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>A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society—potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing mas
by dakial1 3y ago
>A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society—potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds.
I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.
- callalex 3y agoWe could always fall back to running the internet with RFC1149 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149
- divan 3y agoSome hope on Colapse OS [1] perhaps? [1] http://collapseos.org http://collapseos.org
- eddtries 3y agoMust be somewhat depressing to be living in a state of fear such that you build an OS specifically for when you assume all supply chains fail globally, probably this decade. Seems both stressful AND unlikely your project will truly be useful in such a position. Not knocking the tech or author, just a thought about such depressing predictions!
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoWell, someone's got to think of contingencies. It might as well be someone who's already prone to such consuming thoughts. I hope it's never needed, but if it is, there's also some chance we may be thankful for its existence.
- ForHackernews 3y agoIt's a very interesting hobby project that involves thinking about technology in a different way. It's not any more useless than Haskell.
- MisterTea 3y agoThe only hope is one can find the now obsolete computing parts needed after the last modern computer stops working. Collapse OS is a fantasy.
- nine_k 3y agoHalf of the Earth will be unaffected by the flare. Even if a storm fries all electronics on one side of Earth, there will remain devices, networks, and factories on the other side, likely somehow protected by the bulk of the planet.
- adastra22 3y agoFlares aren’t line-of-sight nor instantaneous. The whole earth would be affected.
- btilly 3y agoNot true. The flare itself is fairly fast. But the issue is charged particles that take longer to get us. And they are spread out in time. As https://www.livescience.com/carrington-event https://www.livescience.com/carrington-event describes, the Carrington Event was a solar flare lasting only 5 minutes. But the magnetic disturbances kept arriving over a week.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoReminds me of an episode of an old TV show (I think it was [0]), where one night, the Moon was shining unusually bright. While everyone else marveled at the beauty of the phenomenon, the protagonist is one of the few who understood that if the Moon is this bright, it means the other side of the Earth is currently on fire, and they all have but a few hours left to live. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Outer_Limits_(1995_TV_series)_episodes#ep33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Outer_Limits_(1995...
- jrd259 3y agobased on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.
- bennettnate5 3y agoYou'll still get packet loss on any long distance communication, though: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-storms-can-hinder-bird-migration/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-storms-can-...
- momirlan 3y agoor smoke signals
- alemanek 3y agoNo good when everything is on fire /s
- quickthrower2 3y agoA 1Tb usb on a bird could give decent bandwidth!
- civilitty 3y agoFEMA's got you covered: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_incident-annex_space-weather.pdf https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_incide... That's not the disaster recovery plan itself, it's FEMA instructing a bunch of agencies and departments to make their own. Ordered by Executive Order 13744 signed by President Obama in 2016.
- KMag 3y agoI believe the FEMA plans are for Carrington event-level storms, not a once-in-15,000-years storm.
- KMag 3y agoBeing properly prepared for a once-in-15k-years storm would likely require such a cost over such a long time for the expected benefit that it's not worth it. Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs. Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or once-a-millennium event.
- sgu999 3y ago> Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs. Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.
- KMag 3y agoBut lower dividend yields mean lower yielding retirement funds, with quality of life effects downstream from that. Now, there's plenty to be said about the funding side of the equation to improve wealth inequality and/or increase budgets, but that's orthogonal to the spending-side necessary tradeoffs to harden against extremely rare disasters. In other words, supposing you had the political pull to get more money entirely from the richest 0.01%, 1%, or 5% (and putting aside that not everyone agrees that would be good), that extra money would probably still be better spent on more infrastructure and social programs, not on hardening against extremely rare events.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoWhy does it have to be either/or? Planetary GDP is around $85tn annually. The US military budget on its own is around $1tn. One-off mitigation costs followed by annual maintenance would barely be a rounding error on that. They'd have the added benefit of hardening systems against hostile EMP, which is a more likely threat.
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- akomtu 3y agoUnless this precious tech is used against the people: surveillance, control, etc.
- ryanblakeley 3y agoI interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage. [1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare
- idiotsecant 3y agoI won't comment on 1 and 2 but 3) is laughably untrue. I guess the word 'many' might be stretched to mean 'a few' but I've worked at more than one very large utility directly as an engineer responsible for design of large generation and transmission interface systems and these transformers are not only not spare, they're almost impossible to get quickly even at current market demand. If you toasted even 10 percent of the large generation and transmission transformers in North America it would be years before the grid would even come close to working again, and that's if there was nation state level resources applied. These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.
- foobarian 3y agoThis keeps coming up and I keep wondering how in the world are large transformers that complicated to build. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way but a "boy do I have a gap in my knowledge of the world" way :-)
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI think that is a pretty common reaction when it comes to physical/mechanical objects. Another way of thinking about it which might be helpful is. Hundreds or thousands of very talented engineers have been working non-stop for 150+ years in a transformer arms race. This has resulted in incredibly high performance designs and incredibly high requirements.
- 3y ago
- ForHackernews 3y agoIn the UK, the National Grid Operator maintains "black start" plans[0] for rebooting the entire national electrical grid from a zero power situation, and they pay individual plants to conduct annual drills. However, for obvious reasons, these plans have never been tried in anything close to real-world conditions, and it's something of an open question whether it would work. [0] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/ https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/
- piuantiderp 3y agoIt's not just rebooting. There will be damage even in stored brand-new equipment
- rini17 3y agoHow it gets damaged? For comparison lightning is stronger than solar flares but only rarely damages stored unconnected equipment.
- deepmauka 3y agoThe earth and everything in and on it is part of an electrical system, as solar emissions wash across the landscape they’ll stimulate the flow of electrons in everything especially metal and circuit based items. Since circuits in many items are delicate things, designed for very specific currents, it will be a near guarantee that electrical components will be damaged.
- throwaway837367 3y agoThis is incorrect. A solar flare is not like an EMP. It's low frequency so only wires that are miles long would be energized. It could possibly destroy electronics that aren't protected by a power strip. But no, it's not going to destroy your cellphone or the electronics in your car.
- 3y ago
- kristopolous 3y agoThe last time we had a significant solar storm was during the telegraph age, the Carrington Event of 1859: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event "telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks" No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them
- beebeepka 3y ago> "...in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks" The real life precursor of exploding starship screens/consoles
- kristopolous 3y agoThere was a great radio ecoshock episode about this a couple years ago. Let me see if I can dig it up. https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive. From the text: "Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay down for at least a year, or a decade, or forever. There are ways to protect the system, but a captured Washington regulation system has not pushed for these simple steps. A hostile power aside, our expert guest tells us an EMP hit is “inevitable” within the time of those living now, because the Sun can also crash our electrical systems world-wide. A large solar storm, big enough to do it, was seen in 1859. It’s called the Carrington Event. If part of the Sun blows our way, all satellites are knocked out. The wires of our electric system act like antennae, receiving the deadly pulse." I doubt the doomsayer timetable but the industrial capacity and delivery concern is absolutely valid. If this actually happened, I think community solar would be choked as it gets ramped up everywhere at once and some neighborhoods would have power centers to go charge lithium ion portable power packs as the overall grids become decentralized. Shelf-stable, non-refrigerated food would become the norm and people would just make do with less electricity. We'd go back to a cash economy and things like night time entertainment that relied on sound systems and electric lights would become almost non-existent. Without street lights, nighttime in general would be dramatically quieter The real problem would be people who have to use battery powered medical devices who don't have convenient ways to charge. But yes, huge problem regardless
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]