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Comment by bigyax | Hacker News Reader

A 1 percent chance of happening in the next decade. It's the inevitability of it that's most terrifying, society will fundamentally collapse, there's no way we could prepare for how rapidly our lives would be changed, and absolutely nothing we can do to to stop it.

Only hope is that for when it happens it's far enough down the road for technology to have adapted to bring enough resiliency and/or redundancy into the grid such that we are not so completely vulnerable

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We could decouple transformers to stop them from being destroyed. Wiring is easy to repair, it's the transformers that are vulnerable.

That would certainly be the most immediate mitigation strategy. I wonder though would there be enough time? Would it be possible to isolate the transformers so completely such that they would not be affected by an event of this magnitude

We 'could' at least in theory. The actual response I expect is something closer to "don't look up"

We (humanity) have multiple satellites looking at the sun 24/7 and warning of flares in advance [1]. There's even a running forecast of geomagnetic events [2]. We very much do "look up" and have been for decades.

[1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/exploration/

[2] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/solar-flares-radio-black...

We 'scientists' look for that and have solar weather forecasts.

We 'for profit capitalists' have never completely shut down the entire economy by turning off all the power, hence causing billions and billions of dollars in damages to avoid the end of modern society.

The whole damned point of don't look up is the scientists looked up the entire time, the businesses/governments/citizens at large did not.

The second link is .noaa.gov, what do you think the last A in NOAA or .gov mean? Where do they get their funding from? This kind of doomerism is not only counterproductive, it's also just counterfactual.

> We very much do "look up" and have been for decades.

In case you didn't pick it up, Don't Look Up is a callout to a recent movie [1]. I imagine that in this context it's more of a comment on the appetite of the population at large to undergo the temporary inconvenience of proactively taking the power-grid, and thus the vulnerable transformers, offline prior to the arrival of the event. We know the scientists will be looking up; it's the convincing of the population at large via a capitalist captured media that's the hard part.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up

I am very much aware of the reference. I'm also aware that it's just a movie with a barely concealed and really trivialising climate change allegory. In reality we're just out of a pandemic that showed governments around the globe stopping people's daily life for months by decree without much problem. Switching electricity off for a few days is nothing.

The probability may actually be much higher: about 12% per decade for a -850mT event; 1.5% for -1700mT [1].

Wikipedia estimates the Carrington was anywhere from -800 to -1750 [2].

[1] "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events", Pete Riley, 2012, doi:10.1029/2011SW000734

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

As long as it kills cryptocurrencies, I'm more than happy to live without electricity.

Are you willing to living without food?

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