e. how people behave and what is valuable / scarce as the event progresses. It is not pretty but a fascinating read that will make you consider such a scenario and how you can better prepare. [0] http://a.co/2DWrTJ5 http://a.co/2DWrTJ5
- morganvachon 9y ago
  That sounds almost exactly like Alas, Babylon but with an EMP instead of direct nuclear strikes.
  - Raidion 9y ago
    'Alas, Babylon' was an amazing read as a teenager. Really opened up my eyes to the fact that war was actually a scary thing because it has the stark realism without the shock and horror that allows you to compartmentalize it. You start to realize that we do take a whole lot for granted in terms of simple needs.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Speaking of resilience, this article fails to render under either Outline.com or Pocket, due to JS dependencies and complexity.
secabeen 9y ago
There was an old article in Omni in the late 80s or early 90s that claimed if you did a coordinated attack on only 6 transformer stations across the US, it would take down the whole grid for months. Given that they've never caught the people behind the Metcalfe attack, I do wonder if it's still possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
- jayess 9y ago
  That event still creeps me out. Clearly a sophisticated attack. Penetration testing? Dry run?
  - hwillis 9y ago
    Hanlon's razor, eg Max Headroom[1]. Just a couple smart idiots with enough intelligence to override a network signal (a hell of a feat, from what I've gathered) and enough stupidity to use that to moon thousands of people. The US is full of militias. All you really need is for one to happen to have a cop/ex-cop and a telecom/electrical guy in the same one, and you get this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_...
CapitalistCartr 9y ago
There is a book on the topic called "One Second After". I'm not a fan of it; I think his scenario is excessively dark, but its worth reading. On a similar note, living in Tampa, being prepared is on people's minds right now. No, you can't borrow my chain saw! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After
fencepost 9y ago
I'm surprised to not see any discussion about the cost to effectively harden a home solar system (or business one depending on size) against this kind of surge and damage. I could easily see locations with adequate rooftop solar to be mostly grid independent becoming a valuable part of rebuilding. If nothing else they might provide powered community centers and a way for people to recharge surviving small electronics. I can kind of understand why utilities would not be going ahead in investing in this on their own, because they are basically having to look at interests of their investors and anyone spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to protect effectively their part of the grid would probably not last long in a position. In addition, even if they took steps it's entirely possible or even likely that they would be negatively impacted or completely neutralized by incoming damage from other parts of the grid. It's also worth keeping in mind that the power grid in the US is not uniform. I believe the Texas is mostly a separate grid, and I'm pretty sure that there are multiple other places where there's some cross connect but the bulk of power control is through separate regional grids.
cmurf 9y ago
It's amusing, and also damning, the idea that American civil society, designed pre-electricity, is somehow incapable of retaining civility without electricity. I say amusing in a very condescending sense. We think of ourselves as modern, advanced, and really seriously quite a bit better, than our ancestors of only 150 years ago. And yet if the prediction of our devolution into uncivilized primal behaviors is true, our assessment as advanced or better is absurd on the face of it. But more interesting, is why is this the case? Have we so much more trust in technology, and so much less trust in civil institutions over time? And in a moment where we need to shift from one to the other, we simply can't do it, and therefore civilization implodes? If so, that's embarrassing. Or it should be.

181 points by clra 9y ago

Moving through West Africa I admire the resilience of people here. In many places, the power being ON is the surprise, not when it's OFF. I often wonder what would happen to the world if we lost power, or running water, or grocery stores, or really any of our "fancy" infrastructure. In my experience and estimation, a massive percentage of people in Developed countries would wither and die, while undeveloped countries would continue to function almost exactly as they do now. I think there is a lot to be said for knowing how to grow your own food, hunt your own meat, build your own shelter, etc.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago
Most, if not all, of us here on HN would be out of our normal jobs. There isn't really any immediate need for developers when there isn't any electricity.
- grecy 9y ago
  Think bigger. Almost overnight you would have no access to food or clean drinking water. There would certainly be no gasoline, heating, cooling, showers, etc. You wouldn't even be able to "get" money - ATMs won't work and you certainly won't be able to use your smart phone. So you would not be able to buy life necessities even if someone were selling them. A job will be the last thing you think about.
  - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    I was mostly being tongue-in-cheek. Of course we wouldn't care about a job at that point...its also why I have the required amount of necessities ready to go in case it does.
    - kwhitefoot 9y ago
      > the required amount of necessities ready to go What is the required amount? And where where would you go?
      - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
        I should say I have my required amount of necessities... Where would I go? It depends
  - zyb09 9y ago
    I think what he is trying to say is, that developers will be useless dead weight in this kind of post apocalyptic scenario. Everybody will be out of there normal day jobs, but a lot of people can contribute to survival with their skillset. Doctors, mechanics, farmers, caretakers, hand labor, etc. will be in high demand. Office people & developers, not so much.
    - talmand 9y ago
      Am I one of the rare developers that grew up in rural USA that has remnants of what are now known as survival skills but I just consider as childhood fun? I always tell my team that if things go bad then I'll be the one keeping them alive.
      - zyb09 9y ago
        You sound like a good guy to be around :)
        talmand 9y ago
        I like my team, I'll keep them alive. That way when society returns our children will be able to take over our webdev duties.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      We are not dependent upon any specific technology. We are "fixers", and computers are just our hammer that makes everything else look like a nail. Take them away, and the other, lesser tools in the toolbox are still there. I intend to attach myself to a raider strongman, to provide solutions to their difficult problems, such as how to crack an entrenched survivalist's defenses and get his stockpile out. I'm a decent hand at basic chemistry, too, like organic extractions and distillations. There are many potential princes, and Machiavelli only needs one of them.
- dsq 9y ago
  All developed countries have numerous storage depots, the existence and location of which are only accessible in some online form. Even offline digital form such as a downloaded wikipedia. So a computer-literate person might be of use to a post downfall warlord, plunked down before a laptop powered by a diesel generator and ordered to "do the magic" perl scripts to retrieve all Costco warehouses within a fifty mile radius...
nopinsight 9y ago
Growing food is not that hard. If necessity calls for it, people can learn to do it sufficiently well from books and neighbors. More challenging issues are access to clean drinking water and fertile land, safety from pillaging, and getting proper medical care.
- FooHentai 9y ago
  >Growing food is not that hard. If necessity calls for it, people can learn to do it sufficiently well from books and neighbors. Disagree. It's pretty hard, from a cold start, to reach the point of producing a significant number of calories independently. It's a far cry from keeping a veggie/herb garden, and even harder in turn to do it over a number of successive years. Also, if we're specifically considering a scenario without power, the preservation of that food through the year is a major challenge in itself. >More challenging issues are access to clean drinking water and fertile land, safety from pillaging, and getting proper medical care. Absolutely agree.
- Angostura 9y ago
  I encourage you to watch the first episode of James Burke's original Connections, if you believe that.
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  Wouldn't winter come and kill all your crops? How much food are you planning on growing?
- GlenTheMachine 9y ago
  I grew up in a farming family, and I run a hobby sheep farm. Supplementing your food supply with a family garden isn't that difficult. Completely supplying yourself and your family with enough calories to live via farming is enormously difficult, both in terms of physical labor and in terms of skillset. It also takes at least 45 days, from a standing start, to get anything edible, and that's if you are willing to suvive completely on turnips (which have the shortest yield period of any domesticated vegetable crop). Corn, beans, and potatoes, which are going to be the crops that provide the bulk of your calories in a survival situation, require roughly 100 days to yield, and they only grow during the right season. Furthermore, without either industrial fertilizer or an established farming system that includes animals, you will only grow those crops once before your land begins to be depleted and your yields in subsequent years will drop until they are no longer survivable in approximately year three. You are growing the animals as much or more for manure as for meat. And none of that includes the vagaries of the weather and various plant diseases that can decimate your crop. Basically, if you don't have access to fresh water, you're doomed immediately. If you don't have at least a 12 month supply of food in your basement, you're doomed in two to three months. If you haven't already implemented a closed nitrogen system using composting and animal agriculture, but happen to have land, seeds and a hoe, you're doomed in two to three years. If you have done all of those things you can probably survive for a decade ot three, if you can outlast the looters. For reference, the pioneers who cleared the forests in the midwest would go in on year one and girdle all of the trees. Then they'd go back home. In year two, they'd plant turnips and pumpkins, which would grow among the dead trees, and they'd survive on those for the first couple of years as the stumps rotted. It took several years to establish a sustainable farm. The pioneers who went eg to Utah, where there were no forests, would plant immediately, but the first crop was just seed potatoes, which they would harvest and store - they couldn't carry enough to eat, and were essentially bootstrapping a potato crop from what they could carry. They carried enough food to survive through a complete growing season, augmented by hunting and foraging. It was a hard life, they were living hand to mouth, and they already knew what they were doing.
adventured 9y ago
That's a nice fantasy I suppose. You're no doubt aware of how much West Africa's population has increased since WW2, such that they now have hundreds of millions of people. Most of those people - as in the West - can only exist due to increasingly advanced, connected economic and technological systems. Nigeria's population as an example, has gone from 45 million to 186 million since 1960. That extreme population growth has equally big requirements that are necessary to keep all of those people from dying. In a given year, the West is directly responsible for tens of millions of people being alive in Africa. Routine food aid and supply, sometimes preventing famine and random general food scarcity. This has been a non-stop effort for decades and continues in many places across Sub-Saharan Africa. Medication supply, preventing millions of deaths from everything from HIV/AIDS to TB to malaria to infection. That includes invention, manufacturing and delivery of drugs. Outbreak intervention. The substantial response to the 2014-2016 ebola outbreak as an example, which stopped it from becoming a catastrophe. A massive percentage of people - represented by typical extreme population growth curves of the last ~50 years - in low development nations would die in your scenario. If you need a recent example of how fragile the lower development nations are (in part due to their commonly vast population expansions and weak supporting infrastructure), you need look no further than the global food riots from the commodity bubble of ten years ago, as it dramatically rocked the world's poorest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_price_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_pri...
- username130917 9y ago
  I dont think food aids were responsible for the massive growth in Nigeria's population though improved healthcare definitely played a role in that. I think the biggest contributor to population growth has been the consistent susidizing of the local economy from oil income. Also, Nigeria was able to handle the ebola epidemic that got to its shores with little to no outside assistance.
  - notfromhere 9y ago
    its petroleum fertilizer. places like mexico were famine-ridden in the 40s until they figured out how to make industrial fertilizer
tpeo 9y ago
Is "resilience" really the word for what's on your mind? As far as I understand, "resilience" is the ability to recover from loss. But if electricity is rare enough to be treated as a gift rather than a given, should it be considered a loss when it goes away?
mirimir 9y ago
> I think there is a lot to be said for knowing how to grow your own food, hunt your own meat, build your own shelter, etc. That's true enough. The problem is the people with guns, who will take all that from you. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very depressing read. Its scenario is worse than grid collapse, in that nothing could be grown. But there wouldn't be much commercial agriculture without electricity.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Having a .45 as your disaster/emergency preparedness plan only works in places like CA and a few other coastal states where the odds are very low that any random other person is packing. I would not advise it.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    It doesn't scale well, though. Especially because serious looters will have probably hit National Guard armories, before getting to you :( Indeed, once things get bad enough, the most serious looters will be former police and military.
    - Danihan 9y ago
      My personal fantasy always has me going underground for about 10 years, then coming out once any violent purges are over, well-rested and ready to repopulate. Resilient, like a cockroach. I always think that particularly when I watch "The Walking Dead." I'd just find a nice bomb shelter and try to write my the great American novel for about 5-10 years. No trying to seek out other survivors, no trying to rebuild, etc. I mean, I'm pretty introverted (and also very overworked at the moment,) so really that just sounds like a nice vacation. Maybe in reality I'd get tired of it pretty quickly. But being bored and lonely for a few years still beats ending up as cannibal jerky hands-down.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        Combine the best of both. Carjack your way to the boondocks with everything you need. Box truck + travel trailer + contents of a Walmart garden center would be a damn good start. /s (should be obvious)
pjc50 9y ago
> In my experience and estimation, a massive percentage of people in Developed countries would wither and die, while undeveloped countries would continue to function almost exactly as they do now. Well, yes. That's what the infrastructure is for. Do not romanticise places without infrastructure; there you simply have a much higher risk of dying from something that westerners would consider preventable. Like maternity. Growing your own food works until there's a crop failure. Who here is old enough to remember the Ethiopian famine of the early 80s, possibly the first and most shocking western TV news coverage of a famine?
- FooHentai 9y ago
  OPs position seems to be that primitive societies are more resilient against any event that disrupts technological capabilities. I agree with that. Your position seems to be that primitive societies are a horrible place to live and if it's a choice between the two, no sane person would argue for a return to primativism. I agree with that too. There's a 'third way' that seems to be gaining some ground among luddites, preppers, off-gridders and primitivists. The idea is to take full advantage of modern technologies but also devote a portion of resources and time to maintaining the capability to do things 'the old way'. So, be 'on the grid' but combine it with on-premise solar/wind/hydro/genny. Use all the appliances in your modern kitchen but go into the woods a few times a year and test your ability to make fire from sticks. Buy goods from the supermarket but still grow a portion of your food at home. This third way is far from flawless. It's still a gamble, not unlike Pascal's Wager: You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world, and you're double-spending to maintain both in parallel. But if you can approach it as a hobbyist, it can be a pretty fun and challenging pastime to get invested in.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    This is veering into the "prepper" debate, which the Economist clearly wanted to set up with their disaster-porn writing in the article. But the key question has to be: individual or collective resilience? Yes, it's not a straight up conflict, but I do think things could be greatly improved if people kept asking questions about collective preparation for crises, improving the civic and governmental responses to them, and (in the case under discussion) not ignoring problems simply because they are uncomfortable and expensive.
WalterBright 9y ago
Too many people for hunting meat to be remotely viable, probably by at least a 100, maybe a 1000. Everyone growing their own food is subsistence agriculture, and that cannot support the population, either.
- adam 9y ago
  Thanks for bringing up this simple fact. Being skilled in hunting, fishing, etc. still doesn't mean you're actually going to be able to find game with any kind of sustained outage going on, unless you are in a very remote part of America given the numbers of people (and fellow skilled hunters) who will be in your same predicament.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Eventually, they'll be hunting each other. Until the population drops back to the subsistence level. But of course, international aid would kick in, well before it got to that. One hopes, anyway.
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    It would take years to get into place the infrastructure needed to supply aid for 300 million people. But the population would be greatly reduced by that time.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Yeah, you need to be realistic.
- athenot 9y ago
  It's a first world fallacy that you need to eat steak every day—or any other large animal for that matter. It doesn't take a lot of land to raise chickens and with a few, you already have more eggs than you know what to do, ergo you can pool that with neighbors. Someone can own a cow, which requires 1 acre of pasture but produces enough milk for many families. If you want to see what this looks like at scale, just look at the countryside in Europe a century ago. Villages are mostly townhouses all huddled together, often with long-stretching back yards supporting vegetable gardens, and fields all around. Is that hard work? You bet! A lot more physically demanding than city life. But also more sustainable. The downside of course being that there's so much focus on basic sustenance that few people can devote time to occupations of the mind (which is primarily what cities are devoted to). It seems over time the 2 models have fought each other and the city has won, but a question to ask is if this has been at the cost of resilliency. To me, this is the attraction of suburbia. Not the nice lawns (though I have one) or country clubs, but the ability to have one foot in the city and keep at least a toe in the countryside, with my own vegetables.
abraae 9y ago
I wouldn't compare it to the lifestyle of someone in West Africa, but we have an off grid cabin that we built the infrastructure up from nothing. Such excitement to achieve the milestones we take for granted back in the burbs. A fire pit. Rain water tank. A sheltered long drop to crap in. Solar electricity. Hot running water and a sink. A shower. Internet. Every one achieved was a huge leap forward in comfort. It really helped me get perspective on what you really need to live, and cured us of any desire to strive for a bigger and bigger house with immense walk-in wardrobes.

dEnigma 9y ago

"But the scale of the potential impact is mind-concentrating" I've never heard this expression before. Is it common in English? Sounds to me like it is a descendant of "mind bottling" which again is a corruption of "mind boggling".

qqg3 9y ago
Mind-blowing. Mind-boggling. These are the only two I think I am familiar with, never heard 'mind-concentrating' before nor does it make much sense.
_petronius 9y ago
I've definitely heard the phrase "concentrates the mind" when describing something so concerning that it takes away attention from other things to be dealt with. It's quite uncommon, though. "Mind-concentrating" makes sense as an adverbial formulation of that phrase.
jpbutler 9y ago
I believe it's a reference to Samuel Johnson's quote: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
- dEnigma 9y ago
  Interesting, hadn't heard about this.
Angostura 9y ago
Just The Economist being a little playful with language. It primes the reader with the connotations of phrases such as 'mind-blowing' but then steps away and uses under-statement. The result is a mildly humorous collision in the reader's mind.

equalunique 9y ago

In South Florida, the 3 days since Irma have been hell. Without power, homes have become saunas.

amigoingtodie 9y ago
The majority of Florida's population growth coincided w the widespread introduction of air conditioning.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  The majority of population growth in the entire south coincided with AC.
  - BoiledCabbage 9y ago
    > The majority of population growth in the entire south coincided with AC. That's pretty hard for me to believe. People had been living in the South since before the formation of this country... Do you have any stats to back that up?
    - 0xfeba 9y ago
      Google provided these: https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/06/cities-might-not-exist-without-air-conditioning/2399/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/06/cities-might-not-exist-... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepin-it-cool-how-the-air-conditioner-made-modern-america/241892/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepi... https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/024/ https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/024/
- equalunique 9y ago
  This I would agree with. Actually, having grown up in Florida, it really irks me when I go up north and stay in households during the summer. It seems like Floridians take air conditioning seriously, whereas northerners don't see it as a priority. Growing up in a hot place and always wanting to be in a cool place, sometimes it's just odd living with people who grew up in colder places that yearn for warmth.

andyfleming 9y ago

I remember seeing an announcement about an action by Obama to prepare for this. Not sure how much substance there is to it, but thought it might be relevant. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/10/13/executive-order-coordinating-efforts-prepare-nation-space-weather-events https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/1...

sandworm101 9y ago

Why are rock climbers needed to get people out of lifts? Ive been stuck in a couple. Opening the doors and climbing out didnt involve ropes, let alone a fire department.

Mc_Big_G 9y ago
A couple? I'd love to know where this can happen multiple times to the same person so I can avoid it like the plague.
- sandworm101 9y ago
  I used to work in film/TV. Power failures. Fire Alarms. I was in one elevator that stopped because the overweight sensor was tripped. Getting out is normally just a matter of forcing the doors.
planteen 9y ago
I thought the same thing. I lived in a crappy building in college where the elevator broke all of the time. I just used the stairs, but some people insisted on using the elevator. They would pull the doors open and climb out on a floor. Not only that, as a rock climber, what the hell are you going to do to help somebody? Set a rope at the top of the shaft somehow, rappel onto the elevator car, open the door, and give them a jumar? Or setup a haul system? Most casual rock climbers are not proficient at these things to the point where they should be attempting rescues.

philfrasty 9y ago

Very good book on this topic based on a scenario-study from the German government. Study was researching what happens to society in case of a large scale energy outage. https://www.amazon.de/dp/3442380294 https://www.amazon.de/dp/3442380294 https://www.amazon.de/dp/1784161888 https://www.amazon.de/dp/1784161888 (English) Study (German) http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/pdf/publikationen/berichte/TAB-Arbeitsbericht-ab141.pdf http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/pdf/publikationen/berich... Study (English) http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/en/pdf/publications/books/petermann-etal-2011-141.pdf http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/en/pdf/publications/books/p... edit: study added

sarnu 9y ago
I can second that, this book is really worth reading.
baxtr 9y ago
Why do you think the book is good? I've read it too, but I was not impressed. a) style and story was actually quite boring from my point of view b) I believe that the systems we have in place are much more resilient than people think (my dad was an electrical engineer building grids all over the world, I got my hypotheses from him :)) Really just asking, since I'm interested why this book is so well received
- wil421 9y ago
  Agreed, Dad is an EE as well. From what I gather it would be easy to cause localized disruption but harder to cause a long lasting total outage. Then again this is US only. I've been to Nicaragua before when lightening hit a power line. It took them over 3 days to get power back to the portion of the country I was in. It was such a common issue everyone has generators they would switch on, from hotels and restaurants to homes.

macintux 9y ago

Wait, 5-10 billion USD for something that would prevent the complete collapse of civilization and Congress won't pony up the money?

bbctol 9y ago
Unless voters make it a priority, Congress won't do a damn thing. EDIT: Which is how democracy should work!
- talmand 9y ago
  I do believe that trying to prevent the collapse of our civilization is one of the expected duties, with a high priority, of an elected official.
  - macintux 9y ago
    That's the key distinction between a democracy and a republic. In a republic, we expect our elected officials to be smarter than we are about how to spend money.
Finnucane 9y ago
You find this surprising?
- macintux 9y ago
  I was surprised the price tag was so low.
jerf 9y ago
It probably isn't as irrational as it sounds. I wish I still had a link to it, but I saw a more serious analysis that points out that the amount of ground an EMP nuke can cover has the radius go up linearly as the yield increases, and that the nuke that North Korea had would only be strong enough to knock out a radius of some rather small number of miles. I don't quite recall exactly but I want to say it's on the order of ten. At this point, it's pretty likely that the EMP radius of the North Korea tech is smaller than its inaccuracy if they actually tried to hit us right now, meaning they might just nuke a 10 mile radius in the ocean, or in the mountains or something. The idea that one little nuke from North Korea could take out the whole of the United States in one shot is fantasy, so defending against that is not necessarily a high priority. For further evidence for this, consider that if entire countries could be nuked back to the stone age so easily, the Cold War likely would have ended differently, and much sooner. You want to take about "taking out the entire United States" in one shot, look to the Big Nuke in the Sky. Or those targeted terrorist scenarios. (Which are still harder than they sound, honestly. Trying to coordinate such strikes such that they all go off at once without a hitch and with no possible response sounds easy to those who have never tried it, as if it's as easy as just telling everyone to fire at 11:32am or something. But there's a lot of issues between the idea and the reality. There aren't all that many instances of that working in history, and even the ones that come close still have failures, like 9/11 did.) But the simple reality is probably that it is impossible to insure society against this level of disaster. We already have 7 billion people in the world, very few of which are willing to agree that they can forgo food and water and such now to help insure against such things, and the system basically hums along at capacity. To build such hardened infrastructure would require that we raise the standard to the point that the system would then be humming along at well over capacity, which basically means in the attempt to prevent the disaster we'd be bringing the exact same disaster upon ourselves.

drewg123 9y ago

How vulnerable are off-grid solar setups to this sort of EMP?

thinkcontext 9y ago
Charge controller, inverter and blocking diode could be fried. Keep spares in a Faraday bag.
- snowwindwaves 9y ago
  What about all the junctions on the solar cells? They are no different from other transistors
albertgoeswoof 9y ago
Nuclear EMP would mean Nuclear war, which means there's not much sunlight getting through anyway

kensai 9y ago

At least our Bitcoin won't be lost since our wallets will be decentralized. Still, I won't be able to pay anywhere near the blast zone! :p

amluto 9y ago
No, it'll be lost. With widespread telecom failures, the miners won't be able to reliably communicate, so the network will partition and will reorganize at random. People love to think of Bitcoin as impervious, but it's subject to the CAP theorem just like every other distributed system.
- shawabawa3 9y ago
  It will certainly struggle but there are clear rules for how bitcoin will behave in a network split - the chain with the most work wins. As long as the network comes back up at some point no bitcoins will be lost. Some might be double spent though
  - Cerium 9y ago
    Which I think agrees with the parent post right? If there is a network partition, and people attempt to keep using bitcoin, then there will be consistency issues.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    you might end up with a number of isolated BTC forks though. E.g. imagine if all transatlantic/transpacific communication was lost for a few days, america would have it's own chain, and people would not be willing to switch to a fork without their transactions on as they wouldn't be able to recover they goods they traded for the BTC at the time of the transaction
    - Diederich 9y ago
      It's kind of worse than that. The various (temporary) islands, by default, would not make any decision to 'switch' to different islands. As islands reconnect, each time that happens, the larger island wins, and the smaller island automatically switches over.

devmunchies 9y ago

the chaos scenario lasted for 6 months and they estimated 7m people dying. So is the lesson to have 6 months worth of food and water storage in your home and maybe some propane tanks?

in_cahoots 9y ago
No, because as soon as other people catch on to the fact that's you're relatively well off, you've got looters to deal with. You'd need a way to hide your supplies and the discipline to ensure that nobody else can catch on.
- mullen 9y ago
  Or a gun or two.
defined 9y ago
You need about 1 gallon of potable water per adult person per day. For 6 months and a household of three people, that would require 540 gallons (2052 liters) of water. That's about 110 water-cooler sized bottles of water. I'm not sure where in your home you would fit that. A small swimming pool would easily hold that, but keeping the water clean and potable would be very difficult. I would guess you'd need to have a special water tank made, and to avoid detection or damage, it would probably need to be underground. How the water would stay drinkable is another challenge. Just saying that the logistics around long-term survival appear to be daunting and expensive. Maybe those "crazy" survivalists are not so crazy after all.
- drusepth 9y ago
  For water, you probably have much better luck finding a place (home) next to a natural spring, while leaving the storage available in your home/bunker to food rations and other supplies.

aequitas 9y ago

There is this interesting old documentary with a similar premise called Connections by James Burke: (first episode) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s01e01-the-trigger-effect_tech http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s... It uses the 1965 New York power outage as starting point for the discussion on how modern society relies on technology and the consequences of a breakdown. It then goes through the technology tree from the humble plow all the way up to aerospace and how seemingly unrelated things cause us to end up in our current technological state (like how a excess of linnen lead to cheaper paper and widespread literacy). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

TremendousJudge 9y ago
Connections is absolutely brilliant. It's definitely one of my favorite TV shows, ever. Definitely worth checking out
dredmorbius 9y ago
The opening scene, and Swissair flight number, gave me chills re-watching it recently. Coincindence, but one hell of a doozey. Great series as well.
pjmlp 9y ago
I don't recall anymore the name, but once I read SciFi book where mankid was back into the middle-age kind of society, with computers and electricity sources relegated to some sort of temples. It was kind of interesting.
arnioxux 9y ago
I have fond childhood memories of the 2003 blackout in NYC[1]. Few cars were driving around because traffic lights were off and intersections became all-way stops. It was around ~90 degrees so food was going to spoil very quickly unrefrigerated. The surprising thing that happened next was that people started up impromptu block parties with people pitching in ice cream and all the meat they had in their fridges for BBQs in the streets! Being city folks, you don't really trust your neighbors let alone talk to them. But I got to meet a lot of them that day and it turns out people aren't that scary and are very willing to help one another in times of need. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

tryingagainbro 9y ago

If all it takes is $4 billion to secure it and we don't, we kinda deserve it to happen. The same country has and is spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan.. On the other side, someone mention Pascal's Wager: storing a few basic needs and self defense weapons (were legal), costs practically nothing now but it could save your family's life. It's not a sure way but it's much better to have them then not. Even in cramped apartments you could store stuff for a week or two; in private homes, you're talking months. IIRC, tap water in dark areas with a drop of bleach for liter will last for quite a while. Think 55gallon drums, replaced every so often.

brentm 9y ago
Agreed. It leads me to believe that $4b is either inaccurate or it's not as simple as clearing $4B from the budget and selecting a couple of contractors.
- hwillis 9y ago
  Nope! It's probably quite accurate. The article opens with the March 1989 geomagnetic storm which caused massive blackouts in Canada. Canada implemented upgrades like the ones the US should get, to a cost of 1.2 billion[1]. Of course the US grid is significantly more powerful but the Canadian grid is spread much more sparsely, making it more vulnerable- regardless, the cost is certainly within the same order of magnitude, as the US grid only consumes ~8x more power and Canada is larger. It really speaks more to the absurd level of war spending than anything else- and it truly was absurd. Trillions in direct, congressional spending. We shipped 12 billion on pallets[2] to Iraq and lost it, and most people don't even remember it. The cost of revolutionizing the US power infrastructure is literally peanuts compared to what we have spent in the middle east. [1]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-power-grid-is-getting-smarter-but-is-it-tougher-1.1053093 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-power-grid-is-getting-smar... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
legulere 9y ago
Having weapons makes it more likely for violent acts to happen. Additionally there's a high risk that you will hurt yourself. And then there's the effect on the society: a society based on trust is more productive and safe than a society based on mistrust.

flipfloppity 9y ago

The article doesn't even mention the Carrington Event in 1859, which actually hit earth (with limited damage due to lack of widespread electronics). On the spectrum of existential threats, this one seems to be fairly underrated.

mi100hael 9y ago
For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

BatFastard 9y ago

If the North Korean's were not considering this before, they surely are now!

seszett 9y ago

There's an old (1943) but good, Sci-Fi book about the disappearance of electricity. It's French (Ravage by René Barjavel) but apparently an English translation exists (Ashes, Ashes) [1]. It takes place in 2052, but in a world mostly comparable to ours regarding reliance on electricity. Especially active reliance for some things that do not just become dead or useless, but immediately dangerous. I expect it not to be very well known to US and UK readers, but I think it's worth the read, in France it's usually considered to be among the best and most important Sci-Fi stories. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes,_Ashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes,_Ashes

jessriedel 9y ago

See this introduction to the global risk of geomagnetic storms from the Open Philanthropy Project. http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/geomagnetic-storms-introduction-risk http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/geomagnetic-storms-intr...

prokes 9y ago

One book that examines this scenario is "One Second After" by William Forstchen [0]. It involves a coordinated EMP attack over America and the effects on a small town in North Carolina. In the same vein as The Road but more detailed in how society devolves i.e. how people behave and what is valuable / scarce as the event progresses. It is not pretty but a fascinating read that will make you consider such a scenario and how you can better prepare. [0] http://a.co/2DWrTJ5 http://a.co/2DWrTJ5

morganvachon 9y ago
That sounds almost exactly like Alas, Babylon but with an EMP instead of direct nuclear strikes.
- Raidion 9y ago
  'Alas, Babylon' was an amazing read as a teenager. Really opened up my eyes to the fact that war was actually a scary thing because it has the stark realism without the shock and horror that allows you to compartmentalize it. You start to realize that we do take a whole lot for granted in terms of simple needs.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Speaking of resilience, this article fails to render under either Outline.com or Pocket, due to JS dependencies and complexity.

secabeen 9y ago

There was an old article in Omni in the late 80s or early 90s that claimed if you did a coordinated attack on only 6 transformer stations across the US, it would take down the whole grid for months. Given that they've never caught the people behind the Metcalfe attack, I do wonder if it's still possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

jayess 9y ago
That event still creeps me out. Clearly a sophisticated attack. Penetration testing? Dry run?
- hwillis 9y ago
  Hanlon's razor, eg Max Headroom[1]. Just a couple smart idiots with enough intelligence to override a network signal (a hell of a feat, from what I've gathered) and enough stupidity to use that to moon thousands of people. The US is full of militias. All you really need is for one to happen to have a cop/ex-cop and a telecom/electrical guy in the same one, and you get this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_...

CapitalistCartr 9y ago

There is a book on the topic called "One Second After". I'm not a fan of it; I think his scenario is excessively dark, but its worth reading. On a similar note, living in Tampa, being prepared is on people's minds right now. No, you can't borrow my chain saw! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After

fencepost 9y ago

I'm surprised to not see any discussion about the cost to effectively harden a home solar system (or business one depending on size) against this kind of surge and damage. I could easily see locations with adequate rooftop solar to be mostly grid independent becoming a valuable part of rebuilding. If nothing else they might provide powered community centers and a way for people to recharge surviving small electronics. I can kind of understand why utilities would not be going ahead in investing in this on their own, because they are basically having to look at interests of their investors and anyone spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to protect effectively their part of the grid would probably not last long in a position. In addition, even if they took steps it's entirely possible or even likely that they would be negatively impacted or completely neutralized by incoming damage from other parts of the grid. It's also worth keeping in mind that the power grid in the US is not uniform. I believe the Texas is mostly a separate grid, and I'm pretty sure that there are multiple other places where there's some cross connect but the bulk of power control is through separate regional grids.

cmurf 9y ago

It's amusing, and also damning, the idea that American civil society, designed pre-electricity, is somehow incapable of retaining civility without electricity. I say amusing in a very condescending sense. We think of ourselves as modern, advanced, and really seriously quite a bit better, than our ancestors of only 150 years ago. And yet if the prediction of our devolution into uncivilized primal behaviors is true, our assessment as advanced or better is absurd on the face of it. But more interesting, is why is this the case? Have we so much more trust in technology, and so much less trust in civil institutions over time? And in a moment where we need to shift from one to the other, we simply can't do it, and therefore civilization implodes? If so, that's embarrassing. Or it should be.