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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

I believe that solar storms able to cause widespread havoc on our modern infrastructure are a much more frequent occurance.

The Carrington event in 1859 caused serious damage to telegraphs, for instance.

It's a risk that is more once a century than once a millenium... so we may very possibly see one this century.

Considering how reliant we are on electricity, if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale: just imagine no access to money and thus not being able to buy food, fuel, etc. and then supply chains shutting down anyway.

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I'm aware of the Carrington event, which is why I mentioned being prepared for 100-year or 1,000-year events. The GP was specifically asking if any governments had plans for "a similar storm today", where the referenced storm is this one found in tree rings, not the Carrington event.

Similar event has to be understood as meaning able to cause havoc because that's what matters over the specific strength.

> because that's what matters over the specific strength

... but the specific strength does come into play when discussing the costs of hardening and mitigation.

This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event.

And all of the events it is being compared about are at least an order of magnitude bigger than the Carrington event.

This should not surprise us, by the way. I'd expect major solar storms to follow a Zipf's law distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc.

So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was.

All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.

This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event, which is at least 10X as powerful as the largest event in recorded human history, back in the 1800s, which set telegraph poles on fire. So, yeah, it's a big Twinkee.

> if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale

Forget about civil unrest. Chain of command in the military goes down and every unit is on it for themselves. Imagine generals not knowing if the President is still alive.

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