Solar superflares hit Earth multiple times
earthsky.org
earthsky.org
If we learnt anything from covid it's that our governments do not account for systemic risks. The emperor has no clothes, etc.
The difference now with the past is that everything is connected. We have seen that we "absorbed" it much better/ flexible than what I anticipated. Still getting bad news through the web immediately is not something we had time to adapt to before.
Is it perfect, no. Are there issues, sure! Humanity adapts, bad news actually makes prepares us more and makes us find a solution.
I'm not worried about an apocalypse. The only thing that I'm worried about is the growth of human population since 1960 actually.
But we'll adapt.
Just like all other crisis that were the end of the world before.
And don't forget, humanity had to go through a lot of shit to get where we are now.
Greetings from Bruges, Belgium!
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slag_om_de_IJzer - translate this. This is practically where I live now ;) ( dutch to English)
I don't believe climate change will destroy us all. It might make things more uncomfortable than it has to be but when push comes to shove, humans will adapt to pretty much any situation.
But humans are indeed pretty good at getting on top of things when it's crucial. It's the preparation part that could use improvement ( definitely on a global participation scale).
From another point of view: it's never been this peaceful in the world. Which doesn't mean it's all perfect now, but a reminder of where we came from and how bad it was.
Making a "big bad fuzz" out of things is a requirement to acknowledge and to solve them by getting everyone onboard.
Edit: misread a bit, I thought you mentioned we were better at preventing things, but you didn't. So...
Tldr: I agree!
Civilisation adapted to covid because we had power and communication. It simply won't survive the instantaneous loss of both for an extended period.
With pre-industrial population levels, maybe we could survive in our towns and villages without electricity and communication. But now? I think the suffering would be unimaginable.
Beyond personal experience, this colours collective consciousness. The earliest human writing that we still have record of is only 5000-6000 years old. There is archaeological evidence os civilization going back 10,000-15,000 years. We've found settlements at the bottom of the English Channel from ~8,000 years ago [1]. This should tell you something: we've seen massive sea level rises in recent Earth history.
The last 10,000 years have been relatively stable, abnormally so. There are a host of events that affect life on earth. Just to name a few: solar flares, meteor/asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, earthquakes, magnetic pole flipping, rapid climate change (cooling and warming), sea levels rising and falling, Milankovitch cycles (ie eccentricity, axial tilt and precession) driving long-term climate, cosmic events (eg gamma ray bursts) and so on.
Some of these things are relatively common too in the sense that they've occurred multiple times in the short span of civilization. Beyond these superflare events there are others that cause massive death and destruction (eg [1]).
I guess my point is the best we can do is put off the next such event temporarily. There will be another Ice Age, for example. There will be future mass extinctions. Yes, we're wreaking havoc on the planet but anything we're doing now still just feels like tinkering on the smallest scales.
Ultimately we're just going to have to learn to adapt.
[1]: https://www.livescience.com/1759-stone-age-settlement-englis...
The Scream by Edvard Munch was painted in 1893. Planning for multiple summers with chronically low insolation is the only responsible course of action.
Bad enough it will put pressure on food, trouble keeping the lights on would make this much worse.
I think the bigger problem would be trouble keeping phones charged and Internet/WiFi running. I seriously think that we are so addicted to our always-connected devices that losing them would be severely distressing for many/most people.
Perhaps "adapt" is the wrong word; you might see some of these actions as proactive.
I mean think about it: is it easier to reduce global CO2 output that'll no doubt make things more expensive at least in the short term and require concerted action by other countries like India and China and with all of that it'll probably take decades to see an impact or to just form a voting bloc and get the government to bail you out when your coastal town gets flooded?
I'd like to see a graphic or some kind of graph-theoretic summary statistic describing the damage we've done to the evolutionary tree.
> anything we're doing now still just feels like tinkering on the smallest scales
I’m reminded of: https://xkcd.com/1732/
This is not comforting.
It’s likely that the flare caused red aurora, but it would be pretty diffuse and unlike points of light that we know stars to be.
> knocking out undersea cables
Most undersea cables being optic fiber, I don’t really see why a solar flare would knock them out. Or maybe they are active components like repeaters? But how are they powered up?
Fiberoptic needs repeaters every couple hundred kilometers, so everything crossing any ocean is actively powered.
The damage to the cable would come from difference in potential at the ends of the cable. The cable might be at the ocean bottom but it could still get fried if you apply high voltage that could kill repeaters. And without those the cable is useless.
Basically, greatly simplifying, in a solar storm any long conductor might be subjected to high potential difference (potential difference == voltage). It does not matter if the middle is exposed but enough of it needs to be exposed at the ends. So a lot will depend on details of how the cable is actually terminated. And it should be possible to engineer it (ie terminations) so that it is safe from a storm.
One ohm/m is enough to severely limit anything on the kV range over hundreds of km. Steel cable support is often much more resistive than that.
But the most important is, I think, you are mistaking voltage and current.
Resistance will limit current, but it will do nothing to voltage (except for fast transients depending on capacitive properties of the line -- sorry, there must always be some exceptions to every rule).
1M volts put to a conductor will still be 1M volts regardless of wether the conductor is 1ohm or 1M ohm.
Remember, electronics is mostly fried by voltage, not by current. For high current to damage electronics at nominal voltage it must have an internal fault -- short circuit, for example, that causes it to draw more power than necessary.
High potential, on the other hand, causes electrons to go all sorts of ways they are not supposed to go, causing damage to all sorts of things that are not supposed to be penetrated by electrons.
You can damage sensitive electronics by waving your hand over it. You don't even have to touch it -- just the fact that you are moving some electrons on your hand causes electromagnetic field (moving charge == electromagnetic field) that causes potential to be induced in internal electronics (conductor in changing electromagnetic field == induction).
Just read about why exactly electronics is distributed in those funny metalized bags.
As a rule, you need both voltage and current to kill a device. For MOSFETs, that's indeed very little current, but most components are far more forgiving, and the MOSFETs are always protected.
Also, resistance causes the voltage to drop. How much it drops depends on the details of the device protection, but you certainly won't get a 1MV drop inside the device if you have many Mohm of resistance outside of it.
The question is when.
https://thecomicninja.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/calvin-and...
Worth googling, good short story, and relevant to the "Solar superflares hit Earth" topic.
Before there was a "super" flare and/or CME you'd see the sunspot with your unaided eyes. Check out "The standard flare model in three dimensions. II. Upper limit on solar flare energy" and the figure 4 in particular for size to energy reference. https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2086
AIUI, it's only a problem if sufficiently long wires are actually connected to vulnerable equipment.
"Although X is the last letter, there are flares more than 10 times the power of an X1, so X-class flares can go higher than 9. The most powerful flare on record was in 2003, during the last solar maximum. It was so powerful that it overloaded the sensors measuring it. They cut-out at X17, and the flare was later estimated to be about X45. A powerful X-class flare like that can create long lasting radiation storms, which can harm satellites and even give airline passengers, flying near the poles, small radiation doses. X flares also have the potential to create global transmission problems and world-wide blackouts." (1)