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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

Space weather events can have measurable effects on electrical things that are supposedly grounded.

The 1989 coronal mass ejection caused lots of problems with radios, which is probably one of the better known side effects of a solar storm. But it also took out power grids because utilities got a phantom current that just showed up out of nowhere on their long cables. This current can also cause problems for other long metal things buried in the ground like oil pipelines.

IIRC a similar event in the 19th century electrocuted a bunch of telegraph operators. They unplugged the power as a safety measure, but the Earth's magnetic field generated so much current in the telegraph cables that they still worked.

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> event in the 19th century electrocuted a bunch of telegraph operators.

True but you are underselling it a bit. Aurora was seen as far south as Colombia and in Colorado it reportedly was bright enough to wake people up because they thought it was day.

It is assumed that had that occurred today it would have fried the power grid on at least a continental scale.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

I honestly think it’s crazy that we don’t give this more attention as a society. Like, there is serious talk that we need to look out for Asteroids. But nothing about hardening ourselves against the next high output solar event, which seems more likely to be a problem.

My understanding is that the only early warning system we have relies on old and failing satellites and provides only minutes of warning.

"In August 2018, NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched to space, soon becoming the closest-ever spacecraft to the Sun. With cutting-edge scientific instruments to measure the environment around the spacecraft, Parker Solar Probe has completed three of 24 planned passes through never-before-explored parts of the Sun's atmosphere, the corona."

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasas-parker-solar...

Oh neat. I was at a lecture about space weather some years ago and several scientists were lamenting the delays in that project. Glad it got sorted!

Light travels faster than plasma, so we have on the order of 12-18 hours notice of a CME targeted at us.

Warning of a possible CME-induced electrical storm. The visible signature alone isn't proof.

The actual EMF effects, based on both the nature and targeting of the CME, aren't clear until it encounters some electrically-aware monitoring device. Of which most are in Earth orbit.

If countermeasures include such activities as widespread disabling / disconnecting of major grid elements and equipment, you'll want to minimise the false alarms, both on the basis of cost and because of the boy-who-cried-wolf factor.

Events that kill some people and events that kill all people have different priority.

That's because blowing up asteroids is sexy, but hardening the grid is work.

You can't make a movie out of the latter, so nobody cares.

See, also, why people love sexy non-solutions to problems we don't have (let's colonize Mars), but turn their noses at solving real problems, which affect billions of people (climate change). You can't make a slick film about a superhero convincing people to cutting back on their energy use, and to carpool, or bus to work. It's not sexy.

According to the page you linked we were pretty close to it happening in 2012. Crazy!

https://m.xkcd.com/2233/

Oh, not that again. The last time this came up I pointed people at the PJM website, where you can read "PJM 101" and the section on geomagnetic disturbances, written for the people who are in the control rooms where such problems are dealt with. Yes, it's a problem, and it can cause outages, not for most of the reasons given here. The problem is that minor DC currents can cause transformer saturation, which reduces their capacity and causes them to overheat. It's not hard to detect this, and trip a breaker, and some key points in the US power grid have that protection.

>IIRC a similar event in the 19th century electrocuted a bunch of telegraph operators.

According to the Wikipedia article, it only gave some electric shocks, not actually killed them.

Electrocution can refer to both death and injury via electrical shock.

True but it mostly refers to death via electric shock or severe injuries due to electric shock—which isn’t surprising since the word was coined to mean death by electric shock.

> Electrocution can refer to both death and injury via electrical shock.

I don't like being pedantic about language but given that the word is literally just a portmanteau of electricity and execution it's stupid to use it to refer to something other than death. It's not like execution can refer to someone being hurt. The only reason to use it to describe something nonlethal is because you don't realize that execution is part of the word.

Besides, "electrocuted" is a useful word and much less cumbersome than "killed via electrocution". We already have shock, arc, flash and burn for injuries and no other word to clarify lethality.

"To electrocute" is a lot like "to hang" or "to bisect" or "to draw and quarter": it's a way to attempt to kill something. It doesn't necessarily succeed. You can be electrocuted successfully, or electrocuted unsuccessfully. Suffering an "electrocution injury" is like suffering a "hanging-related injury": it means that something tried to kill you, and you escaped less-than-fully dead. In legal terms, it's what causes someone to be charged with the crime of attempted murder.

I disagree with that the word shock or severe shock would (should) be used not electrocution.

Electrocution means death by electricity and shock is damage by electricity up to but not including electrocution.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/electrocute

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

https://www.etymonline.com/word/electrocute

This reminds me of a "hilarious" conversation I had one time when I was in the casualty ward of the local hospital.

"So there I was at home and I cut through an electrical cable with some scissors."

"And you came to A&E because you got shocked?"

"Well I was shocked, yes. I didn't expect the cable to be live, there was a big bang and all the lights went off"

"OK you've had an electric shock?"

"No I was surprised, I was not electrocuted"

"So why are you here ..?"

(Paranoid partner made me go, though I was certain I was fine. Had some fluid taken from my spine; apparently electric shocks can cause "stuff to break down" and they were gonna use the fluid to confirm whether I'd been hit by electricity or not.)

Not sure if "to bisect" and "to draw and quarter" are so similar here. I mean, if you say that someone is bisected, or drawn and quartered, the meaning is pretty much that he's dead!

Language and meaning evolves. Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they report how words are used. Electrocution is currently defined as killed or injured by electricity by both Websters and Oxford, so it's a meaning that's caught on both sides of the Atlantic.

So I think that ship has sailed, whether you like it or not.

That is not how it is interpreted in professional engineering circles. Take a look at the definition of electrocution in the international electrotechnical vocabulary: http://www.electropedia.org/iev/iev.nsf/display?openform&iev...

My point is that the definition of execution hasn't changed, and derived words shouldn't either, to minimize confusion.

This is also a plea from an actual electrical engineer, because we generally use it to refer to death. It would be nice if everyone else did too because it's useful.

Wikipedia asserts that it only refers to death by electric shock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocution I agree it should only mean that. "Electric shock" is the term for something that hurts but doesn't kill.

Yes, but it does so by citing Merriam Webster which explicitly says that it includes death or severe injury.

Problem is that there is no single word to mean "to shock or harm through electricity," thus "to electrocute" is used metonymically.

Did it decimate them?

> "Space weather events can have measurable effects on electrical things that are supposedly grounded."

So the ground is not as grounded as we'd like it to be?

Oh, it's as grounded as it could possibly be, literally. Just sometimes...it's not enough.

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