A Bad Solar Storm Could Cause an 'Internet Apocalypse' | Hacker News Reader

A Bad Solar Storm Could Cause an 'Internet Apocalypse'

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26 pointsjcfrei13 comments

It is possible to prepare for such an event. Power grid providers in developed nations have been doing so over the past decade, following a near miss in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLO9WxVO9s8

Wouldn't the ocean shield the undersea cables from the storm? Water is supposed to be a good barrier against solar radiation and has been proposed for deep space applications shielding astronauts.

This seems like something that won’t be addressed proactively since it hasn’t been already. I’m guessing a bad solar storm would do trillions of dollars in damage to the world economy.

IIRC, the DOE went to congress in ~2017 with a report calling for a strategic transformer reserve. They estimated $0.5 billion would cover buying and transporting 1 redundant transformer to every major power substation in the US. At the time, it took about 18 months or so to design, buy, and receive one large transformer. After a solar storm that knocks out half the worlds infrastructure, who knows how many years it would take to replace our electrical grid.

It would be cheap at twice the price, especially in light of the recent infrastructure bills. The damage, the fires, the loss of life caused buy a large solar storm could be comparable to a world war. I hate to put it in a cold & calculating manner, but the countries that are able to avoid damage or rebuild first would see economic growth similar to the post WW2 economic boom.

Is there an engineering reason why fuse/breaker infrastructure can't be upgraded to handle solar storm conditions & cut off the large transformers from the grid rather than planning to let them die and replace them from a stockpile after the fact?

Even if it costs more money than "lol stockpile" I feel like it would be still be the better choice once the time/manpower it would take to move and hookup stockpiled transformers is taken into account, and more resilient in case the storm flares up again two days after we've finally got all the transformers back online

I wonder how much this was encouraged by the Metcalf sniper attack[1] in 2013? A coordinated human action could trash a lot of transformers, and there's no way our society could survive 18 months without an electric grid.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

> but the countries that are able to avoid damage or rebuild first would see economic growth similar to the post WW2 economic boom.

Those countries will be even better off by securing a supply large enough to ship to countries which fail to address the problem .

We aren't in 1945 anymore. Economies are interconnected to such a degree that a problem somewhere means a problem everywhere

I imagine an event like this would cause a lot of tech related stocks to tank.

I'm not sure we'd have a working exchange where to see them tank...

Agreed. Impact duration would probably also depend on how companies are backing up their data. Hardware can be eventually replaced. Data can not.

Imagine what it would do to cryptocurrencies!

If you have your seed someone on the other side of the planet will have an intact Blockchain.

Imagine what it would do to banking data and transfer/payment networks on the impact facing countries.

https://archive.is/gWROk

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