A “perfect coronal mass ejection” could be a nightmare
arrl.org
arrl.org
Evidence of a Monstrous, Ancient Solar Storm Found Hidden in Greenland's Ice https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a268179...
BC 660 beryllium-10 / chlorine-36 spike https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a268179...
AD 774–775 carbon-14 spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...
AD 993-994 carbon-14 spike https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2783
See Also: Atmospheric Production of Carbon-14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#Natural_production_i...
We know from geological records that these are periodic events that happened every so often. We are due for one, and it is in our best interest to take the periodicity of nature seriously.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X1...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13429...
The strength of Earth's magnetic field in the past, recorded by rocks and sediments, provides a proxy for past flux of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) to Earth's surface due to the role of the field in modulating stratigraphic ozone. About 40,000 years ago, mammalian fossils in Australia and Eurasia record an important die‐off of large mammals that included Neanderthals in Europe. In the Americas and Europe, a large mammalian die‐off appears to have occurred ~13,000 years ago. Both die‐offs can be linked to minima in Earth's magnetic field strength implying that UVR flux variations to Earth's surface influenced mammalian evolution. For the last ~200,000 years, estimates of the timing of branching episodes in the human evolutionary tree, from modern and fossil DNA and Y chromosomes, can be linked to minima in field strength, which implies a long‐term role for UVR in human evolution. New fossil finds, improved fossil dating, knowledge of the past strength of Earth's magnetic field, and refinements in the human evolutionary tree, are sharpening the focus on a possible link between UVR arriving at the Earth's surface, magnetic field strength, and events in mammalian evolution.
>Auroras were seen around the world, those in the northern hemisphere as far south as the Caribbean; those over the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. were so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.[8] People in the northeastern United States could read a newspaper by the aurora's light.[15] The aurora was visible from the poles to low latitude areas such as south-central Mexico,[16][17] Queensland, Cuba, Hawaii,[18] southern Japan and China,[19] and even at lower latitudes very close to the equator, such as in Colombia.
Instead it's much closer to a Gaussian distribution centered on the ecliptic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/astrocourses/ast201/o...
I'd rather have fibre on the ground for a lot of reasons, but if enough people moved to LEO orbit sats, and then huge numbers of them get affected by reduced magnetosphere protection, the compounding problems here are huge.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be disruptive, but people seem to have a fetish for disaster. Society is resilient, and life would return to near-normal within weeks, if not days, I predict.
However, that's where I wonder about the "shouldn't" part. Wouldn't a large CME like this cause excessive power surges, which modern electronics don't respond well to? i.e. nearby lightning strikes can kill a computer or microwave even if you've got a circuit breaker, so wouldn't the grid suddenly having a massive surge go through it still be a cause for concern? Or are we talking voltage/amp levels below that of a lightning strike?
It would take years in normal times. In a crisis like this, you'd see resources allocated to transformers on the scale of (perhaps greater than) that allocated to COVID-19 vaccines and PPE, and that time scale would almost certainly be dramatically reduced.
What are you referring to?
Distribution is also easier in the cities due to population density.
In general there's a fiction pushed by people who live in lower density areas that somehow they're tougher or more caring or something - that for some reason everyone in cities is just waiting for a moment to suddenly slaughter each other. It doesn't happen.
Lots of the local trucks run on vegetable oil so they don't even need a working supply chain for diesel. It'll be an inconvenience but it's no death.
On top of that, a huge amount hunt and fish like you said and have hundreds of pounds of meat for a year or two with only 2-4 deer which breed like locusts.
Short term, depending on the season, it could be over a year before sustainable crops can be grown to eat. Best case, it happens in early spring, and everyone can go immediately till and plant as many acres as possible, presuming they have the seeds. And the stored fuel and sufficient labor to prepare the extra ground, fell trees and turn them to fields, etc. Even then, what is the fastest-maturing crop, 10 weeks? A long few months to live on the scraps in your no-longer-working refrigerator. And if it happens too late in the growing season? yikes, but less bad for those in more temperate climates.
Hunting? If everyone even in small towns started hunting for food, including out of season, most food species would be hunted to local extinction in short order.
Longer term, is there really enough to sustain more than a small population? I recall one rule of thumb of 20+ acres/household just to have wood to heat with (an acre/year, 20 years to regrow). With little tech, we'd pretty quickly be back to 98% of the population doing primarily farming activities.
Cities? Sure, everyone would help each other, but what other things stop working when there is no electricity? Water, refrigeration, fuel pumps, heating systems. The populations of cities are so dependent on just-in-time or constant supplies, I have a hard time seeing how they survive in any numbers unless massive aid can be immediately mobilized and sustained, which would be very tough if all the cities are out of power at once...
Where is this? I thought only a small amount of DIY types were running their cars on used veggie oil.
A large majority of people, including all but the youngest children in the developed world are healthy enough to survive just fine on zero calories for a week as long as they have clean water. You wouldn’t have zero calories and that’s probably enough time to start milling animal feed corn and processing other animal feed into something edible by humans. The developed world is well capable of feeding itself even in very bad situations. This is a coordination problem and in catastrophes people do not turn into locusts. They pull together. See WW2 in all combatant nations. I’d expect high mortality among the very young, very old and very sick and well over 90% survival rates four most of the developed world besides those groups.
1st world countries are well stocked, have know-how, have a lot of people (and a lot of educated people).
I'm inclined to believe they'd recover faster and with better results (i.e. no anarchy, no descent into dictatorship, good QoL) than third world countries. Worst case, they'll be invading poorer countries, sadly.
There’d be advantages for the one with the most remaining capability.
Some people will be able to trade for essentials at arbitrarily large amounts.
a) an immediate steep drop in difficult will allow the network to resolve transactions without loads of power, and the few nodes online will still comprise the network. some networks have much longer difficulty adjustment periods and they will be debilitated for months as blocks will not come, other networks have much shorter adjustment periods and will generate new blocks in minutes
b) that transactions can be signed offline and broadcast eventually, far far in the future.
c) alternatively, in a temporarily trusted environment, physical notes with private keys can be handed to someone else in exchange for goods and services. anybody can check the current balance with their own copy of the chain state without the internet, the date/block height of the physical notes balance should be stated alongside the note and anybody with a chain after that block height can verify it. if a provider really wants the latest copy of the chain to accept these notes, order it on a physical disk shipped to you and verify the checksum with multiple sources.
d) this means the user can exchange for goods and services without the internet, and the people that are still connected to other nodes such as a radio tower or internet cafe can act as tellers at banks and broadcast transactions periodically for people.
better than trading bottlecaps.
You can sign things offline, sure, but you can't really verify them. I could spend the same coins a thousand times if the people accepting them can't reliably check for verifications using the same consistent chain.
I don't even understand how the scheme in "c" would work to be honest, and I have a decent background in crypto and cryptocoins. How many people are going to be able to make that work?
I just can't see any of that happening. I'd expect a combination of a barter economy, some precious metals and whatever physical currency is around.
No power, societal fabric is breaking down, credit cards don't work.
Assumption: people will accept crypto at any value.
Reality: people will barter for tangible items and use force to maintain their desired order. If I'm auctioning a spare 10kw generator the guy offering a 5.56 rifle and 100 rounds has infinitely more value than 100k bitcoins (~$5,000,000,000.00)
Maybe this fantasy can play out if the person you're bartering with knows a lot about bitcoin, knows that the disaster is localized, and knows that they can escape and survive the disaster zone without the tangible alternatives. That's a lot of assumptions. You're better off hoarding 9mm bullets, water purification tabs, generators, trucks without electronics and their repair parts, solar panels, deep cycle batteries, gasoline/diesel, bullet proof vests, and MREs. But at that point any substantial tradeable stock pile is going to cost as much or more than a well designed bunker stocked to run and survive independently for >10yrs. You won't make any money during the disaster, and you must survive it to have the opportunity to be robbed before you can start to realize gains during the aftermath/rebuild period.
I will support the cause to build the infrastructure for better price discovery. Transactions can be broadcast to the chain which is supported by an asset with many assurances and confidence about its supply.
I don't actually care about the cryptocurrency being a reserve currency or any ideology fantasizing that, I care about its network being an option to support better price discovery in barter.
Society collapses, and you believe people will use cryptocurrency for barter instead of tangibles like water, food, ammunition and/or weapons because people will want to optimize the prices? What are you saying?
if its easier for you, just imagine that its for the monocle wearing investment bankers that still want to offer intangible services and settlement over a network
Radio can be recreated easily, and so can the concept of two computers talking to each other
Cryptocurrency does not need ubiquitous internet
Is a nation-sized power grid even a good idea anymore? If most places were powered by a local cooperative solar + wind + storage system, it would be less efficient, but wouldn't it also be a lot more robust against a CME, and also everything else? Individual systems would go down all the time, but overall the system as a whole would never be able to be taken down by pretty much anything.
In additional to everything on Earth being wiped out would this would create a mini Kessler Syndrome since all satellites are now space junk which we will never be able to communicate with again?
What are the odds of having a (total) solar eclipse during a CME coming straight to earth? astronomically small for sure.
When I saw nightmare in the title, I expected something like humanity will be wiped out, or maybe just 90% of us.
Can somebody clarify?
I don't know if the same extends to other places, but once distribution and sanitation systems break down, which are heavily dependent on electricity, it'll become pretty clear very quickly just how ill-equipped we are for a world without reliable electricity.
I don't see how you can say with confidence "That doesn't happen with a solar storm". We have only had the electric grid for a short period of time & have not been keeping detailed records for very long either.
I suppose the immediate challenge would be how to organise food 7 days out if we got hit by something like that. Assuming people put in a desperate effort and sort that out somehow, then the medium term problem would be something like a long period where effective communication is gone and any JIT systems fall apart. COVID shortages times 100 possibly.
People living on an area with rivers and wild animals could do a bit better. Unless they are at reach of people walking out of the cities.
Think about a zombie apocalypse, but with starving people by the hundreds of thousands. Starving and, if in the US, armed.
Keeping food and water at home for at least for a couple of months is a very sensitive thing to do for this kind of events. Think about a new pandemic but this time the virus has 10% or 20% of mortality. Exactly.
Consider grocery shopping: what fraction of sales are online? What fraction in-store are card-based? Do the tills work offline, and if not, how fast can the cashiers work by hand? Does the store request resupply either automatically or via a manager looking at a spreadsheet, and if so, can the manager manage that without computer assistance? Do the freezers and refrigerators still work? Do the gas pumps used by the delivery trucks? Can current distribution warehouses function if there is no electric lighting? What are the power requirements of modern factories that turn ingredients into food products?
These questions probably have multiple answers, one for each different business, but the chain breaks on the weakest link.
Im not a ludite but I would say thats better to have a plan B in such case.
In any event, it is the kind of scale that only governments (and possibly Foxconn, Apple, Amazon, and Google) can really engage with.
How about shelter from the elements?
What's the plan B for that? These are foundational capabilities of 'civilization'. We can protect them, and take actions to be able to quickly restore, but 'plan B' isn't really in the cards.
Many people depend on medical devices that will no longer work. All those people would die immediately.
Many people depend on lifesaving drugs. They will die in the short term (e.g. insulin).
Within a few months People will die from untreated water and starvation.
I doubt 90% of the population will die. You can look at the siege of leningrad and see that people survived years of a siege and I think 25% died.
People will find a way to survive even if it means eating bugs.
It'd probably be something like loosing 10 years of world GDP all at once. Probably pretty good for the environment if we used the opportunity to build back greener.
The currents induced by the grid burn out these transformers and they have to be replaced before power can flow again. But these are very large, long lead time items that we don’t leave just laying around. And now you need hundreds of them, but the supply chain to build them has collapsed.
Thankfully, most of these transformers are connected to grids that automatically detect the high DC currents and shut down. And this assumes everyone missed the massive impending space weather event and grid operators forgot to shut them down.
So it probably wouldn’t be that bad.
Oh you mean energy suppliers off-lined production temporarily and most resumed operation once the storm was over.
Totally the same phenomena.
Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
The doomsday people like to say we are 72 hours away from anarchy, and, if true, it will be the fallout from people instantaneously competing for very scarce resources that will be the real problem.
I don't subscribe to the incident statistics on this anymore. We had similar incident statistics pre-chernobyl, pre-fukushima and they are not mereley useless, they are actually harmful and dangerous. They prevent discussion, calm down politicans and public, fuel a short-sighted prevent-cost-at-allcost-preventionism that sabotages any disaster awareness and preparedness.
Obviously, in both the USSR and Japan, there were/are problems with regulatory capture, and in the USSR, safety culture. I think people overfocus on the dramatic explosion and underfocus on the legion of maimed, poisoned, and permanently disabled people that suffer from industrial accidents every day. It's both unjust and ineffective - you can't make a dangerous industrial process safe in a society where civil servants see their job as to promote the interests of big industrial concerns, and that's at the root of both Fukishima and Minamata disease.
Would the outcomes for grid-connected and off-grid systems be different?