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I don't really get the "nightmare" consequences. Sure, some electric systems will go down / maybe burn down. But few people will die, right? When I saw nightma

I don't really get the "nightmare" consequences. Sure, some electric systems will go down / maybe burn down. But few people will die, right? When I saw nightmare in the title, I expected something like humanity will be wiped out, or maybe just 90% of us. Can somebody clarify?

f6v 5y ago
I guess anyone on life support would die swiftly.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Also anyone reliant on perishable medicines or regular treatments that would be threatened by utility outages - some medicines need to be refrigerated, for example, so after a week or so without power all of that stuff is probably a goner.
  - f6v 5y ago
    Yeah, like an insulin. I wonder what happens if someone’s glucose sensor implant(don’t know what’s it called) gets burned like that.
codeulike 5y ago
I think the often cited problem is that if a national electricity grid goes down, its a very long and complex job to get them back up again, especially if transformers are damaged.
- cesarb 5y ago
  If there's no damage, it doesn't take that long. We had a blackout in 2009 in which the national grid of two countries (Itaipu is shared between Brazil and Paraguay) went down; I'm looking at the official report right now, and it took less than half a day to restore nearly all of the system for this country. Of course, if there's damage beyond the redundancies, it can take much longer; see for instance the recent blackout in the Amapá state, in which two transformers at a key substation were damaged by fire (and the third was under maintenance).
  - Izkata 5y ago
    2003 had a large blackout across the US and Canada, looks like it took 4 days to restore power everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
smeej 5y ago
In the U.S., there was a study, with results published by the EMP Commission, indicating that as many as 90% of people could die within a year as a result of a pulse event hitting the electrical grid.[0] I don't know if the same extends to other places, but once distribution and sanitation systems break down, which are heavily dependent on electricity, it'll become pretty clear very quickly just how ill-equipped we are for a world without reliable electricity. [0] http://www.empcommission.org/ http://www.empcommission.org/
- zupa-hu 5y ago
  Oh that's an interesting aspect. I was on the lookout for immediate consequences. Thanks for clarifying!
- anonuser123456 5y ago
  And EMP is a totally different phenomena. With EMP you have the prospect of burning out microelectronics. That doesn’t happen with a solar storm.
  - briantakita 5y ago
    We have not experienced a large solar storm since the Carrington Event, before the electric grid. There have been larger solar storms than the Carrington Event in the past. Note that there are other factors such as being in the direct path of the blast, the Phi angle, the Geomagnetic field strength, etc. I don't see how you can say with confidence "That doesn't happen with a solar storm". We have only had the electric grid for a short period of time & have not been keeping detailed records for very long either.
roenxi 5y ago
Wouldn't this involve losing all communication grids and access to bank accounts? That'd be pretty disruptive. I suppose the immediate challenge would be how to organise food 7 days out if we got hit by something like that. Assuming people put in a desperate effort and sort that out somehow, then the medium term problem would be something like a long period where effective communication is gone and any JIT systems fall apart. COVID shortages times 100 possibly.
- madia_leva 5y ago
  It would also disrupt food, drinking water and sweage. And all transportation, so even fuel would not be available. Without clean water and sanitation at home cities would be death traps. People living on an area with rivers and wild animals could do a bit better. Unless they are at reach of people walking out of the cities. Think about a zombie apocalypse, but with starving people by the hundreds of thousands. Starving and, if in the US, armed. Keeping food and water at home for at least for a couple of months is a very sensitive thing to do for this kind of events. Think about a new pandemic but this time the virus has 10% or 20% of mortality. Exactly.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    It makes sense to keep food and water, only if you also have protection. I mean a weapon. Because those 20 million zombies are coming.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      It only makes sense to have protection if you are going to have enough protection to fend off all 20 million of those zombies.
      - SyzygistSix 5y ago
        That is what community is for. I would imagine an armed community would be in a better situation than an unarmed community or unarmed individuals.
ben_w 5y ago
The more we depend on automation, the more vulnerable we are to power failure. Consider grocery shopping: what fraction of sales are online? What fraction in-store are card-based? Do the tills work offline, and if not, how fast can the cashiers work by hand? Does the store request resupply either automatically or via a manager looking at a spreadsheet, and if so, can the manager manage that without computer assistance? Do the freezers and refrigerators still work? Do the gas pumps used by the delivery trucks? Can current distribution warehouses function if there is no electric lighting? What are the power requirements of modern factories that turn ingredients into food products? These questions probably have multiple answers, one for each different business, but the chain breaks on the weakest link.
- zupa-hu 5y ago
  Very good points, thanks!
- huachimingo 5y ago
  If everything falls like a house of cards in such scenario, does it mean that we are over-dependent on electricity? Im not a ludite but I would say thats better to have a plan B in such case.
  - achenatx 5y ago
    once you go down that road you will find preppers (e.g. doomsday preppers)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    I may have misunderstood how CMEs damage things, but I think the problem is the grid rather than the electricity? And even then, it could be designed around, but that’s expensive? In any event, it is the kind of scale that only governments (and possibly Foxconn, Apple, Amazon, and Google) can really engage with.
  - count 5y ago
    Are we over dependent on running water? How about shelter from the elements? What's the plan B for that? These are foundational capabilities of 'civilization'. We can protect them, and take actions to be able to quickly restore, but 'plan B' isn't really in the cards.
gonzo41 5y ago
Your phone will be wiped out. For A LOT of people that is the END. It'd probably be something like loosing 10 years of world GDP all at once. Probably pretty good for the environment if we used the opportunity to build back greener.
piyh 5y ago
Remember when Texas lost power for a week? Imagine that nationally for potentially months, no food, no water, no communication.
anonuser123456 5y ago
The nightmare scenario is a follows; You get a really large solar storm and no one notices it, so all of the high voltage grid transformers are connected to the grid. The currents induced by the grid burn out these transformers and they have to be replaced before power can flow again. But these are very large, long lead time items that we don’t leave just laying around. And now you need hundreds of them, but the supply chain to build them has collapsed. Thankfully, most of these transformers are connected to grids that automatically detect the high DC currents and shut down. And this assumes everyone missed the massive impending space weather event and grid operators forgot to shut them down. So it probably wouldn’t be that bad.
- notabee 5y ago
  I would like to submit Texas' recent near grid collapse due to cold weather as exhibit A to prove that knowing about a potential problem for over a decade does not mean that a bunch of disparate private entities will do their due diligence to prevent disaster.
  - anonuser123456 5y ago
    The grid collapsed? Then how on earth are people using power? Oh you mean energy suppliers off-lined production temporarily and most resumed operation once the storm was over. Totally the same phenomena.
    - notabee 5y ago
      You don't have to take it from me, you can hear it from ERCOT via many sources. Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday. The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
It's much worse than normal grid failure because the grid goes down, the dominant means of communication go down, and the means of transport go down. Can't communicate and can't get anywhere even if you wanted to.
achenatx 5y ago
The supply chain contains about 3 days worth of food. Without power there is no 1) gas for trucks 2)food in stores 3) food being produced 4) water to homes 5)lifesaving medical devices Many people depend on medical devices that will no longer work. All those people would die immediately. Many people depend on lifesaving drugs. They will die in the short term (e.g. insulin). Within a few months People will die from untreated water and starvation. I doubt 90% of the population will die. You can look at the siege of leningrad and see that people survived years of a siege and I think 25% died. People will find a way to survive even if it means eating bugs.
brodouevencode 5y ago
There is a pretty simple test: attempt to go a week not using any tool, service, or person that relies on electricity or telecommunications even in the slightest little bit and see how you fare. The doomsday people like to say we are 72 hours away from anarchy, and, if true, it will be the fallout from people instantaneously competing for very scarce resources that will be the real problem.

f6v 5y ago

I guess anyone on life support would die swiftly.

kevingadd 5y ago
Also anyone reliant on perishable medicines or regular treatments that would be threatened by utility outages - some medicines need to be refrigerated, for example, so after a week or so without power all of that stuff is probably a goner.
- f6v 5y ago
  Yeah, like an insulin. I wonder what happens if someone’s glucose sensor implant(don’t know what’s it called) gets burned like that.

codeulike 5y ago

I think the often cited problem is that if a national electricity grid goes down, its a very long and complex job to get them back up again, especially if transformers are damaged.

cesarb 5y ago
If there's no damage, it doesn't take that long. We had a blackout in 2009 in which the national grid of two countries (Itaipu is shared between Brazil and Paraguay) went down; I'm looking at the official report right now, and it took less than half a day to restore nearly all of the system for this country. Of course, if there's damage beyond the redundancies, it can take much longer; see for instance the recent blackout in the Amapá state, in which two transformers at a key substation were damaged by fire (and the third was under maintenance).
- Izkata 5y ago
  2003 had a large blackout across the US and Canada, looks like it took 4 days to restore power everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

smeej 5y ago

In the U.S., there was a study, with results published by the EMP Commission, indicating that as many as 90% of people could die within a year as a result of a pulse event hitting the electrical grid.[0] I don't know if the same extends to other places, but once distribution and sanitation systems break down, which are heavily dependent on electricity, it'll become pretty clear very quickly just how ill-equipped we are for a world without reliable electricity. [0] http://www.empcommission.org/ http://www.empcommission.org/

zupa-hu 5y ago
Oh that's an interesting aspect. I was on the lookout for immediate consequences. Thanks for clarifying!
anonuser123456 5y ago
And EMP is a totally different phenomena. With EMP you have the prospect of burning out microelectronics. That doesn’t happen with a solar storm.
- briantakita 5y ago
  We have not experienced a large solar storm since the Carrington Event, before the electric grid. There have been larger solar storms than the Carrington Event in the past. Note that there are other factors such as being in the direct path of the blast, the Phi angle, the Geomagnetic field strength, etc. I don't see how you can say with confidence "That doesn't happen with a solar storm". We have only had the electric grid for a short period of time & have not been keeping detailed records for very long either.

roenxi 5y ago

Wouldn't this involve losing all communication grids and access to bank accounts? That'd be pretty disruptive. I suppose the immediate challenge would be how to organise food 7 days out if we got hit by something like that. Assuming people put in a desperate effort and sort that out somehow, then the medium term problem would be something like a long period where effective communication is gone and any JIT systems fall apart. COVID shortages times 100 possibly.

madia_leva 5y ago
It would also disrupt food, drinking water and sweage. And all transportation, so even fuel would not be available. Without clean water and sanitation at home cities would be death traps. People living on an area with rivers and wild animals could do a bit better. Unless they are at reach of people walking out of the cities. Think about a zombie apocalypse, but with starving people by the hundreds of thousands. Starving and, if in the US, armed. Keeping food and water at home for at least for a couple of months is a very sensitive thing to do for this kind of events. Think about a new pandemic but this time the virus has 10% or 20% of mortality. Exactly.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  It makes sense to keep food and water, only if you also have protection. I mean a weapon. Because those 20 million zombies are coming.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    It only makes sense to have protection if you are going to have enough protection to fend off all 20 million of those zombies.
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      That is what community is for. I would imagine an armed community would be in a better situation than an unarmed community or unarmed individuals.

ben_w 5y ago

The more we depend on automation, the more vulnerable we are to power failure. Consider grocery shopping: what fraction of sales are online? What fraction in-store are card-based? Do the tills work offline, and if not, how fast can the cashiers work by hand? Does the store request resupply either automatically or via a manager looking at a spreadsheet, and if so, can the manager manage that without computer assistance? Do the freezers and refrigerators still work? Do the gas pumps used by the delivery trucks? Can current distribution warehouses function if there is no electric lighting? What are the power requirements of modern factories that turn ingredients into food products? These questions probably have multiple answers, one for each different business, but the chain breaks on the weakest link.

zupa-hu 5y ago
Very good points, thanks!
huachimingo 5y ago
If everything falls like a house of cards in such scenario, does it mean that we are over-dependent on electricity? Im not a ludite but I would say thats better to have a plan B in such case.
- achenatx 5y ago
  once you go down that road you will find preppers (e.g. doomsday preppers)
- ben_w 5y ago
  I may have misunderstood how CMEs damage things, but I think the problem is the grid rather than the electricity? And even then, it could be designed around, but that’s expensive? In any event, it is the kind of scale that only governments (and possibly Foxconn, Apple, Amazon, and Google) can really engage with.
- count 5y ago
  Are we over dependent on running water? How about shelter from the elements? What's the plan B for that? These are foundational capabilities of 'civilization'. We can protect them, and take actions to be able to quickly restore, but 'plan B' isn't really in the cards.

gonzo41 5y ago

Your phone will be wiped out. For A LOT of people that is the END. It'd probably be something like loosing 10 years of world GDP all at once. Probably pretty good for the environment if we used the opportunity to build back greener.

piyh 5y ago

Remember when Texas lost power for a week? Imagine that nationally for potentially months, no food, no water, no communication.

anonuser123456 5y ago

The nightmare scenario is a follows; You get a really large solar storm and no one notices it, so all of the high voltage grid transformers are connected to the grid. The currents induced by the grid burn out these transformers and they have to be replaced before power can flow again. But these are very large, long lead time items that we don’t leave just laying around. And now you need hundreds of them, but the supply chain to build them has collapsed. Thankfully, most of these transformers are connected to grids that automatically detect the high DC currents and shut down. And this assumes everyone missed the massive impending space weather event and grid operators forgot to shut them down. So it probably wouldn’t be that bad.

notabee 5y ago
I would like to submit Texas' recent near grid collapse due to cold weather as exhibit A to prove that knowing about a potential problem for over a decade does not mean that a bunch of disparate private entities will do their due diligence to prevent disaster.
- anonuser123456 5y ago
  The grid collapsed? Then how on earth are people using power? Oh you mean energy suppliers off-lined production temporarily and most resumed operation once the storm was over. Totally the same phenomena.
  - notabee 5y ago
    You don't have to take it from me, you can hear it from ERCOT via many sources. Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday. The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

It's much worse than normal grid failure because the grid goes down, the dominant means of communication go down, and the means of transport go down. Can't communicate and can't get anywhere even if you wanted to.

achenatx 5y ago

The supply chain contains about 3 days worth of food. Without power there is no 1) gas for trucks 2)food in stores 3) food being produced 4) water to homes 5)lifesaving medical devices Many people depend on medical devices that will no longer work. All those people would die immediately. Many people depend on lifesaving drugs. They will die in the short term (e.g. insulin). Within a few months People will die from untreated water and starvation. I doubt 90% of the population will die. You can look at the siege of leningrad and see that people survived years of a siege and I think 25% died. People will find a way to survive even if it means eating bugs.

brodouevencode 5y ago

There is a pretty simple test: attempt to go a week not using any tool, service, or person that relies on electricity or telecommunications even in the slightest little bit and see how you fare. The doomsday people like to say we are 72 hours away from anarchy, and, if true, it will be the fallout from people instantaneously competing for very scarce resources that will be the real problem.