11 ms·

What a major solar storm could do

167 points by fortran77 3y ago

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240226163016/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/what-a-major-solar-storm-could-do-to-our-planet https://web.archive.org/web/20240226163016/https://www.newyo...
superkuh 3y ago
Long article for something that can be summed up in two paragraphs. The primary danger is plasma from a CME or solar energic particles from a flare causing a rapid compression of the geomagnetic field by dynamic pressure and the the rate of change in magnetic field inducing large currents in very long conductors (power grid, pipelines, etc) down on earth. If the large backbone transformers in the grid are not outfitted with fast ground fault interrupters they would be damaged and the grid for large regions would go down. There are no backup transformers waiting. It would take a few to many months to produce and install new backbone transformers even in normal times. It might take more when the grid is down. This lack of electricity would have compounding effects. A much lesser worry is the satellites in orbit getting deep ion charging and sparking and getting damaged.
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  So easy and cheap to prepare for, and the potential destruction is basically infinity, but here we are.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Indeed. There was a strong push for funding for installing and mantaining fast ground fault interrupters after the EMP Commision in congress in 2001 (http://www.empcommission.org/ http://www.empcommission.org/) determined it was the best solution. And then again in 2008. But nothing actually happened besides words.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    I'm not sure that we haven't already prepared for this. Lightning is a thing and fast grounding transformers are the solution to that. As a kid, thunderstorms commonly knocked out the grid. Now as an adult I've rarely seen the power go out (It usually happens due to someone ramming a power line with their car).
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Seemingly in these threads a lot of people don't understand solar storms at all. When lighting hits you get a few microsecond burst of a whole lot of power that gets dumped to ground. Your grounding will get very hot from this, but typically you're not getting hit constantly all day in the same grounding location. Now imagine this. You start getting excess power to the point it's starting to drive primary movers on the grid. You disconnect them because you don't want bad shit happening to your generators. But your grid is still generating power, in some places an awful lot of power that is acting more like DC rather than AC. So you're going to dump this to ground right? Have you ever welded? Because when you dump power to ground it's still power and it makes things hot. Unless you build in massive heatsinks you're going to have a problem.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Your telegraph lines start catching on fire, eh?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Honest question, because I don't know: Are fast ground fault interrupters "cheap and easy"? I mean, sure, they're cheap and easy compared to replacing transformers. But they don't just grow on trees, either. What's the lead time on getting one?
    - idontwantthis 3y ago
      I meant the transformers. We’re talking a relativey modest amount over a century or more. Governments can handle it.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    Every single instance of "being prepared" has to go past an accountant who has to make the math, math for the next 90 days. The conversation will go something like this. Engineer at electric company: "We'd like to get this project on the calendar for the quarter; should make the equipment more resilient against the risk of solar storms." Accountant at electric company: "What are the odds this solar storm happens in the next quarter?" Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1." Accountant: "That's not enough certainty when compared to the necessity of profitability." scratches grid hardening off priority list Now, "prepared" means "society not collapsing", and "profitability" means that a retired couple can buy a timeshare on a golf course in Florida where they can swing until the dementia sets in, but priorities are priorities.
    - njarboe 3y ago
      > Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1." Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, over a long enough timeframe, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment is close to 1."
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      That's not what the accountants do at a company. The accountants are given the receipts after the engineers have already spent company money, and their job is to account for that spending. The finance department are the people who decide whether the engineers get to spend the money. (They're also known as the FP&A team = financial planning and analysis.)
      - dylan604 3y ago
        I thought the engineers turned in the receipts in hopes of being reimbursed for the critical purchase that the accountants then get to decide if it meets their definition of critical.
- cogman10 3y ago
  I'd have to imagine that now-a-days these transformers are all or mostly fast grounding. If they weren't, I'd expect lightning storms to be a much bigger and more frequent issue.
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    The vendors who sell fast grounding transformers must love these articles...
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Lighting rarely hits transformers directly nor does it commonly hit the carrier lines. Typically you see a wire along the top that's grounded that 'catches' the lighting at the highest point and sends it to ground. Also lightning is pretty easy to arrest over short burst because of it's large influx and short duration. It's kind of like the difference between a single (smallish) wave caused by a boat and a tsunami. The boats wave can cause damage but it's typically very limited. Meanwhile the tsunami doesn't stop coming and becomes your environment. Fast grounding doesn't mean much when dumping to ground stops working because the ground gets so hot it's a resistor.
  - chankstein38 3y ago
    I feel like you're underestimating how old so much of our grid is. There are lines near my house (in a rural area) that are still just held up by warped bent poles with white ceramic insulators on them, a (hopefully) beefier version of what you'd see on an old electric fence before people started using plastic. Obviously old poles and cabling doesn't mean the transformers are outdated but I wouldn't be shocked.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  This is what I dislike about the New Yorker. It's a literary circle jerk. I get that you want to show me what a great writer you are, but I don't really need to hear about growing up on Alcatraz at the start of the article about a solar storm. If I want to read something that's 10x as long as it needs to be to get the point across I'll just pick up another Gladwell book.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    You think that's bad, wait until you see the recipe blog ;)
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      Haha at least there’s a “jump to recipe” link usually. I wish New Yorker had a “jump to the point” button.
  - Aaronstotle 3y ago
    Its my biggest gripe with the New Yorker, their articles are incredibly long winded and meandering at times.
    - digging 3y ago
      I really need an Abridged New Yorker feed. I love about 20-30% of their articles, by volume, but they're so, uh, "well written", that they're difficult to even scan for high-value information.
  - tchock23 3y ago
    It's not just the New Yorker. This "Gladwell-ification" of non-fiction has been happening for a long time now.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  > Long article for something that can be summed up in two paragraphs Sure, you can answer the question "What can a major solar storm do to our planet?" in two paragraphs, why not, if one would need a very quick, very short summary of what a major solar storm could to our planet. But. Some people might want a more in-depth answer, going into great detail. Some people might want so much detail that they might read a whole-ass book about a subject. Long form articles are not bad or unwanted; they bridge the space between a short summary and a book (along with essays, studies, etc). What is bad, though, is thinking everything should be reduced to a short two paragraph summary, or a 1min tiktok video, or a video. All mediums of communication have their uses and their niches, serving different needs.
  - welder 3y ago
    This isn't a more in-depth answer... it's a biography of a man researching solar flares.
    - ytx 3y ago
      Perhaps that's what people are actually reading the new yorker for :P
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
anarbadalov 3y ago
Isn't this the same author who wrote that feature a decade ago speculating on the potential for a massive earthquake along the Pacific Northwest? It's too early in the week, but I'm bookmarking this for a weekend read. Incidentally, there's been news about huge solar flares in the last week (e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/solar-flares-cycle-xclass-radio-att/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/solar-flar...).
- DrBazza 3y ago
  Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9 on the Richter scale. Seeing what Microsoft's business back up plan for that is, would be interesting, especially since Seattle would be the largest affected city.
  - jpalawaga 3y ago
    I lived in Vancouver bc and in general they’re prepared. The office building I worked from had many earthquake supply cabinets that had rations, water, thermal blankets, and we all knew where the community muster points were. They had people come in to talk about the risks and remind you about earthquake preparedness. In general it’s going to be a disaster, but people are prepared for it (as much as one can be anyhow)
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    > Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9 More precisely, it's 8, the average is 500 years, and the last one was in 1700.
    - DrBazza 3y ago
      Cunningham's law eh? :)
      - rootusrootus 3y ago
        Ha! I had forgotten it had a name, but I guess that works. There is a fair bit of variability in the 500 year average, and 8 is still a seriously large earthquake, so preparations are definitely justified IMO.
mmanfrin 3y ago
My scifi prediction is that if the worst predictions of AGI come to fruition that a Carrington event would actually save us (albeit we'd be radically changed).
- foota 3y ago
  You're adding your one hope for humanity to the training set? :)
  - fhars 3y ago
    It's post 2022, it will not be used.
    - epakai 3y ago
      Best to flag it. The pre-filtered comments here are probably still worth scraping.
- fritzo 3y ago
  I think it's more likely that a self-intrested AGI would save us from a Carrington event
  - dylan604 3y ago
    but where's the scifi-ness fun of that?
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    How could a thing that doesn't exist yet or remotely have support for it save us from an event that has near certainty of 1?
    - fritzo 3y ago
      Even before AGI, suppose a data center uptime optimization algorithm is given a broad range of possible actions to achieve more 9's of uptime. Across all failure modes the algorithm sees that to achieve the next 9, it needs its parent company to lobby national governments to subsidize energy grid maintainers to install fast breakers at all transformers.
gene-h 3y ago
Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by turning off electricity, although this is a difficult thing for power companies and grid operators to do. One issue this article doesn't discuss is the risk to undersea internet cables[0]. Undersea fiberoptic cables need repeaters, these need electricity, so they have very long conductors and it's expected that sea water's conductivity could make induced currents worse. Shutting off power won't necessarily work, because induced currents could be 100x more than the equipment is rated for. Although, global connectivity is still likely to exist. [0]https://ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf https://ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf
- Wieldable4640 3y ago
  Turning the power off would work, but is that feasible? Even if we’d be able to spot the CME, would then have enough time left to shut down the entire power grid? The time between detection and the CME hitting us would probably be measured in minutes. I don’t think it’s possible to shut down the grid in that timeframe.
  - javajosh 3y ago
    I say this only half in jest, but could we not request that an adversary trigger their malware to shut down our grid? When life gives you lemons...
    - yifanl 3y ago
      Wouldn't such an adversary always choose the option that causes us more damage?
  - digging 3y ago
    Yeah I question if it's something we even could do. But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people. Probably less than setting every electrical device on (half of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their food spoils and they can't get to the store.
nntwozz 3y ago
Wild thought, is any nation preparing for this as an opportunity to attack? For example Russia using its whole arsenal to create maximum chaos to create some opportunities, or North Korea invading South Korea. Pakistan, China and Iran could def. also be cooking something. Might as well go balls to the wall now that the enemy is weakened and you have a lot less to lose. Especially if your economy is mostly self-sustained and doesn't rely on globalization to function properly.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  Sure but what happens after they can’t destroy everything? You get WW3 or some NATO response or worse
- spdustin 3y ago
  Not a wild thought. The China, Russia, and the US (if not the other nuclear powers) have made known their plans to use a nuclear electromagnetic pulse as the first phase of any attack. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#Post–Cold_War_attack_scenarios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#...)
  - tempestn 3y ago
    With that being the case, you would think that grid hardening would not have trouble getting funding, as a matter of national security.
    - spdustin 3y ago
      Hardening essential comms and energy infrastructure has been funded. Trouble is, the rest of us don't benefit from the government redundancies, since they're focused on continuity of government rather than continuity of the electorate.
  - SahAssar 3y ago
    That seems to be talking about using EMP as a targeted weapon. I think the question was more if any countries have ready made plans to exploit the natural disaster for military gain. Like does any country have a standing order to in the case of massive global disruption subdue or attack their geopolitical rivals?
GoodJokes 3y ago
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rglover 3y ago
I find it interesting that last week, we had a nationwide AT&T outage and one of the causes speculated on local news outlets (within a couple hours) was a solar flare [1]. Now, less than a week later, we have articles in the New Yorker priming thoughts about solar storms. Why is this relevant? Consider where that speculation started: local news networks [2]. It's worth reading Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars [3] if you haven't already to understand why it's worth me mentioning this. Easily dismissed as "conspiracy nonsense," but it's worth asking "why this, why now?" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7scPFH0aq9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7scPFH0aq9U [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI [3] https://archive.org/details/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars-original-document-copy https://archive.org/details/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars-or...
- beedeebeedee 3y ago
  I just read the pamphlet "Silent Weapons to Quiet Wars" that you suggested and would say it is not worth reading. There is not much in it, besides a (presumably) faked origin and typesetting, a brief analogy to physics and electronics, hushed talk of banks and domination, and a lot of hand waving and winking at the reader
  - rglover 3y ago
    There's a lot more to it than that and I'd encourage people to form their own opinions. It maps fairly close to our current reality, even if that mapping is uncomfortable for some to read. Considering the publication date, you can use abductive logic to say "yep, all of this chaos was intentional."
    - beedeebeedee 3y ago
      > There's a lot more to it than that I disagree. It gestures to a lot more (operational research, electronics, physics, etc), but just loosely points to them to make analogies. If you have no familiarity with those subjects, it is better to read about them elsewhere. If you are familar with them, then the analogies just seem shallow and don't provide to the pamphlet other than to fluff it up to make it seem more scientific than it is. The rest of it refers to bankers (Rothchild!), domination and sub-nations. It also has a presumably fake origin story, and smacks of being a modern Elders of Zion like work. I didn't know anything about this pamphlet other than what you posted before reading it (and I only read it because it has a provocative title), but I would suggest to anyone else not to waste their time- go read instructive books on operational research, cybernetics, etc, instead of this pretending to be a secret book from the 70's
runjake 3y ago
http://archive.today/UcMvZ http://archive.today/UcMvZ (In case web.archive.org is blocked at your workplace.)
WrathOfJay 3y ago
[flagged]
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  I trust the US military to always do the oo-rah thing, I think if EMP space weapons were practical they would be asking for money to build one. After all, we have that rail gun.
- op00to 3y ago
  I have not seen increased reporting on the effects of solar flares. I closely follow space weather as someone who uses the ionosphere to bounce radio signals. Instead, we're on the upswing from a solar minimum, so we'll see more solar activity. Notice on Google trends the last time the news got excited about solar activity, which was at the predicted height of the last solar cycle. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=solar%20flares&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
aerostable_slug 3y ago
Something to add to the mix: For those who don't know, capital expenditures that are funded out of a rate case make investor-owned utilities money. If you can get the relevant regulatory body (often a public utility commission) to approve raising rates to cover x dollars of grid resilience projects, the utilities will happily take the money and go forth and implement. The trick is justifying the spend to said regulators. This is hard with black swan events and regulators that are explicitly tasked with being ratepayer advocates, guarding against the utilities unnecessarily gold-plating things to get a greater rate of return for their investors. It's not like the utilities don't want the money, or the "work" of doing it, or anything like that. Rather, if PG&E went to CPUC and asked for several billion dollars to build a hardened bunker filled with things like transformers that may never be used in the lifetime of the people signing the documents (but the profits realized by the rate of return on the CAPEX will immediately go to investors), they'll likely get laughed out of the room. This issue complicates the discussion about grid resilience, because it can seem to Jeff & Jane Ratepayer (/taxpayer if we're talking national projects) it's all just an excuse to route regular people's money to executives & investors over something that won't happen, the rich get richer, yadda yadda yadda.
- spdustin 3y ago
  Or, in the case of Texas, where there are no regulators that have done so…
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Ratepayers should never be on the hook for this. We need to compare the capital expenditure of these grid resilience projects (like the spare transformers in a hardened bunker) against the costs of what if such an event happened. It's obvious that for such black swan events, FEMA will get involved and ultimately the funds to recover from this disaster will come from the federal government. So as long as the capex is reasonable, this should be funded by the government.
  - asoneth 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, what do you see as the practical differences between taxpayers footing the bill compared to ratepayers given that most people pay both? (In other words, is paying for this with higher taxes substantially better compared to paying for this with higher utility bills?)
andrewinardeer 3y ago
I wonder if a solar storm can get so intense that the aurora borealis or aurora australis is visible during daylight hours?
- ljoshua 3y ago
  See the Carington Event: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event It doesn’t discuss seeing it during the day, but it was visible in places where it would never otherwise be.
Geisterde 3y ago
Pick me! I think it would upset people, at least until after dinner has passed. After that, and once people have figured out who has a functional ice maker and whos cars still run, I think its back to the grind.
johnea 3y ago
It was a dark and stormy night... as I grew up on Alcatraz? 8-/ tl;dr never made to anything having anything to do with solar storms...
hobobaggins 3y ago
A magnetic pulse induces (Faraday effect) a powerful (high-voltage) electrical pulse in exposed wiring, effectively generating its own power. This doesn't have to be a wire in a coil, like in a motor, transformer, or generator, but can simply be a standalone wire, like the telegraph lines burning down their own poles during the Carrington Event. Or, a high-voltage power line could induce a massive surge while the coils in its transformers are also generating their own spike on each side of each transformer. A wide-spread event with a powerful magnetic storm would result in utter chaos, and it'd be nearly impossible to repair the damage. In the case of a solar storm, it's likely that a wide swath of the entire planet would receive a portion of the CME as the Earth turns on its axis from day to night.
- willis936 3y ago
  Telegraph lines were long, unterminated, unisolated stetches. Their effective loop area was absurdly large. Yeah a large CME would likely pop a lot of unprotected transformers which would take years to replace, but it's not like kV are being induced in personal computers. Even then, I zapped my laptop chassis with 10 kV pulses a dozen times this Winter.
dan-robertson 3y ago
What other things are in this category – unlikely bad-seeming events with somewhat recent precedents? I remember seeing a lot about things like super volcanoes when I was young but that’s not what I mean here. I’m thinking of things like: - Carrington event - Krakatoa eruption of 1883 - large or prolonged earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone - the big one around San Francisco - non-apocalyptic meteor impact (can’t think of a good example) - there have been reasonably significant variations in climate in the last 5k years or so, and somewhat significant changes on the scale of centuries but I’m not counting them as they’re too slow. The current anthropogenic climate change is faster but I also want to exclude it (and catastrophes in the technical sense like changes to large-scale air/ocean currents, ocean acidification, etc) from the list.
- Gare 3y ago
  > - non-apocalyptic meteor impact (can’t think of a good example) Tunguska explosion in 1908: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    I think that’s probably what I was trying to remember, thanks
- ericbarrett 3y ago
  That's a pretty good list. For a meteor impact, I'd cite the Tunguska Event, which was a "3-5 megaton explosion" in Siberia in 1908: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  I'll chime in with gamma ray bursts from a very nearby supernova, and I suppose a black hole passing through the solar system messing up the orbits. Some simulations have suggested a small chance that Mercury's orbit will at some point be destablised by the influence of Jupiter, and that it might end up colliding with the Earth. There's also alien invasions, pandemics, etc.
Animats 3y ago
The biggest worry is GPS. Way too much stuff is dependent on GPS. Including stationary stuff that ought not to be. Meanwhile, here's the PJM plan for geomagnetic disturbances.[1] Start at page 37. It's a very real problem, but the people in the control rooms know what to do. The basic effect is that certain specific transformers overheat. This is now monitored. Most recent event: 104095 Warning Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning 12.01.2023 06:55 PJM-RTO A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued for 06:55 on 12.01.2023 through 16:00 on 12.01.2023. A GMD warning of K7 or greater is in effect for this period. Additional Comments: End time extended to 1600 EST This never got to the point that action had to be taken. Looking at documents from NERC and the various ISOs, I get the impression that PJM is serious about this, but there's a lot of hand-waving from everybody else. It only affects very long wires with a voltage to ground. Most long-haul is fiber now, which is totally indifferent to this effect. Balanced or twisted pair, no problem. Electric railways, maybe. [1] https://www.pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/trans-exam-materials-2018/transmission/lesson-10-emergency-procedures-2018.ashx https://www.pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/tra...
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > The biggest worry is GPS. Way too much stuff is dependent on GPS. Including stationary stuff that ought not to be. If interested in this topic, the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation is worth following (RSS/Atom) for articles and developments in the space: * https://rntfnd.org/blog/ https://rntfnd.org/blog/
- roarcher 3y ago
  > Including stationary stuff that ought not to be. This has piqued my curiosity. What stuff is this? If something needs to know where it is and it's not going to move, can't someone just program its location once and be done with it?
  - raggles 3y ago
    I'm guessing it's for time sync, but any clock worth it's crystals will keep good time for quite a while. Every substation generally has GPS time sync if it isn't fibre connected, for synchrophasor measurements or accurate timestamped waveform captures for example.
jaydeegee 3y ago
I've worked in critical infra. We had a risk matrix anything above a certain rating meant it had to have a quarterly update to our executive committee. We had some satellites which had a severe impact. Anyway we raised a case about aliens destroying the satellites which was ranked the lowest likelihood. But due to the matrix it meant our director needed to report on aliens attacking our satellites every quarter.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Glad to know at least someone out there is looking out for these potentially pesky aliens.
  - jaydeegee 3y ago
    Our diligence paid off too, those satellites are still up there unbothered.
    - dools 3y ago
      I'd like to buy your threat matrix
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    You jest, but when the aliens really come, or when countries downwell decide to start lobbing antisatellite weapons around, any mitigations coming off that threat matrix may suddenly come in handy.
    - jaydeegee 3y ago
      We did have real mitigation plans for such things, luckily this service was deemed non critical as there really wasn't a workable solution.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  >We had some satellites Nice flex.
- 3y ago
GolfPopper 3y ago
I'm not seeing any mention of a Miyake event[1]: "It gets even scarier when you compare the Carrington Event with the Miyake Event. Scientist were able to estimate the strength of the Carrington Event based on the fluctuations of Earth’s magnetic field as recorded by observatories at the time. There was no way to measure the magnetic fluctuation of the Miyake event. Instead, scientists measured the increase in carbon-14 in tree rings from that time period. The Miyake Event produced a 12 percent increase in carbon-14. By comparison, the Carrington Event produced less than 1 percent increase in Carbon-14, so the Miyake Event likely dwarfed the G5 Carrington Event." 1.https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-large-solar-storm-could-knock-out-the-internet-and-power-grid-an-electrical-engineer-explains-how/ https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-large-solar-storm-could-... Original Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11123 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11123 Dating using Miyake events: https://www.science.org/content/article/marking-time-cosmic-ray-storms-can-pin-precise-dates-history-ancient-egypt-vikings https://www.science.org/content/article/marking-time-cosmic-... Additional link: https://daily.jstor.org/the-carrington-event-of-1859-disrupted-telegraph-lines/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-carrington-event-of-1859-disrupt...
aws_ls 3y ago
Great article. And also perhaps, should we always have the steering wheels in Cars even though level 5 FSD is reached? Edit: If its not obvious, level 5 FSD will assume permanent availability of communication, GPS, sensors etc to be working at all times. So having a steering wheel backup for critical unforeseen situations should be a good redundancy and safety measure.
- goodcanadian 3y ago
  That presupposes that basic driving skills will continue to exist in that scenario . . . I am somehow doubtful.

167 points by fortran77 3y ago

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240226163016/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/what-a-major-solar-storm-could-do-to-our-planet https://web.archive.org/web/20240226163016/https://www.newyo...

superkuh 3y ago

Long article for something that can be summed up in two paragraphs. The primary danger is plasma from a CME or solar energic particles from a flare causing a rapid compression of the geomagnetic field by dynamic pressure and the the rate of change in magnetic field inducing large currents in very long conductors (power grid, pipelines, etc) down on earth. If the large backbone transformers in the grid are not outfitted with fast ground fault interrupters they would be damaged and the grid for large regions would go down. There are no backup transformers waiting. It would take a few to many months to produce and install new backbone transformers even in normal times. It might take more when the grid is down. This lack of electricity would have compounding effects. A much lesser worry is the satellites in orbit getting deep ion charging and sparking and getting damaged.

idontwantthis 3y ago
So easy and cheap to prepare for, and the potential destruction is basically infinity, but here we are.
- superkuh 3y ago
  Indeed. There was a strong push for funding for installing and mantaining fast ground fault interrupters after the EMP Commision in congress in 2001 (http://www.empcommission.org/ http://www.empcommission.org/) determined it was the best solution. And then again in 2008. But nothing actually happened besides words.
- cogman10 3y ago
  I'm not sure that we haven't already prepared for this. Lightning is a thing and fast grounding transformers are the solution to that. As a kid, thunderstorms commonly knocked out the grid. Now as an adult I've rarely seen the power go out (It usually happens due to someone ramming a power line with their car).
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Seemingly in these threads a lot of people don't understand solar storms at all. When lighting hits you get a few microsecond burst of a whole lot of power that gets dumped to ground. Your grounding will get very hot from this, but typically you're not getting hit constantly all day in the same grounding location. Now imagine this. You start getting excess power to the point it's starting to drive primary movers on the grid. You disconnect them because you don't want bad shit happening to your generators. But your grid is still generating power, in some places an awful lot of power that is acting more like DC rather than AC. So you're going to dump this to ground right? Have you ever welded? Because when you dump power to ground it's still power and it makes things hot. Unless you build in massive heatsinks you're going to have a problem.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Your telegraph lines start catching on fire, eh?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Honest question, because I don't know: Are fast ground fault interrupters "cheap and easy"? I mean, sure, they're cheap and easy compared to replacing transformers. But they don't just grow on trees, either. What's the lead time on getting one?
  - idontwantthis 3y ago
    I meant the transformers. We’re talking a relativey modest amount over a century or more. Governments can handle it.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  Every single instance of "being prepared" has to go past an accountant who has to make the math, math for the next 90 days. The conversation will go something like this. Engineer at electric company: "We'd like to get this project on the calendar for the quarter; should make the equipment more resilient against the risk of solar storms." Accountant at electric company: "What are the odds this solar storm happens in the next quarter?" Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1." Accountant: "That's not enough certainty when compared to the necessity of profitability." scratches grid hardening off priority list Now, "prepared" means "society not collapsing", and "profitability" means that a retired couple can buy a timeshare on a golf course in Florida where they can swing until the dementia sets in, but priorities are priorities.
  - njarboe 3y ago
    > Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1." Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, over a long enough timeframe, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment is close to 1."
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    That's not what the accountants do at a company. The accountants are given the receipts after the engineers have already spent company money, and their job is to account for that spending. The finance department are the people who decide whether the engineers get to spend the money. (They're also known as the FP&A team = financial planning and analysis.)
    - dylan604 3y ago
      I thought the engineers turned in the receipts in hopes of being reimbursed for the critical purchase that the accountants then get to decide if it meets their definition of critical.
cogman10 3y ago
I'd have to imagine that now-a-days these transformers are all or mostly fast grounding. If they weren't, I'd expect lightning storms to be a much bigger and more frequent issue.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  The vendors who sell fast grounding transformers must love these articles...
- pixl97 3y ago
  Lighting rarely hits transformers directly nor does it commonly hit the carrier lines. Typically you see a wire along the top that's grounded that 'catches' the lighting at the highest point and sends it to ground. Also lightning is pretty easy to arrest over short burst because of it's large influx and short duration. It's kind of like the difference between a single (smallish) wave caused by a boat and a tsunami. The boats wave can cause damage but it's typically very limited. Meanwhile the tsunami doesn't stop coming and becomes your environment. Fast grounding doesn't mean much when dumping to ground stops working because the ground gets so hot it's a resistor.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  I feel like you're underestimating how old so much of our grid is. There are lines near my house (in a rural area) that are still just held up by warped bent poles with white ceramic insulators on them, a (hopefully) beefier version of what you'd see on an old electric fence before people started using plastic. Obviously old poles and cabling doesn't mean the transformers are outdated but I wouldn't be shocked.
mattmaroon 3y ago
This is what I dislike about the New Yorker. It's a literary circle jerk. I get that you want to show me what a great writer you are, but I don't really need to hear about growing up on Alcatraz at the start of the article about a solar storm. If I want to read something that's 10x as long as it needs to be to get the point across I'll just pick up another Gladwell book.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  You think that's bad, wait until you see the recipe blog ;)
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Haha at least there’s a “jump to recipe” link usually. I wish New Yorker had a “jump to the point” button.
- Aaronstotle 3y ago
  Its my biggest gripe with the New Yorker, their articles are incredibly long winded and meandering at times.
  - digging 3y ago
    I really need an Abridged New Yorker feed. I love about 20-30% of their articles, by volume, but they're so, uh, "well written", that they're difficult to even scan for high-value information.
- tchock23 3y ago
  It's not just the New Yorker. This "Gladwell-ification" of non-fiction has been happening for a long time now.
GeoAtreides 3y ago
> Long article for something that can be summed up in two paragraphs Sure, you can answer the question "What can a major solar storm do to our planet?" in two paragraphs, why not, if one would need a very quick, very short summary of what a major solar storm could to our planet. But. Some people might want a more in-depth answer, going into great detail. Some people might want so much detail that they might read a whole-ass book about a subject. Long form articles are not bad or unwanted; they bridge the space between a short summary and a book (along with essays, studies, etc). What is bad, though, is thinking everything should be reduced to a short two paragraph summary, or a 1min tiktok video, or a video. All mediums of communication have their uses and their niches, serving different needs.
- welder 3y ago
  This isn't a more in-depth answer... it's a biography of a man researching solar flares.
  - ytx 3y ago
    Perhaps that's what people are actually reading the new yorker for :P
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

anarbadalov 3y ago

Isn't this the same author who wrote that feature a decade ago speculating on the potential for a massive earthquake along the Pacific Northwest? It's too early in the week, but I'm bookmarking this for a weekend read. Incidentally, there's been news about huge solar flares in the last week (e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/solar-flares-cycle-xclass-radio-att/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/solar-flar...).

DrBazza 3y ago
Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9 on the Richter scale. Seeing what Microsoft's business back up plan for that is, would be interesting, especially since Seattle would be the largest affected city.
- jpalawaga 3y ago
  I lived in Vancouver bc and in general they’re prepared. The office building I worked from had many earthquake supply cabinets that had rations, water, thermal blankets, and we all knew where the community muster points were. They had people come in to talk about the risks and remind you about earthquake preparedness. In general it’s going to be a disaster, but people are prepared for it (as much as one can be anyhow)
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9 More precisely, it's 8, the average is 500 years, and the last one was in 1700.
  - DrBazza 3y ago
    Cunningham's law eh? :)
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      Ha! I had forgotten it had a name, but I guess that works. There is a fair bit of variability in the 500 year average, and 8 is still a seriously large earthquake, so preparations are definitely justified IMO.

mmanfrin 3y ago

My scifi prediction is that if the worst predictions of AGI come to fruition that a Carrington event would actually save us (albeit we'd be radically changed).

foota 3y ago
You're adding your one hope for humanity to the training set? :)
- fhars 3y ago
  It's post 2022, it will not be used.
  - epakai 3y ago
    Best to flag it. The pre-filtered comments here are probably still worth scraping.
fritzo 3y ago
I think it's more likely that a self-intrested AGI would save us from a Carrington event
- dylan604 3y ago
  but where's the scifi-ness fun of that?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  How could a thing that doesn't exist yet or remotely have support for it save us from an event that has near certainty of 1?
  - fritzo 3y ago
    Even before AGI, suppose a data center uptime optimization algorithm is given a broad range of possible actions to achieve more 9's of uptime. Across all failure modes the algorithm sees that to achieve the next 9, it needs its parent company to lobby national governments to subsidize energy grid maintainers to install fast breakers at all transformers.

gene-h 3y ago

Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by turning off electricity, although this is a difficult thing for power companies and grid operators to do. One issue this article doesn't discuss is the risk to undersea internet cables[0]. Undersea fiberoptic cables need repeaters, these need electricity, so they have very long conductors and it's expected that sea water's conductivity could make induced currents worse. Shutting off power won't necessarily work, because induced currents could be 100x more than the equipment is rated for. Although, global connectivity is still likely to exist. [0]https://ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf https://ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf

Wieldable4640 3y ago
Turning the power off would work, but is that feasible? Even if we’d be able to spot the CME, would then have enough time left to shut down the entire power grid? The time between detection and the CME hitting us would probably be measured in minutes. I don’t think it’s possible to shut down the grid in that timeframe.
- javajosh 3y ago
  I say this only half in jest, but could we not request that an adversary trigger their malware to shut down our grid? When life gives you lemons...
  - yifanl 3y ago
    Wouldn't such an adversary always choose the option that causes us more damage?
- digging 3y ago
  Yeah I question if it's something we even could do. But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people. Probably less than setting every electrical device on (half of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their food spoils and they can't get to the store.

nntwozz 3y ago

Wild thought, is any nation preparing for this as an opportunity to attack? For example Russia using its whole arsenal to create maximum chaos to create some opportunities, or North Korea invading South Korea. Pakistan, China and Iran could def. also be cooking something. Might as well go balls to the wall now that the enemy is weakened and you have a lot less to lose. Especially if your economy is mostly self-sustained and doesn't rely on globalization to function properly.

m3kw9 3y ago
Sure but what happens after they can’t destroy everything? You get WW3 or some NATO response or worse
spdustin 3y ago
Not a wild thought. The China, Russia, and the US (if not the other nuclear powers) have made known their plans to use a nuclear electromagnetic pulse as the first phase of any attack. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#Post–Cold_War_attack_scenarios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#...)
- tempestn 3y ago
  With that being the case, you would think that grid hardening would not have trouble getting funding, as a matter of national security.
  - spdustin 3y ago
    Hardening essential comms and energy infrastructure has been funded. Trouble is, the rest of us don't benefit from the government redundancies, since they're focused on continuity of government rather than continuity of the electorate.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  That seems to be talking about using EMP as a targeted weapon. I think the question was more if any countries have ready made plans to exploit the natural disaster for military gain. Like does any country have a standing order to in the case of massive global disruption subdue or attack their geopolitical rivals?

GoodJokes 3y ago

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rglover 3y ago

I find it interesting that last week, we had a nationwide AT&T outage and one of the causes speculated on local news outlets (within a couple hours) was a solar flare [1]. Now, less than a week later, we have articles in the New Yorker priming thoughts about solar storms. Why is this relevant? Consider where that speculation started: local news networks [2]. It's worth reading Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars [3] if you haven't already to understand why it's worth me mentioning this. Easily dismissed as "conspiracy nonsense," but it's worth asking "why this, why now?" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7scPFH0aq9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7scPFH0aq9U [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI [3] https://archive.org/details/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars-original-document-copy https://archive.org/details/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars-or...

beedeebeedee 3y ago
I just read the pamphlet "Silent Weapons to Quiet Wars" that you suggested and would say it is not worth reading. There is not much in it, besides a (presumably) faked origin and typesetting, a brief analogy to physics and electronics, hushed talk of banks and domination, and a lot of hand waving and winking at the reader
- rglover 3y ago
  There's a lot more to it than that and I'd encourage people to form their own opinions. It maps fairly close to our current reality, even if that mapping is uncomfortable for some to read. Considering the publication date, you can use abductive logic to say "yep, all of this chaos was intentional."
  - beedeebeedee 3y ago
    > There's a lot more to it than that I disagree. It gestures to a lot more (operational research, electronics, physics, etc), but just loosely points to them to make analogies. If you have no familiarity with those subjects, it is better to read about them elsewhere. If you are familar with them, then the analogies just seem shallow and don't provide to the pamphlet other than to fluff it up to make it seem more scientific than it is. The rest of it refers to bankers (Rothchild!), domination and sub-nations. It also has a presumably fake origin story, and smacks of being a modern Elders of Zion like work. I didn't know anything about this pamphlet other than what you posted before reading it (and I only read it because it has a provocative title), but I would suggest to anyone else not to waste their time- go read instructive books on operational research, cybernetics, etc, instead of this pretending to be a secret book from the 70's

runjake 3y ago

http://archive.today/UcMvZ http://archive.today/UcMvZ (In case web.archive.org is blocked at your workplace.)

WrathOfJay 3y ago

[flagged]

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
I trust the US military to always do the oo-rah thing, I think if EMP space weapons were practical they would be asking for money to build one. After all, we have that rail gun.
op00to 3y ago
I have not seen increased reporting on the effects of solar flares. I closely follow space weather as someone who uses the ionosphere to bounce radio signals. Instead, we're on the upswing from a solar minimum, so we'll see more solar activity. Notice on Google trends the last time the news got excited about solar activity, which was at the predicted height of the last solar cycle. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=solar%20flares&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...

aerostable_slug 3y ago

Something to add to the mix: For those who don't know, capital expenditures that are funded out of a rate case make investor-owned utilities money. If you can get the relevant regulatory body (often a public utility commission) to approve raising rates to cover x dollars of grid resilience projects, the utilities will happily take the money and go forth and implement. The trick is justifying the spend to said regulators. This is hard with black swan events and regulators that are explicitly tasked with being ratepayer advocates, guarding against the utilities unnecessarily gold-plating things to get a greater rate of return for their investors. It's not like the utilities don't want the money, or the "work" of doing it, or anything like that. Rather, if PG&E went to CPUC and asked for several billion dollars to build a hardened bunker filled with things like transformers that may never be used in the lifetime of the people signing the documents (but the profits realized by the rate of return on the CAPEX will immediately go to investors), they'll likely get laughed out of the room. This issue complicates the discussion about grid resilience, because it can seem to Jeff & Jane Ratepayer (/taxpayer if we're talking national projects) it's all just an excuse to route regular people's money to executives & investors over something that won't happen, the rich get richer, yadda yadda yadda.

spdustin 3y ago
Or, in the case of Texas, where there are no regulators that have done so…
kccqzy 3y ago
Ratepayers should never be on the hook for this. We need to compare the capital expenditure of these grid resilience projects (like the spare transformers in a hardened bunker) against the costs of what if such an event happened. It's obvious that for such black swan events, FEMA will get involved and ultimately the funds to recover from this disaster will come from the federal government. So as long as the capex is reasonable, this should be funded by the government.
- asoneth 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you see as the practical differences between taxpayers footing the bill compared to ratepayers given that most people pay both? (In other words, is paying for this with higher taxes substantially better compared to paying for this with higher utility bills?)

andrewinardeer 3y ago

I wonder if a solar storm can get so intense that the aurora borealis or aurora australis is visible during daylight hours?

ljoshua 3y ago
See the Carington Event: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event It doesn’t discuss seeing it during the day, but it was visible in places where it would never otherwise be.

Geisterde 3y ago

Pick me! I think it would upset people, at least until after dinner has passed. After that, and once people have figured out who has a functional ice maker and whos cars still run, I think its back to the grind.

johnea 3y ago

It was a dark and stormy night... as I grew up on Alcatraz? 8-/ tl;dr never made to anything having anything to do with solar storms...

hobobaggins 3y ago

A magnetic pulse induces (Faraday effect) a powerful (high-voltage) electrical pulse in exposed wiring, effectively generating its own power. This doesn't have to be a wire in a coil, like in a motor, transformer, or generator, but can simply be a standalone wire, like the telegraph lines burning down their own poles during the Carrington Event. Or, a high-voltage power line could induce a massive surge while the coils in its transformers are also generating their own spike on each side of each transformer. A wide-spread event with a powerful magnetic storm would result in utter chaos, and it'd be nearly impossible to repair the damage. In the case of a solar storm, it's likely that a wide swath of the entire planet would receive a portion of the CME as the Earth turns on its axis from day to night.

willis936 3y ago
Telegraph lines were long, unterminated, unisolated stetches. Their effective loop area was absurdly large. Yeah a large CME would likely pop a lot of unprotected transformers which would take years to replace, but it's not like kV are being induced in personal computers. Even then, I zapped my laptop chassis with 10 kV pulses a dozen times this Winter.

dan-robertson 3y ago

What other things are in this category – unlikely bad-seeming events with somewhat recent precedents? I remember seeing a lot about things like super volcanoes when I was young but that’s not what I mean here. I’m thinking of things like: - Carrington event - Krakatoa eruption of 1883 - large or prolonged earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone - the big one around San Francisco - non-apocalyptic meteor impact (can’t think of a good example) - there have been reasonably significant variations in climate in the last 5k years or so, and somewhat significant changes on the scale of centuries but I’m not counting them as they’re too slow. The current anthropogenic climate change is faster but I also want to exclude it (and catastrophes in the technical sense like changes to large-scale air/ocean currents, ocean acidification, etc) from the list.

Gare 3y ago
> - non-apocalyptic meteor impact (can’t think of a good example) Tunguska explosion in 1908: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  I think that’s probably what I was trying to remember, thanks
ericbarrett 3y ago
That's a pretty good list. For a meteor impact, I'd cite the Tunguska Event, which was a "3-5 megaton explosion" in Siberia in 1908: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
I'll chime in with gamma ray bursts from a very nearby supernova, and I suppose a black hole passing through the solar system messing up the orbits. Some simulations have suggested a small chance that Mercury's orbit will at some point be destablised by the influence of Jupiter, and that it might end up colliding with the Earth. There's also alien invasions, pandemics, etc.

Animats 3y ago

The biggest worry is GPS. Way too much stuff is dependent on GPS. Including stationary stuff that ought not to be. Meanwhile, here's the PJM plan for geomagnetic disturbances.[1] Start at page 37. It's a very real problem, but the people in the control rooms know what to do. The basic effect is that certain specific transformers overheat. This is now monitored. Most recent event: 104095 Warning Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning 12.01.2023 06:55 PJM-RTO A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued for 06:55 on 12.01.2023 through 16:00 on 12.01.2023. A GMD warning of K7 or greater is in effect for this period. Additional Comments: End time extended to 1600 EST This never got to the point that action had to be taken. Looking at documents from NERC and the various ISOs, I get the impression that PJM is serious about this, but there's a lot of hand-waving from everybody else. It only affects very long wires with a voltage to ground. Most long-haul is fiber now, which is totally indifferent to this effect. Balanced or twisted pair, no problem. Electric railways, maybe. [1] https://www.pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/trans-exam-materials-2018/transmission/lesson-10-emergency-procedures-2018.ashx https://www.pjm.com/-/media/training/nerc-certifications/tra...

throw0101c 3y ago
> The biggest worry is GPS. Way too much stuff is dependent on GPS. Including stationary stuff that ought not to be. If interested in this topic, the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation is worth following (RSS/Atom) for articles and developments in the space: * https://rntfnd.org/blog/ https://rntfnd.org/blog/
roarcher 3y ago
> Including stationary stuff that ought not to be. This has piqued my curiosity. What stuff is this? If something needs to know where it is and it's not going to move, can't someone just program its location once and be done with it?
- raggles 3y ago
  I'm guessing it's for time sync, but any clock worth it's crystals will keep good time for quite a while. Every substation generally has GPS time sync if it isn't fibre connected, for synchrophasor measurements or accurate timestamped waveform captures for example.

jaydeegee 3y ago

I've worked in critical infra. We had a risk matrix anything above a certain rating meant it had to have a quarterly update to our executive committee. We had some satellites which had a severe impact. Anyway we raised a case about aliens destroying the satellites which was ranked the lowest likelihood. But due to the matrix it meant our director needed to report on aliens attacking our satellites every quarter.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
Glad to know at least someone out there is looking out for these potentially pesky aliens.
- jaydeegee 3y ago
  Our diligence paid off too, those satellites are still up there unbothered.
  - dools 3y ago
    I'd like to buy your threat matrix
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  You jest, but when the aliens really come, or when countries downwell decide to start lobbing antisatellite weapons around, any mitigations coming off that threat matrix may suddenly come in handy.
  - jaydeegee 3y ago
    We did have real mitigation plans for such things, luckily this service was deemed non critical as there really wasn't a workable solution.
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
>We had some satellites Nice flex.
3y ago

GolfPopper 3y ago

I'm not seeing any mention of a Miyake event[1]: "It gets even scarier when you compare the Carrington Event with the Miyake Event. Scientist were able to estimate the strength of the Carrington Event based on the fluctuations of Earth’s magnetic field as recorded by observatories at the time. There was no way to measure the magnetic fluctuation of the Miyake event. Instead, scientists measured the increase in carbon-14 in tree rings from that time period. The Miyake Event produced a 12 percent increase in carbon-14. By comparison, the Carrington Event produced less than 1 percent increase in Carbon-14, so the Miyake Event likely dwarfed the G5 Carrington Event." 1.https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-large-solar-storm-could-knock-out-the-internet-and-power-grid-an-electrical-engineer-explains-how/ https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-large-solar-storm-could-... Original Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11123 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11123 Dating using Miyake events: https://www.science.org/content/article/marking-time-cosmic-ray-storms-can-pin-precise-dates-history-ancient-egypt-vikings https://www.science.org/content/article/marking-time-cosmic-... Additional link: https://daily.jstor.org/the-carrington-event-of-1859-disrupted-telegraph-lines/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-carrington-event-of-1859-disrupt...

aws_ls 3y ago

Great article. And also perhaps, should we always have the steering wheels in Cars even though level 5 FSD is reached? Edit: If its not obvious, level 5 FSD will assume permanent availability of communication, GPS, sensors etc to be working at all times. So having a steering wheel backup for critical unforeseen situations should be a good redundancy and safety measure.

goodcanadian 3y ago
That presupposes that basic driving skills will continue to exist in that scenario . . . I am somehow doubtful.