9 ms·

Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse (2021) [pdf]

71 points by joak 3y ago

irrational 3y ago
On the one hand, I lived approximately half of my life before the mid 90s, so I should be fine not having the Internet around. But, then I think about how many things I do on the Internet now and wonder how hard it would be to go back to the non-Internet way of doing things. I can remember paying bills, mortgage/rent, taxes, etc. without the use of the Internet, but it is so much easier now that it would be a royal pain to go back to the old way of doing it. I remember the old ways of making doctor appointments, buying movie tickets (finding out when movies were playing!), contacting family and friends, looking up information, buying things, etc. It would suck to have to go back to that world now that I know how much easier things can be. Just today I was reading people’s comments on a forum and they didn’t make much sense until I suddenly realized that they had no conception of buying movie tickets without assigned seats. In the old days you would have to show up at the theater, stand in line to buy tickets (with no way to know how many had already been sold), then go into the theater and hope there were still decent seats left. It would stink to go back to that situation.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  I'd say the issue is not just "going back to that situation", it's the world being forcefully thrown back into that situation one random day in an instant, with maybe a couple hours advanced notice, which is the bigger issue. Also the impact on other systems such as potentially long-term significant damage to the electrical grid, it's not just losing the internet. It would have an immediate, out of the blue, devastating social/industrial/economic/civilization impact.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Do you really think that those minor inconveniences are the issue if we suddenly lose internet access around the globe?
  - irrational 3y ago
    Humans lived for thousands of years without the internet or WWW. The use of them has only been widespread for about 25 years. I assume we are smart enough to eventually figure out how to go back to how things used to be.
- lanstin 3y ago
  Most stores I shop at are unable to take money if their internet is down. And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change. And I have no way of getting cash with ATMs which seem to be via some sort of network. I don’t think I can even make phone calls or send sms without IP transit available to the phone companies.
  - Shared404 3y ago
    > And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change. Usually the point of sale system doesn't allow any offline credit. Similarly for the making change, most point of sale systems track exact change very closely, and trying to do something outside of what eas entered into the PoS causes issues with logging/audits. (Yes, including the "I just found a $coin, can you give me different change" situations) That's before you get to the people who try to fast talk you into giving extra change. PoS Performance is also usually horribly slow and requires manager overide for anything off the happy path. Source for the above: worked as a cashier in the late 2010's.
    - lanstin 3y ago
      this, movement of discretion from the employees talking to the customer to some central platform with the possible outcomes premapped out, seems to be a general trend for highly cost conscious large stores. so often the people at the desk say i should go online to do stuff their computers won't let them do for me.
- saurik 3y ago
  > In the old days you would have to show up at the theater, stand in line to buy tickets (with no way to know how many had already been sold), then go into the theater and hope there were still decent seats left. It would stink to go back to that situation. Don't most theater still work this way? The ability to buy specific seats at a theater isn't an Internet thing.
  - yard2010 3y ago
    It is astounding to me that in the US the seats at the movie theater are not tied to the tickets. I learned it a few weeks ago watching that Seinfeld episode and I still can't understand why it works like this..
    - irrational 3y ago
      They are today (at least all the theaters where I live). But in the 1980s and 1990s? No.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      One theater near me trialed something like that for a while, but they stopped using it very quickly. I can only assume it was confusing people and they lost sales; other than that one instance, I didn't even know this was a thing for movie theaters. They do keep track of number of seats and won't over-sell, but it's not normal to have assigned seating.
      - tohnjitor 3y ago
        I've been to a theater with assigned seating. It was great but not sure if they kept the system after selling to a competing company.
      - bigDinosaur 3y ago
        How does assigned seating confuse people?
        3y ago
markwalllberg 3y ago
[dead]
aussieguy1234 3y ago
I had the experience of my entire states internet going down from around 24 hours. Not only my fibre internet at home but also my mobile data was down, although phone calls still worked. Contactless payments and other card payments at shops stopped working. Also, most of the ATMs were down. Luckily I found one ATM that still worked. I think it had some kind of dial up backup mechanism.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  We have optimized for efficiency over resilience. It is great while it works but it makes the whole system more fragile.
germinalphrase 3y ago
Wouldn’t such an event likewise knock out most automobiles, appliances, electrical systems, etc almost immediately leading to the collapse of urban food security and so on? Loss of internet seems like a minor inconvenience if you’re trapped in a city with a couple million hungry people and there’s no way to flee but foot or bicycle.
- superkuh 3y ago
  No, there is no fast (short wavelength) component to the variation of the geomagnetic field associated with coronal mass ejections caused by solar storms. Generally CME distortions of the Earth's magnetic field are large scale and slowish and only couple to and induce currents in very long conductors like the power grid or pipelines. Nothing human scale and disconnected from the grid will get damaged (like cars or phones). And most stuff connected to the grid will be fine, it's just the transformers infrastructure that will get damaged (not that that is just a "just" it's nasty with 2 month production wait times). There are solar storm events which can induce faster timescale geomagnetic distances. Primarily the x-ray and EUV light from the solar flares themselves ionizing the upper atmosphere and the currents resulting from that. But to have a bright enough flare to do that in a damaging way would require an exceptionally large active region. So large you'd be seeing it with the naked eye on Earth before things went down. Another fast timescale solar caused geomagnetic disturbance can happen from relativistic "sudden energetic particles" sometimes directed at Earth. But generally the amount of energy in these particles is minor compared to the component in the flare light (~2/3 on average) versus the CME if one happens (~1/3). So, no. It wouldn't immediately knock out society. Especially with solar panels everywhere. But it would knock out the power grid for at least 2 months before new transformers could be built and installed. That might take down society.
  - germinalphrase 3y ago
    Well, that’s comforting - I suppose.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    The 2 month wait period for transformers both assumes that 1) there isn't a sudden huge spike in demand and 2) there isn't anything unusual getting in the way of building them, such as the grid being down literally everywhere. Given how reliant we are on electricity and the internet I don't think it's actually a stretch to say it would be a society ending event.
nntwozz 3y ago
Focusing on the things I can control I keep a Blu-ray disc backup collection of my most important family media etc. Other than that a nice bunker with canned food would be nice but that's approaching tinfoil hat territory.
- palad1n 3y ago
  Would solid state drives be affected?
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    Not likely, too small to be impacted from such a charge. In general, Solid state drives as long term storage is probably OK on the time frame of a single decade but they degrade with time. Some of the more dense ones even show noticeable degradation in less than a year as the error correction slows transfer speeds. I have had some USB sticks that have held information from 2006 but it hard to tell what state they were in.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  One key point that a lot of long term preppers make is that prepping with a LITTLE extra canned food is never a bad idea. Having the pantry stocked for a month, not a week. It isn't about the survivalist fantasy of society crumbling into pieces over night, it is the idea of being prepared for those outlier systemic failures. A power failure for a few days, a flood, short term shipping delays etc. As an aside, one thing they like to stress the most is, the single best thing you can do to be prepped is to be in as good of health as you can manage. If something goes down and you drop dead from a stress induced heart attack, all the other stuff is pointless.
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    > one thing they like to stress the most is, the single best thing you can do to be prepped is to be in as good of health as you can manage And be on good terms with your neighbours. I'm no prepper/survivalist, but groups are more resilient than individuals in most circumstances.
blisterpeanuts 3y ago
About a year ago, I got nervous and spent some money on some of those survival dried food packs, currently sitting in the basement (and hopefully not rotting). I have a charcoal grill and a gas grill and probably should stock up on propane and briquettes. I have enough ammo to last a while. Chickens in the backyard, some vegetables growing in the garden. Solar panels but no battery, so, not off grid yet. But realistically, if such a solar apocalypse happened, the panels and many other electronics will fail, communications will break down, marauding gangs will take over in many places, until the military can impose order. And there’s the issue of potable water. There’s not much chance of surviving past the first week or so, at this level of prepping. Let’s just hope this flare never happens.
- Tepix 3y ago
  Water should be your primary concern to survive a couple of weeks or maybe months. Only if you're in the US also consider getting a tank, a flamethrower, grenades.
  - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
    How would Germans handle a breakdown in services?
    - Tepix 3y ago
      By complaining. Perhaps even by german efficiency. There are institutions like the THW, after all. But they wouldn't need guns.
- dqat3fas 3y ago
  found the american :)
  - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
    Explain?
tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
We barely have enough offline and analogue hardware anymore.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  And suddenly those folks hoarding their Vinyl collection will find the apocalypse proof media being in hot demand!
  - j-a-a-p 3y ago
    Sell them on ebay!, oh wait
skellyclock 3y ago
A benefit of this is the resurrection of the cash economy and death of CBDC.
8bitsrule 3y ago
Here's a NASA story about the March 13, 1989 power outage in Quebec. It was caused by the second-biggest (X-20) recorded flare. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html The biggest recorded (X 28-45; Nov 4 2003) took out 12 transformers in South Africa. (It's been compared to 1859 Carrington.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms Lloyd's did a 2013 report for North America, looks like that's kept updated. https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the-north-american-electric-grid/1/pdf-Solar-Storm-Risk-to-the-North-American-Electric-Grid.pdf https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...
butler14 3y ago
I have a substation in my back yard, approximately 15ft from my house. Anyone have a sense of what "damage to transformers" means? Like, it frazzles out in its own housing, or takes half my street out?
- King-Aaron 3y ago
  If they're oil cooled transformers then they do have a tendency of catching on fire. It won't take half your street out but I wouldn't want to be 15 feet from one that's on fire.
  - WJW 3y ago
    Oh stop fearmongering. "A tendency of catching on fire" makes it sound like that happens every week. Fires in substation transformers are extremely rare and any given transformer is unlikely to see any significant incident in its rated life. Of course if one gets hits by a meteorite and catches fire then keep a safe distance. Definitely more than 15 feet. In normal operation they are extremely safe though.
    - butler14 3y ago
      Thanks!
    - King-Aaron 3y ago
      Having been a first responder to a fire in a shopping centre sub station/transformer where a technician lost their life in the incident, I do have a limited amount of experience around transformer fires, and I don't necessarily see my comment as 'fear mongering'. Particularly when the context is the question the person above me asked (failure modes of large substations). Under normal operation they are safe, and in abnormal circumstances they can catch on fire.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    When I was a child, a pole-mounted transformer on my street exploded, making a huge, earth-shaking boom and taking the top of the pole it was mounted on with it. It scattered debris widely. A hazmat crew in full bunny suits showed up to clean up the mess. The story I remember (this was a long time ago) is that PCBs were present -- I think they stopped using PCBs in these things since then -- and that was why the hazmat team was needed. It was quite exciting, though, and remains a vivid memory.
javier_e06 3y ago
And talking about electronics ruling society: I was trying to buy the outrageously overpriced popcorn at my nearby movie theater with a $20.00 and the youngster told me that he can accept cash. I told them that that is not legal . He directed me to the box office to purchase a "rewards card" worth $20.00 so I can use it to buy popcorn. Turns out in my state there is no requirement for business to accept cash and there is no Federal law requiring business to accept cash.

71 points by joak 3y ago

On the one hand, I lived approximately half of my life before the mid 90s, so I should be fine not having the Internet around. But, then I think about how many things I do on the Internet now and wonder how hard it would be to go back to the non-Internet way of doing things. I can remember paying bills, mortgage/rent, taxes, etc. without the use of the Internet, but it is so much easier now that it would be a royal pain to go back to the old way of doing it. I remember the old ways of making doctor appointments, buying movie tickets (finding out when movies were playing!), contacting family and friends, looking up information, buying things, etc. It would suck to have to go back to that world now that I know how much easier things can be. Just today I was reading people’s comments on a forum and they didn’t make much sense until I suddenly realized that they had no conception of buying movie tickets without assigned seats. In the old days you would have to show up at the theater, stand in line to buy tickets (with no way to know how many had already been sold), then go into the theater and hope there were still decent seats left. It would stink to go back to that situation.

thegrim33 3y ago
I'd say the issue is not just "going back to that situation", it's the world being forcefully thrown back into that situation one random day in an instant, with maybe a couple hours advanced notice, which is the bigger issue. Also the impact on other systems such as potentially long-term significant damage to the electrical grid, it's not just losing the internet. It would have an immediate, out of the blue, devastating social/industrial/economic/civilization impact.
Loughla 3y ago
Do you really think that those minor inconveniences are the issue if we suddenly lose internet access around the globe?
- irrational 3y ago
  Humans lived for thousands of years without the internet or WWW. The use of them has only been widespread for about 25 years. I assume we are smart enough to eventually figure out how to go back to how things used to be.
lanstin 3y ago
Most stores I shop at are unable to take money if their internet is down. And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change. And I have no way of getting cash with ATMs which seem to be via some sort of network. I don’t think I can even make phone calls or send sms without IP transit available to the phone companies.
- Shared404 3y ago
  > And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change. Usually the point of sale system doesn't allow any offline credit. Similarly for the making change, most point of sale systems track exact change very closely, and trying to do something outside of what eas entered into the PoS causes issues with logging/audits. (Yes, including the "I just found a $coin, can you give me different change" situations) That's before you get to the people who try to fast talk you into giving extra change. PoS Performance is also usually horribly slow and requires manager overide for anything off the happy path. Source for the above: worked as a cashier in the late 2010's.
  - lanstin 3y ago
    this, movement of discretion from the employees talking to the customer to some central platform with the possible outcomes premapped out, seems to be a general trend for highly cost conscious large stores. so often the people at the desk say i should go online to do stuff their computers won't let them do for me.
saurik 3y ago
> In the old days you would have to show up at the theater, stand in line to buy tickets (with no way to know how many had already been sold), then go into the theater and hope there were still decent seats left. It would stink to go back to that situation. Don't most theater still work this way? The ability to buy specific seats at a theater isn't an Internet thing.
- yard2010 3y ago
  It is astounding to me that in the US the seats at the movie theater are not tied to the tickets. I learned it a few weeks ago watching that Seinfeld episode and I still can't understand why it works like this..
  - irrational 3y ago
    They are today (at least all the theaters where I live). But in the 1980s and 1990s? No.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    One theater near me trialed something like that for a while, but they stopped using it very quickly. I can only assume it was confusing people and they lost sales; other than that one instance, I didn't even know this was a thing for movie theaters. They do keep track of number of seats and won't over-sell, but it's not normal to have assigned seating.
    - tohnjitor 3y ago
      I've been to a theater with assigned seating. It was great but not sure if they kept the system after selling to a competing company.
    - bigDinosaur 3y ago
      How does assigned seating confuse people?
      - 3y ago

markwalllberg 3y ago

[dead]

aussieguy1234 3y ago

I had the experience of my entire states internet going down from around 24 hours. Not only my fibre internet at home but also my mobile data was down, although phone calls still worked. Contactless payments and other card payments at shops stopped working. Also, most of the ATMs were down. Luckily I found one ATM that still worked. I think it had some kind of dial up backup mechanism.

NovaDudely 3y ago
We have optimized for efficiency over resilience. It is great while it works but it makes the whole system more fragile.

germinalphrase 3y ago

Wouldn’t such an event likewise knock out most automobiles, appliances, electrical systems, etc almost immediately leading to the collapse of urban food security and so on? Loss of internet seems like a minor inconvenience if you’re trapped in a city with a couple million hungry people and there’s no way to flee but foot or bicycle.

superkuh 3y ago
No, there is no fast (short wavelength) component to the variation of the geomagnetic field associated with coronal mass ejections caused by solar storms. Generally CME distortions of the Earth's magnetic field are large scale and slowish and only couple to and induce currents in very long conductors like the power grid or pipelines. Nothing human scale and disconnected from the grid will get damaged (like cars or phones). And most stuff connected to the grid will be fine, it's just the transformers infrastructure that will get damaged (not that that is just a "just" it's nasty with 2 month production wait times). There are solar storm events which can induce faster timescale geomagnetic distances. Primarily the x-ray and EUV light from the solar flares themselves ionizing the upper atmosphere and the currents resulting from that. But to have a bright enough flare to do that in a damaging way would require an exceptionally large active region. So large you'd be seeing it with the naked eye on Earth before things went down. Another fast timescale solar caused geomagnetic disturbance can happen from relativistic "sudden energetic particles" sometimes directed at Earth. But generally the amount of energy in these particles is minor compared to the component in the flare light (~2/3 on average) versus the CME if one happens (~1/3). So, no. It wouldn't immediately knock out society. Especially with solar panels everywhere. But it would knock out the power grid for at least 2 months before new transformers could be built and installed. That might take down society.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  Well, that’s comforting - I suppose.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  The 2 month wait period for transformers both assumes that 1) there isn't a sudden huge spike in demand and 2) there isn't anything unusual getting in the way of building them, such as the grid being down literally everywhere. Given how reliant we are on electricity and the internet I don't think it's actually a stretch to say it would be a society ending event.

nntwozz 3y ago

Focusing on the things I can control I keep a Blu-ray disc backup collection of my most important family media etc. Other than that a nice bunker with canned food would be nice but that's approaching tinfoil hat territory.

palad1n 3y ago
Would solid state drives be affected?
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  Not likely, too small to be impacted from such a charge. In general, Solid state drives as long term storage is probably OK on the time frame of a single decade but they degrade with time. Some of the more dense ones even show noticeable degradation in less than a year as the error correction slows transfer speeds. I have had some USB sticks that have held information from 2006 but it hard to tell what state they were in.
NovaDudely 3y ago
One key point that a lot of long term preppers make is that prepping with a LITTLE extra canned food is never a bad idea. Having the pantry stocked for a month, not a week. It isn't about the survivalist fantasy of society crumbling into pieces over night, it is the idea of being prepared for those outlier systemic failures. A power failure for a few days, a flood, short term shipping delays etc. As an aside, one thing they like to stress the most is, the single best thing you can do to be prepped is to be in as good of health as you can manage. If something goes down and you drop dead from a stress induced heart attack, all the other stuff is pointless.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > one thing they like to stress the most is, the single best thing you can do to be prepped is to be in as good of health as you can manage And be on good terms with your neighbours. I'm no prepper/survivalist, but groups are more resilient than individuals in most circumstances.

blisterpeanuts 3y ago

About a year ago, I got nervous and spent some money on some of those survival dried food packs, currently sitting in the basement (and hopefully not rotting). I have a charcoal grill and a gas grill and probably should stock up on propane and briquettes. I have enough ammo to last a while. Chickens in the backyard, some vegetables growing in the garden. Solar panels but no battery, so, not off grid yet. But realistically, if such a solar apocalypse happened, the panels and many other electronics will fail, communications will break down, marauding gangs will take over in many places, until the military can impose order. And there’s the issue of potable water. There’s not much chance of surviving past the first week or so, at this level of prepping. Let’s just hope this flare never happens.

Tepix 3y ago
Water should be your primary concern to survive a couple of weeks or maybe months. Only if you're in the US also consider getting a tank, a flamethrower, grenades.
- blisterpeanuts 3y ago
  How would Germans handle a breakdown in services?
  - Tepix 3y ago
    By complaining. Perhaps even by german efficiency. There are institutions like the THW, after all. But they wouldn't need guns.
dqat3fas 3y ago
found the american :)
- blisterpeanuts 3y ago
  Explain?

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago

We barely have enough offline and analogue hardware anymore.

NovaDudely 3y ago
And suddenly those folks hoarding their Vinyl collection will find the apocalypse proof media being in hot demand!
- j-a-a-p 3y ago
  Sell them on ebay!, oh wait

skellyclock 3y ago

A benefit of this is the resurrection of the cash economy and death of CBDC.

8bitsrule 3y ago

Here's a NASA story about the March 13, 1989 power outage in Quebec. It was caused by the second-biggest (X-20) recorded flare. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html The biggest recorded (X 28-45; Nov 4 2003) took out 12 transformers in South Africa. (It's been compared to 1859 Carrington.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms Lloyd's did a 2013 report for North America, looks like that's kept updated. https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the-north-american-electric-grid/1/pdf-Solar-Storm-Risk-to-the-North-American-Electric-Grid.pdf https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...

butler14 3y ago

I have a substation in my back yard, approximately 15ft from my house. Anyone have a sense of what "damage to transformers" means? Like, it frazzles out in its own housing, or takes half my street out?

King-Aaron 3y ago
If they're oil cooled transformers then they do have a tendency of catching on fire. It won't take half your street out but I wouldn't want to be 15 feet from one that's on fire.
- WJW 3y ago
  Oh stop fearmongering. "A tendency of catching on fire" makes it sound like that happens every week. Fires in substation transformers are extremely rare and any given transformer is unlikely to see any significant incident in its rated life. Of course if one gets hits by a meteorite and catches fire then keep a safe distance. Definitely more than 15 feet. In normal operation they are extremely safe though.
  - butler14 3y ago
    Thanks!
  - King-Aaron 3y ago
    Having been a first responder to a fire in a shopping centre sub station/transformer where a technician lost their life in the incident, I do have a limited amount of experience around transformer fires, and I don't necessarily see my comment as 'fear mongering'. Particularly when the context is the question the person above me asked (failure modes of large substations). Under normal operation they are safe, and in abnormal circumstances they can catch on fire.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  When I was a child, a pole-mounted transformer on my street exploded, making a huge, earth-shaking boom and taking the top of the pole it was mounted on with it. It scattered debris widely. A hazmat crew in full bunny suits showed up to clean up the mess. The story I remember (this was a long time ago) is that PCBs were present -- I think they stopped using PCBs in these things since then -- and that was why the hazmat team was needed. It was quite exciting, though, and remains a vivid memory.

javier_e06 3y ago

And talking about electronics ruling society: I was trying to buy the outrageously overpriced popcorn at my nearby movie theater with a $20.00 and the youngster told me that he can accept cash. I told them that that is not legal . He directed me to the box office to purchase a "rewards card" worth $20.00 so I can use it to buy popcorn. Turns out in my state there is no requirement for business to accept cash and there is no Federal law requiring business to accept cash.