How Dangerous Are Solar Storms? | Hacker News Reader

How Dangerous Are Solar Storms?

backreaction.blogspot.com

102 pointsfirebaze54 comments

NASA is planning for Space Weather Follow-on mission in 2025 that's going to stick a probe at L1 point between the Earth and the Sun, providing some ~22 mins of heads up when shit hits the fan (Carrington-like event).

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any emergency procedures that can benefit from such an alarm in DOE or any public electricity infrastructure. They might very well exist, anyone knows?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Weather_Follow_On-Lagran...

afaik the aim is to provide enough warning to protect transformers, I guess by powering them down in some way?

Not sure it answers your question but in case interesting here's a link to a UK document describing 'space weather preparedness strategy'

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Not just transistors--we could basically shut down the entire power grid for the time it takes the event to pass and disconnect enough connections to protect key components like the transformers. It would be a few hours of no power in order to avoid damage that could cause outages of weeks or months or years.

What about power plants? IIRC a sudden loss of electricity demand can lead to massive damage (specifically to the turbines and generators).

Can't we already predict Carrington-like events by watching for massive solar flares? I thought even at the time astronomers saw it coming in advance.

Perhaps this is just a more precise measurer; a space-weather bouy in our backyard.

Well, at least for households it would be plenty of time to disconnect everything (even cut cables) and dump some valuable electronics in the dishwasher.

Are solar storms and coronal mass ejections are underrated as a danger to society?

It seems to me like yes. Anecdotally, every time I've brought the topic up with people who work in fields like electrical engineering or for power companies, it's not really something that anyone's considering or planning for. Hardly anyone even knows about the Carrington Event.

A Carrington Event in 2021 could be so crippling.

Less common but still underrated as a risk is asteroid strike or near miss. Jupiter, Saturn, our Moon all keep us safer than other Earth-like planets. But it seems like a risk that should concern us. besides maybe subterranean shelter, IMO the best hedge is interplanetary colonization. Ridiculously expensive but not when measured against the cost of losing all of humanity.

Maybe galactic risks like these are part of the Great Filter.

I think asteroids are overrated. A globally catastrophic asteroid will not hit earth within our life times with a high degree of certainty. Yet, we currently already have means to deflect it. When it finally happens, it will be deflected. That risk is minuscule. The chances of a random small asteroid destroying a city has a higher chance, but I wouldn’t really worry about that more than the building I’m living right now collapsing.

We don't have the technology to deflect a planet-killer.

If we detect it with enough time ahead (which is very likely we will), it’s not that hard to deflect. We have already landed on asteroids and we certainly have the technology to give it a light, but constant, push in the course of an year or so. We don’t have the technology in case it’s found only days before hitting the earth. But that is very unlikely.

The odds of a planet-killer hitting our planet in the lifetime of you, your children, your children's children, and the subsequent thousand generations is so low it may as well be zero.

Worrying about it is like stressing out over what you are going to name your super-yacht, when you're broke, unemployed, homeless, and are dying of lung cancer. It's the most absurdly pointless form of bikeshedding. There are plenty of immediate and catastrophic disasters that we should be preparing for, first.

Even so its still fun to think about!

A planet killer won't hit the Earth without 3-5 near misses first. Plenty of opportunity to paint it.

Paint it? I think I vaguely know what you're getting at, but please explain.

You only need a few thousand km of orbital change to move a direct impact to well clear of Earth. You can use the momentum of photons to get this orbital change. The effect of paint is a very small delta-V, but it works out that it's enough if done a few decades before the expected impact. This works out since it is extremely unlikely that a large asteroid would impact Earth without first having a series of near passes.

https://spaceguardcentre.com/asteroids-deflected-with-paint/

If something is going to hit Earth and wipe us out, we won’t have a few decades notice.

Yes we will. Planet killer sized asteroids are the easiest to detect and track and are also the least common. City killers are harder: there is a chance we won't one of those coming and there are many more of them out there.

Asteroids that hit Earth are in near-Earth orbits. For a first intercept event the odds of an asteroid just happening to hit an Earth sized target as opposed to, say, a 1000x Earth sized "near miss" target is incredibly unlikely. We get a few near-miss events of a given asteroid before an impact happens.

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-space-orbit-oort-cloud.html

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was between 3 and 10 miles diameter. 2014 UN271 is 100km-370km.

Would we have discovered 2014 UN271 earlier had its orbit brought it closer to Earth? It’s making its closest approach in 2031 (ok, 11AU away!), only 17 years after discovery.

And sure, incredibly unlikely something that size would hit Earth, but just an example of something that is very large, and discovered shortly before it makes its closest approach.

Objects with highly eccentric orbits are both very uncommon and very unlikely to intercept Earth. The period in which they have near misses is on the order of thousands of years at least. Even if we could see them from their high altitude we don't have enough information to predict where they'll be on the next intercept.

My understanding is that this kind of threat is usually lumped in with comets, whereas threat asteroids are lumped in with low eccentricity big rocks.

Thanks, I see the difference now.

If something is big enough to wipe us out, you WILL notice it a few decades ahead. The bigger asteroids are, the easier they are to detect.

The tech is not out of reach, it's just not getting funding. See B612 Foundation.

I read as detect, but if you detect it far enough in advance, it gives a lot of time to do something about it. Even a small nudge make a huge change in position decades later.

I'm quite sure we do, assuming that US military would be willing to share their experiences from the B61 Mod 11 project.

An "asteroid", under the strict astrophysical definition, isn't a big threat. Predictable orbits, and, as you say, all the big inner system objects are mapped, and smaller objects aren't global threats.

Comets, though. We keep spotting alarmingly large comets only when they get close enough to the sun to show up in low-sensitivity sky surveys, long after they've crossed the Earth's orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2020_F8_(SWAN)

A ultra-high eccentricity Oort object, covered with low-albedo goop from spending millions of years in the periphery of the solar system is going to be damn hard to detect. Worse yet, they'll be traveling fast. Kinetic energy is the square of velocity. Won't ever see em coming, and they'll hit hard. Worst of all worlds.

Does albedo refer only to visible spectrum? Could we detect these using other frequencies?

Thermal infrared would do it. (Lower the albedo, the more blackbody radiation is emitted) The JWST would be great for comet spotting, but unfortunately it's going to be used for stellar observation instead of sky surveys. Putting another ten of them in orbit would be great, but so far the JWST has taken 25 years and more than ten billion dollars to build. Infrared also won't spot a comet until it's far enough into the solar system to warm up.

Radar is tempting, but the tyranny of the inverse square law limits its use. (Worse-- the pulse has to make it out to the object, and then be reflected back. Inverse fourth power!) All those great radar images of asteroids made by Arecibo were done during their closest approach to Earth. This[1] claims its useful range was "~2 lunar distances". This was with a 305 meter dish and 1 MW of transmit power! Also, Arecibo collapsed, and nobody seems to be in a hurry to build a replacement. (The 500 meter dish in China doesn't have a transmitter)

Assuming you have infinite power, (With a moon-based dish, maybe, otherwise your gigawatts of power just ionize the air in front of the feed horn) you have other practical problems. Bigger the dish, better the gain, narrower the beam width. Arecibo had a 2 arcminute beam. 60 arcminutes to the degree: 21,600 arcminutes to a full circle. Assuming you're surveying out to Jupiter's orbit, 43 minutes for the pulse to get out there, 43 minutes back: 645 days to survey a strip 2 arcminutes wide and 360 degrees long. Which... wouldn't have caught C/2020 F8 (SWAN), which came in 110 degrees off the ecliptic. Surveying the entire night sky would take 6,074.9 years. Just out to Jupiter! You're not even looking into the cloud of outer objects, just spotting infalling ones.

1: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/orbitaldebris2019/orbital2...

> Ridiculously expensive but not when measured against the cost of losing all of humanity.

there's no concept of money and cost left if humanity goes extinct ... so it can't be "expensive".

There is an argument to set the value of humanity to some finite, not ultra-enormous value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

There very much is a back up plan, with bunkers, food, water and energy reserves, for such a catastrophic event. But not for you an I.

I don't think they are under-rated. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/skys-cobra-series-solar...

Didn't the Carrington event start fires too? I wonder how likely it would be to start fires today, like inside a home.

Just to add, as the edit expired... many homes would be poor shields if built with OSB walls and asphalt shingles. Hopefully the normal 14ga wires in the wall could handle it. But what about devices? Most are fused on the hot side, but this type of event would essentially be energizing the wires past that point and create a circuit with the still connected ground path. Many of these devices would have small wires that could be overloaded by the current and essentially turn into a resistive heating element, which could be a problem inside dusty equipment...

Does that sound plausible or am I crazy?

The effects on the telegraph system were because they were made up of miles long conductors, so when the CME hit it induced current in these wires.

Some operators reported being able to send messages without their batteries connected. The telegraph system typically used milliamps of power (at a few hundred volts), so it's pretty much nothing compared to the electrical system in your home. That and the shorter wires, I doubt you'd even notice it.

Ah, so the wavelength is too long. That's good to know.

Oh, not again. This is mostly an ad for some streaming service. See the author's comment on the video:

Get your SPECIAL OFFER for --- here: It's an exclusive offer for our viewers! Start your free trial today. --- is a new kind of streaming service run by filmmakers...

This is actually a real problem, it's quite fixable, and not enough is being done about it. I've posted a link before to the PJM grid's training materials about this, which few will read. If you're really interested, go read the training materials on emergency procedures. I'm not going to provide a link. It's not the end of the world. The last time this happened, there were some breaker trips and blackouts, and one transformer burned out.

There are a few places in the electrical grid where you woud like to have a big capacitor between the center of the transformer delta and ground. That hasn't been done enough. Also, having more large spare transformers around would be good. However, monitoring DC current flow between the center of the delta and ground is in place, so that the need to shut down can be detected before the transformer overheats.

It's not likely to hurt anything other than long distance power transmission. Nothing else has continuous wires hundreds of km long any more. Effect on fiber optics is zero.

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with "EMP", which is something else entirely.

I've been following Sabine Hossenfelder for a while and I think she may be even the best popularizer of science/physics at the moment. She has started to add sponsor messages to her videos, which is quite sad, but for me it tells more about the sorry state of academic funding and the academic community in general. She goes against the "establishment" and criticizes very real problems that academia would rather just ignore.

I don't know enough about solar effects on electric grids, but I wouldn't pass it off just because it has to be (sadly) funded with borderline scam ads because the borderline scam academic funding structure won't fund it.

Could be worse.[1]

Could be better.[2]

[1] https://www.brimhall.com/p-104-total-shield-emf-protection.a...?

[2] https://www.pes-psrc.org/kb/published/reports/PSRC%20-%20K17...

> There are a few places in the electrical grid where you woud like to have a big capacitor between the center of the transformer delta and ground.

How big should these capacitors be? How does this compare to what's typical right now?

You sound like you know something about how big power systems work - how quickly can a grid be disconnected from the transformers in an emergency situation? It seems like we would have at least some warning if a big CME was heading our way.

> See the author's comment on the video:

The author is Sabine Hossenfelder, well posted on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=backreaction.blogspot...

A moderate scientist, but unwilling to put up with BS.

Has interviewed some of the top people in physics, not popular people but top people. Has several books out.

One of the best scientists out there talking real science IMO. Puts in a lot of work to her videos that go to a pretty high level. Has a odd and funny sense of humour. Also does music videos.

Also needs to earn money. People complain about product placement and influencers, people complain about pay walls, it all gets pretty boring. She puts in very obvious ads, not sure what more people want.

Generally she's pretty right. I'm sure she can be wrong. I learned something from her video.

This month across Europe thousands of pidgins went missing. Some claim it was solar weather, but no one seems willing to confirm or deny that. How can that be? Do we not track this stuff. I'm happy for her to do a video on this.

>Effect on fiber optics is zero.

Note that underwater cables carry a copper conductor to power the inline laser amplifiers. Would they pick up an eddy current 100m underwater? Probably not, but you'd hope they have disconnect switches at the beach landing hut, and someone on call 24/7 within 10 minutes drive distance to open them.

Without the amps, an undersea fiber cable is just an unusually long strand of glass.

The problem is large scale ground currents, eg currents of thousands of amps traveling through the ground.

Which means that deeply buried (or underwater) cables are particularly vunerable.

And of course that even happens today, eg the ground currents caused by electric trains and trams can be very destructive.

A really good book (fiction) on this topic, very entertaining and thought provoking this is: 48 Hours, by William Forstchen.

There's a major research paper coming up next month on the effect of solar storms on the Internet and well, the impacts can potentially be enormous:

https://twitter.com/sangeetha_a_j/status/1389303295055831042

The only data about the Carrington event is very niche.

Telegraph lines make very good antenna for the EM that comes from either CME or EMP. A shorter "antenna" would not work remotely as well. This is why most of the horror stories you see in movies are simply wrong. No, your cell phone won't die. No, your car won't be zapped. Only things connected to really long (wavelength-long) antennas like the power grid. We don't have telegraph or even many wired telephone lines anymore. Fiber optic is "hardened" by definition.

outdoor fiber with support-long cables gonna die tho

If a solar storm knocked out the electric grid, would I still be able to use a diesel generator to power stuff in my house?

Yes, but if you want the generator to power your house as if nothing had happened, the details of installing it are both complex and important. You'll need an electrician and a decent-sized checkbook.

You'd also want your household appliances etc. to not have been fried from some anomalous power surge.

The specific term of art is a "transfer switch". The phrase "decent sized checkbook" in the HN context might be $10k-$10m, but installing a transfer switch would only be a few thousand bucks if done to code by a professional.

> On May twenty-third nineteen sixty-seven, the US Air Force almost started a war. It was during the most intense part of the Cold War.

Uh.. I thought around 1962 and the early 80s were the most intense parts, no? Doesn't exactly fill me with trust in the writer for the coming article.

Paywalled of course:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00147152

I am confused, what is worse a Carrington like event or a high atmosphere multi-megaton nuclear blast for EMP effect?

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