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How Dangerous Are Solar Storms?
- giantg2 5y agoDidn't the Carrington event start fires too? I wonder how likely it would be to start fires today, like inside a home.
- giantg2 5y agoJust to add, as the edit expired... many homes would be poor shields if built with OSB walls and asphalt shingles. Hopefully the normal 14ga wires in the wall could handle it. But what about devices? Most are fused on the hot side, but this type of event would essentially be energizing the wires past that point and create a circuit with the still connected ground path. Many of these devices would have small wires that could be overloaded by the current and essentially turn into a resistive heating element, which could be a problem inside dusty equipment... Does that sound plausible or am I crazy?
- fy20 5y agoThe effects on the telegraph system were because they were made up of miles long conductors, so when the CME hit it induced current in these wires. Some operators reported being able to send messages without their batteries connected. The telegraph system typically used milliamps of power (at a few hundred volts), so it's pretty much nothing compared to the electrical system in your home. That and the shorter wires, I doubt you'd even notice it.
- giantg2 5y agoAh, so the wavelength is too long. That's good to know.
- elevaet 5y agoAre solar storms and coronal mass ejections are underrated as a danger to society? It seems to me like yes. Anecdotally, every time I've brought the topic up with people who work in fields like electrical engineering or for power companies, it's not really something that anyone's considering or planning for. Hardly anyone even knows about the Carrington Event. A Carrington Event in 2021 could be so crippling.
- wyldfire 5y agoLess common but still underrated as a risk is asteroid strike or near miss. Jupiter, Saturn, our Moon all keep us safer than other Earth-like planets. But it seems like a risk that should concern us. besides maybe subterranean shelter, IMO the best hedge is interplanetary colonization. Ridiculously expensive but not when measured against the cost of losing all of humanity. Maybe galactic risks like these are part of the Great Filter.
- aflag 5y agoI think asteroids are overrated. A globally catastrophic asteroid will not hit earth within our life times with a high degree of certainty. Yet, we currently already have means to deflect it. When it finally happens, it will be deflected. That risk is minuscule. The chances of a random small asteroid destroying a city has a higher chance, but I wouldn’t really worry about that more than the building I’m living right now collapsing.
- robotomir 5y agoWe don't have the technology to deflect a planet-killer.
- aflag 5y agoIf we detect it with enough time ahead (which is very likely we will), it’s not that hard to deflect. We have already landed on asteroids and we certainly have the technology to give it a light, but constant, push in the course of an year or so. We don’t have the technology in case it’s found only days before hitting the earth. But that is very unlikely.
- vkou 5y agoThe odds of a planet-killer hitting our planet in the lifetime of you, your children, your children's children, and the subsequent thousand generations is so low it may as well be zero. Worrying about it is like stressing out over what you are going to name your super-yacht, when you're broke, unemployed, homeless, and are dying of lung cancer. It's the most absurdly pointless form of bikeshedding. There are plenty of immediate and catastrophic disasters that we should be preparing for, first.
- systemvoltage 5y agoNASA is planning for Space Weather Follow-on mission in 2025 that's going to stick a probe at L1 point between the Earth and the Sun, providing some ~22 mins of heads up when shit hits the fan (Carrington-like event). Unfortunately, I am not aware of any emergency procedures that can benefit from such an alarm in DOE or any public electricity infrastructure. They might very well exist, anyone knows? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Weather_Follow_On-Lagrange_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Weather_Follow_On-Lagran...
- laminatedsmore 5y agoafaik the aim is to provide enough warning to protect transformers, I guess by powering them down in some way? Not sure it answers your question but in case interesting here's a link to a UK document describing 'space weather preparedness strategy' https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/449593/BIS-15-457-space-weather-preparedness-strategy.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- pdonis 5y agoNot just transistors--we could basically shut down the entire power grid for the time it takes the event to pass and disconnect enough connections to protect key components like the transformers. It would be a few hours of no power in order to avoid damage that could cause outages of weeks or months or years.
- bserge 5y agoWhat about power plants? IIRC a sudden loss of electricity demand can lead to massive damage (specifically to the turbines and generators).
- elevaet 5y agoCan't we already predict Carrington-like events by watching for massive solar flares? I thought even at the time astronomers saw it coming in advance. Perhaps this is just a more precise measurer; a space-weather bouy in our backyard.
- barathr 5y agoThere's a major research paper coming up next month on the effect of solar storms on the Internet and well, the impacts can potentially be enormous: https://twitter.com/sangeetha_a_j/status/1389303295055831042 https://twitter.com/sangeetha_a_j/status/1389303295055831042
- Animats 5y agoOh, not again. This is mostly an ad for some streaming service. See the author's comment on the video: Get your SPECIAL OFFER for --- here: It's an exclusive offer for our viewers! Start your free trial today. --- is a new kind of streaming service run by filmmakers... This is actually a real problem, it's quite fixable, and not enough is being done about it. I've posted a link before to the PJM grid's training materials about this, which few will read. If you're really interested, go read the training materials on emergency procedures. I'm not going to provide a link. It's not the end of the world. The last time this happened, there were some breaker trips and blackouts, and one transformer burned out. There are a few places in the electrical grid where you woud like to have a big capacitor between the center of the transformer delta and ground. That hasn't been done enough. Also, having more large spare transformers around would be good. However, monitoring DC current flow between the center of the delta and ground is in place, so that the need to shut down can be detected before the transformer overheats. It's not likely to hurt anything other than long distance power transmission. Nothing else has continuous wires hundreds of km long any more. Effect on fiber optics is zero. Incidentally, this has nothing to do with "EMP", which is something else entirely.
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- jampekka 5y agoI've been following Sabine Hossenfelder for a while and I think she may be even the best popularizer of science/physics at the moment. She has started to add sponsor messages to her videos, which is quite sad, but for me it tells more about the sorry state of academic funding and the academic community in general. She goes against the "establishment" and criticizes very real problems that academia would rather just ignore. I don't know enough about solar effects on electric grids, but I wouldn't pass it off just because it has to be (sadly) funded with borderline scam ads because the borderline scam academic funding structure won't fund it.
- Animats 5y agoCould be worse.[1] Could be better.[2] [1] https://www.brimhall.com/p-104-total-shield-emf-protection.aspx https://www.brimhall.com/p-104-total-shield-emf-protection.a...? [2] https://www.pes-psrc.org/kb/published/reports/PSRC%20-%20K17_Report_Final%2020190927.pdf# https://www.pes-psrc.org/kb/published/reports/PSRC%20-%20K17...
- yesenadam 5y ago> On May twenty-third nineteen sixty-seven, the US Air Force almost started a war. It was during the most intense part of the Cold War. Uh.. I thought around 1962 and the early 80s were the most intense parts, no? Doesn't exactly fill me with trust in the writer for the coming article.
- scrps 5y agoPaywalled of course: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00147152 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00147152
- trashface 5y agoIf a solar storm knocked out the electric grid, would I still be able to use a diesel generator to power stuff in my house?
- CamperBob2 5y agoYes, but if you want the generator to power your house as if nothing had happened, the details of installing it are both complex and important. You'll need an electrician and a decent-sized checkbook.
- elevaet 5y agoYou'd also want your household appliances etc. to not have been fried from some anomalous power surge.
- sbierwagen 5y agoThe specific term of art is a "transfer switch". The phrase "decent sized checkbook" in the HN context might be $10k-$10m, but installing a transfer switch would only be a few thousand bucks if done to code by a professional.
- pomian 5y agoA really good book (fiction) on this topic, very entertaining and thought provoking this is: 48 Hours, by William Forstchen.
- farseer 5y agoI am confused, what is worse a Carrington like event or a high atmosphere multi-megaton nuclear blast for EMP effect?
- xyzzy21 5y agoThe only data about the Carrington event is very niche. Telegraph lines make very good antenna for the EM that comes from either CME or EMP. A shorter "antenna" would not work remotely as well. This is why most of the horror stories you see in movies are simply wrong. No, your cell phone won't die. No, your car won't be zapped. Only things connected to really long (wavelength-long) antennas like the power grid. We don't have telegraph or even many wired telephone lines anymore. Fiber optic is "hardened" by definition.
- civildude 5y agooutdoor fiber with support-long cables gonna die tho