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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Aren't modern electrical systems much better protected against solar storms than in 1859 or 1921?

Possibly. A geomagnetic storm in 1989 wiped out power to Quebec and subsequent improvements were made to prevent another mass outage [0], but that was a relatively small solar flare compared to those in the past, which sparked fires and blew fuses. A storm that can cause arcing like that most certainly result in a lot of damage even on a modern grid.

In 2003 October, a stronger storm than 1989's hit the Earth, resulting in a lot less power outages (presumably the grid was protected better than the past), but resulted in damages to many orbiting satellites. [1]

It's safe to assume that thanks to GOES, SOHO, and other observation and forecasting systems, we'll have enough time to respond to an incoming CME, which would probably result in preemptive blackouts to isolate and reduce the effective capture area of the grid to reduce currents upon impact, but little can be done to protect satellites in orbit, which would be the biggest impact to civilization should a large portion of satellites fail.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm#c...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_solar_storms,_2003

In some countries with modern grids. The grid in the United States (with the exception of most of Texas which is on its own independent grid) however is not and is quite susceptible to this sort of event. Modern hardware that can actually handle this sort of thing is simply largely lacking in the United States as it's far cheaper to repair the occasional failed piece of equipment than to redo the entire grid and the power companies are out to make profits tomorrow not to prepare for "it might happen tomorrow or in 10,000 years" types of events. Even losing a small percentage of the hardware to an event like this could result in blackouts in entire regions and rolling blackouts for quite some time until enough hardware could be replaced.

Worse, a lot of the hardware at that level (those big transformers and the like) are not really kept in surplus and are effectively manufactured to order and sourced outside of the United States. And while that's not a problem for countries that are more modernized, if you took down the grid in the United States the economic and food supply implications would be a global issue.

Similarly, if anything ever happened to GPS the logistics and agricultural industries would topple as they are so incredibly dependent on GPS now it's terrifying.

There have been attempts to modernize it and a plethora of articles exist on the subject, here is a semi-decent one Forbes ran earlier this year

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2019/07/12/modern...

Honestly, reading this makes me nervous - it's scary just how fragile our modern way of life is.

It really is. We've become insanely dependent on the internet, massive electrical grids and GPS.

GPS is especially interesting because the USAF didn't even want it and it almost never happened yet ever shipping company, every cargo ship, every semi, ever FedEx and UPS truck, many pieces of large farm vehicles and most of us use GPS daily. The larger farming operations even use GPS to harvest as GPS is far more accurate than a human being trying to make optimal rows and optimal rows end up in huge time & fuel savings as each acre goes by.

And take the internet... all of those delivery/freight companies use the internet to manage their shipments all across the world and to adjust routes on the fly, and most commerce is conducted via the internet either via websites or servers.

Then power. If you don't have power you don't have water pressure, you can't pump gasoline, you can't make gasoline, you can't use the internet, etc. If you even just manage to take down one region (like happened in Canada in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm ) for even a day you have a massive disruption.

It can honestly be terrifying if you let your mind obsess about it, just how fragile our technological civilization is. More and more I want to live as simply as possible but man, it's hard, we rely so much on gadgets and SAAS and the general convenience of an electricity/GPS/internet driven society.

I'd much prefer if things were more self-contained and self-reliant rather than so deeply interconnected; I don't yearn much for simple (pre-industrial) life. But given the reality we have, it makes it extremely important to protect our civilization from shocks and reinforce the most fragile aspects of it. That's why I often speak up against revolutionary changes, for good or bad. I'm for more gradual changes, and strongly against those that risk breaking civilization, because that would be game over for everyone.

I wholeheartedly agree. Society has it's fair share of flaws (and they absolutely should be fixed!) but all of the alternatives are way worse.

GPS is also used heavily in banking and fiancee for timing purposes, so any storm big enough to jam the network could essentially halt the entire economy for however long the storm lasts. The lucky thing though is that the satellites themselves are hardened against storms, so restoring service would be as "simple" as resynchronizing the entire constellation versus launching a new one

> GPS is also used heavily in banking and fiancee for timing purposes

Fascinating. Is this to measure the lag time between ordering and executing a trade?

I highly recommend James Burke's Connections (the original series if this kind of thing interests you) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

Depending on how you view some aspects of this modern way, it can also make you hopeful.

Nah, I see nothing hopeful in enormous suffering and death of billions of people, which is what would happen in days following our civilization breaking to pieces.

(And to be clear: I'm not exaggerating when I say billions.)

If by whiskey... :)

Thank you for teaching me a new term. That said, I'm having a hard time seeing its relevance here :).

Well, if by modern way you mean modern healthcare, ease of communication and travel, varied food throughout the year, etc. then I'm certainly for its continued existence. If by modern way you mean the degradation of nature, the plastering with ads of every inch of the world, the addictiveness of facebook, and time spent in company-meetings, then its collapse could not come one second too soon. (Just some random picks to illustrate the analogy, not to be taken too seriously :)

If you could surgically cut out bad slices while retaining the good, I'd be first to support it (e.g. I've written about my stance on advertising elsewhere[0]). It's not something I believe is possible without going about it very carefully, and very piecemeal.

I meant my comment in the context of the comments about fragility of our civilization (e.g. GPS being tied to power grids and agriculture and trade). Severely disrupt the systems that feed and warm us daily could easily topple the entire civilization, and I wanted to highlight that "toppling" here is a synonym for billions of deaths from starvation in a very short time frame, followed by not having a technological civilization for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

At least our C02 emissions would be reduced.

That's putting cart before the horse. The only reason to care about CO₂ emissions is because they threaten our technological civilization. The planet doesn't care about CO₂.

The Texas transmission grid run by ERCOT is independent of FERC, but not NERC. They still have to answer to the same reliability standards as everyone else in the US.

>They still have to answer to the same reliability standards as everyone else in the US. reply

Right but my intended point was, Texas is generally better off than the rest of the United States as far as their grid because the companies have much tighter, digital, control over the grid and don't have to worry about being tied into their neighbors which not only lets them get back up and running from 'normal' outages much quicker but they can also have a much larger impact when they do upgrades compared to the rest of the United States.

Not 100% true. Being tied off and islanded (well, besides the DC ties) means they have to be a lot more proactive about frequency response and inertia than the Eastern Interconnect which is the biggest machine in the world.

Wonder what the odds are that old critically underspecced transformers can act as impromptu fuses and break apart the gird fast enough to protect some of the bigger units

Sure, but not enough. There would still be a substantial number of transformers exploding. As I understand it there aren't nearly enough backups waiting around to replace them

And I'll bet the plants that make those transformers require a stable source of electricity...

The government has plenty of generators for emergency scenarios like that. It's a bootstrap problem, but not an insurmountable one.

I'd suspect that's balanced by a greater dependency on those electrical systems.

Losing 10% of our electronics would probably have a greater impact than losing 50% of the ones in use in the Civil War era.

A first-person survival game (no zombies, just unforgiving nature) called The Long Dark explores this in a way that feels concrete.

There's no electricity, except during aurorae when everything electric glitches.

After playing the survival sandbox version of the game for some time, there was a short electric blackout due to a thunderstorm in real life, in the area where I live. That made me think hard about our dependency on electrical stuff. If the electricity goes over a big area, there's no light, phones last for a short time, then goes the water, radios will be out, food supplies will cease eventually, and so forth and so on. A modern technological society is relatively brittle.

The game studio made a short film called "Elegy" [1]. I think it is quite beautiful in all its melancholy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZNbUITN-mA

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