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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Massive solar storms are fascinating to me. They seem to be quite common in the scale of "catastrophic disasters", there is a chance it would completely destroy the modern life we are used to, yet compared to other catastrophes, the damage to human life would be minimal.

Sure, someone really depends on an electrical gizmo to survive, but most of us would wake up to a world without machines that we rely on daily, yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests.

It would be like waking up to a very familiar, yet completely alien world for the vast majority of us.

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> Sure, someone really depends on an electrical gizmo to survive, but most of us would wake up to a world without machines that we rely on daily, yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests.

That would be true for like, 15 minutes. Then the realization hits: we eat it all, and there's no more left until the next growing season or whatever, meanwhile we'll be hungry tomorrow.

No. The fate of humanity, were the machines to suddenly stop working, is most of it dead within first couple weeks. Not only the nature cannot support 7 billion humans without technology to make it, not only we're not tooled out for doing agriculture the "old-school" way, but also most people now live in the cities. Cities do not produce food.

If you live in a city, and the machines disappear, or the economy collapses, you will starve to death, unless someone kills you first.

>If you live in a city, and the machines disappear, or the economy collapses, you will starve to death, unless someone kills you first.

This is hyperbolic. Plenty of economies have collapsed without everyone starving to death or being murdered. Will it be pretty? No, but not as hopeless as you're making it out to be.

> Plenty of economies have collapsed without everyone starving to death or being murdered.

Not in the last 50 years, not at the scale I'm talking about. Not to the point food stops being made, stored or transported, and there is no "outside" (such as international aid) to help. Closest to that would be warn-torn zones, where people in fact do starve and die.

There's hardly any hyperbole here. With the entire food sector operating just-in-time, at any given moment a modern city has enough food to last a week or two, and that's with refrigeration running. In case of global economic collapse or even global power outage, that's all you'll get in the city. There will be no more food coming after that.

You'll last longer without food, than without water. Where I live, there are no (working) watertowers anymore. It's all pressure by pumps. I'd hope they survive, but am not so sure. Where would their electricity come from in such a situation? The fuel for the emergency generators? (Do they even have them? Again, not so sure.) How long would they even last when running 24/7?

I wouldn't want to drink any unfiltered water here. At least not without some filtering "straw", Katadyn, or something similar. And they don't last long either. So you need packs of those, or at least their filters.

This view always facinates and alarms me.

Don't we know that at 7bn people this hasnt been true for millenia? We're talking c. 5,000 apes in a jungle last time this made sense.

Don't we know that the earth isnt just provided by god designed for human life? We have been nearly extinct many times, and our labour is required (via, at least, hunting) to make the world habitable for us.

Don't we know that nature is a place of choas and extremes, and technology and economics exist primarily to prevent the day-to-day mass death which was common?

Don't we know that half of the 100bn who've ever lived died before 20? Don't we know that famine, mass death, mass infant death, mass death in child birth (5-10%), etc. are "the default" ?

This strange "nature utopianism" I have always found profoundly pesimissitic and "evil-projecting", since it locates evil in all the solutions to the problems of nature we have struggled to create.

If you think "turning off civilisation" will have us wandering around forests, you're about gauarneteed to see what people have done over the last 200k years as evil.

While hunter-gathering is no Garden of Eden, I don't think it's as bad as you describe for the simple fact that evolution has molded us to it specifically. Earth isn't designed for human life, but human life most certainly is designed for Earth.

No, I dont think so. Would you say that to all the extinct species?

There's nothing guaranteeing you don't starve. There is no design.

Genes are just "random reproductive bets" with fairly high probabilities of failure over the long-run. The environment is basically guaranteed to change faster than your species can evolve, including via meteor.

I dont think the rabbits who die alive eaten by foxes, and the foxes which starve from eating all the rabbits regard that cycle as "designed for them".

Nor likewise, were the dinosaurs that impressed by the sky going dark.

This idea that "we had a home" or "there was once Eden" in any respect is wrong. The life which we were evolved for is one in which if you survived 10, then you might not survive the lion, and if you survive that, not the volcano, and so on.

Your body is just a bet made over millions of years, and not one any conservative gambler would take.

Extinct species become extinct because there is some change in their environment to which they are not successful at adapting. Generally speaking, neither the human genome or the wilderness of Earth has changed since we built our first huts.

You're correct in your regard for exceedingly high child mortality, though it bears no weight on the survival of humanity as a whole in a technology-breaking event. The human body is indeed a bet, and one that has paid off for ~300,000 years and about 12,000 generations, if we start counting from Homo Sapiens. I'd very much take that bet any day.

There's not that much wilderness left.

Globally, The max distance to a road is something like 250km, in the middle of the Sahara. In the lower US, it's more like 40 miles. Entire ecosystems are gone (e.g. tallgrass prairie), or are only present in chunks that are only a few square miles. There are basically no old growth landscapes in Ireland/England. All the old trees were harvested, and sheep were farmed in the high places. Biomass of land mammals is heavily skewed to Humans and their livestock.

It will revert very quickly. In two hundred years (outside of the dead cities and major highways), you'll have to look hard to find traces of the old civilization.

It may revert -- some -- but without the previous genetic diversity because what's gone is gone.

Apex predators are mostly gone over large parts of their former range. The species of trees in the forests that we had in UK/Ireland just aren't there any more. It will probably be taken over by hedge laurels. Deer have been introduced where they used to not be. Florida is going to be a hellscape of escaped pets, like the pythons. The old growth forests of the PNW aren't going to come back for 1000 years or more, if they even can at all due to the extinction of some species and the addition of invasives.

The earth has been here 4bn years... a species profliferating for over 300,000 years isn't even "making its money back".

Almost all of past human history has been spent dealing with mass death, and it isnt clear almost that won't be the case for future history, until we're extinct.

The world isnt made for us, and there's no reason to suppose we won't go faster than the dinos

Hunter gather doesn't work so well in a paved city of a million.

The Amish would likely be fine. Farmers with land and skill would likely survive, but would be able to provide crops for large numbers of people.

People in cities would die.

I wouldn't hedge by bets on the Amish either though. The starving majority can be nasty, and permanent positions difficult to defend. Most people anywhere would starve, but intelligence has a cockroach-like ability to survive in the crevasses.

Cannibals could actually thrive, at least for a while, I think...

Most of us have little idea how to go about hunting and gathering. And if we tried, we'd soon find out that there are far too many of us to subsist on what can be hunted and gathered around us.

Soon enough, we'd be at each other's throats.

It is very true that the Earth can simply not support 7-8 billion people without machine-based agriculture. The population would quickly collapse to a level which hunter-gathering can support, likely overshooting by some amount due to initial adjustment.

> While hunter-gathering is no Garden of Eden...

Without electricity, we would be back to 200 years ago. That's still like 10,000 years after most humans were hunter-gathering.

Did we forget that for most of civilization's time, we had technology to help us do stuff, just not electricity-based technology? For example vapor engines would work just fine without electricity. Agriculture would require a lot (really a lot) more people, but would still be possible with manpower and animalpowered machines, like it was for thousands of years.

Also, it's not like our knowledge of electricity would just disappear... we would just have to repair and make new machines, which may take a while but most people would probably survive that.

It would be more like 1200 years ago. Because almost no one today has the tools, skills, experience, and supply chains needed to recreate the Industrial Revolution.

It's one thing to know that a steam engine is possible. It's another to build steam engines at scale when you're starting from iron ore or perhaps recycled scrap metal, and the most sophisticated available practical skill - and exceptionally rare at that - is blacksmithing.

  > Because almost no one today has the tools, skills, experience, and supply chains needed to recreate the Industrial Revolution.

And even if we did, there is no easily-accessible source of energy anymore. All the accessible coal and oil have already be exhausted. We're now digging under thousands of meters of sea water and seabed to get to the sources of energy that are left.

wood, peat, and there's still a decent amount of natural gas

Wood and peat will not meet the energy demands of a society on par with current western society, no matter how small. And I believe that you underestimate the amount of effort to recover natural gas today.

> All the accessible coal and oil have already be exhausted

The Powder River Basin would like a word...

Transportation would like a word...

Edit: Like Trains 12/2022, Cover story: 24 Hours on Logan Hill

Follow along for a day's worth of action in Wyoming's Powder River Basin

Sure. But dotancohen's claim was that the only remaining energy was thousands of feet under sea, which is very false, even if the places that we currently want to burn coal are not all that close to the Powder River.

But if we're rebuilding civilization, well, the iron ore mine that supplied US Steel's Geneva Works is also in Wyoming, not that far away. And once you get an industrial revolution up and running, among other things you get railroads, which are useful for transporting coal longer distances.

TBH, I'd bet the tracks would be torn apart first to get at the steel, maybe even for the sleepers/ties.

Sure. But if we have to re-start the industrial revolution, those tracks probably don't go to the right places anyway. And if we can re-start the industrial revolution, then we can make new rails.

We'll see, or not ;->

> Because almost no one today has the tools, skills, experience, and supply chains needed to recreate the Industrial Revolution.

Beg to differ. We have millions of engineers with extremely relevant skill sets to these problems. If all of electronics was destroyed tomorrow, by next week you'd have a metric shit ton of people learning steam engine technology and how to build/work with analog systems. There would be a lot of growing pains and a lot of death, but it wouldn't be like starting in the year 800 all over again.

Are you sure these engineers would be able to coordinate under the circumstances? What would happen to all the spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants dangling in cooling pools, because still too 'hot' for dry storage?

Bucket chains?

Praimfaya!

> Earth isn't designed for human life, but human life most certainly is designed for Earth.

The word "designed" isn't correct here, unless you believe in a designer. I think it's more correct to say humans are adapted to life on Earth.

> Don't we know that at 7bn people this hasnt been true for millenia?

What has been true for millenia? That we need electrical machines to survive? Because that's what I was talking about.

> This strange "nature utopianism" I have always found profoundly pesimissitic and "evil-projecting", since it locates evil in all the solutions to the problems of nature we have struggled to create.

Please do not rationalise your total misunderstanding by saying I am projecting evil. My comment was a simple reflection that a solar flare is one of those massive natural disaster with no direct (again for those in the back: direct) threat to life, yet has somehow sparked some ferocious disagreement as if I was calling for the end of times. Weird. Sorry I spoke out of line I guess.

That said, your comment is ripe with pessimism and fatalism, as if humanity in its entirety would be wiped out if we stop having light, hot water and stocked shelves in stores. We are more resilient than you give us credit for.

You went on a complete tirade that one should be grateful of modern life, because without it the only fate is unmitigated disaster, mayhem and apocalypse. We have thrived without medicine, massive child mortality and wolves roaming the woods. I never said if it were to happen today it would be easy, nor I called for the end of times, geez. I guess I'll stop here, I had no idea I would strike such a nerve with a simple observation.

>yet everything we actually need to survive is intact. There are fruit on trees, water is still flowing and drinkable, boars still roam the forests

This is completely wrong. The natural biomass is not enough to support 7.8 billion people. Without modern industrialized food production the vast majority of people are going to die.

Yes. Even rolling agricultural technology back a hundred years would require killing off fifty percent of the population.

  > rolling agricultural technology back a hundred years would require killing off fifty percent of the population.

Only 50 years!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

Natural biomass is not enough to support a specific kind of diet for $7.8 billion. It still is enough to support all kinds of diets for humans and animals. Walk outside of the bubble we have invented for ourselves.

Before the invention of the dynamo electric generators, human population was about 1 billion.

A lot of our crops are now fertilised by chemicals that either made with assistance from, or transported with assistance from, or dug up by equipment made with tool that run on, electricity.

As someone that once lived without running water for just 5 days because the electric pump to my apartment was broken I can say pretty confidently that that minor experience was enough to make it clear to me, most of us can't survive without "modern life".

If there's no electricity there's no running water. That means no more flushing toilets. No more water to drink. If there's no electricity that means no more gas pumps so no trucks to deliver food. No refrigeration to store the food. It also means no communication to coordinate anything.

I'm sure I'm only covering the tip of the iceberg. A large percentage of the planet would die from an event like this.

>yet everything we actually need to survive is intact.

Unfortunately we now rely on our machines to survive. If they'd suddenly disappear, we'd have a bit of a massive problem. We just wouldn't do very well without our heavy agricultural machines, our food and fuel supply systems, our water pumps, our fertilizer plants, etc. We're not going to feed 7 billion people without machines anymore, so we'd better fix them fast or risk losing a lot of us.

Sadly being proactive about these issues is not incentivized in our society until something very bad happens. Recent events come to mind.

It seems very unlikely to me that any electric magnetic event could simultaneously destroy modern life while at the same time cause minimum damage to human life. One of the biggest concerns with massive solar storms is that they will cause firestorms in things connected to the power grid. If its not strong enough to do that, then it is unlikely to have the penetrating power to reach all electrical systems.

> water is still flowing and drinkable

When did you last drink free flowing water from the outside, unfiltered, unboiled, or otherwise untreated?

Got a clean spring? Lucky you!

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