What a major solar storm could do

Our diligence paid off too, those satellites are still up there unbothered.

You jest, but when the aliens really come, or when countries downwell decide to start lobbing antisatellite weapons around, any mitigations coming off that threat matrix may suddenly come in handy.

Yep 100%, probability is a variable. Weather events were a major consideration for us but things like confirmation of UFOs would also influence that rating.

Out of curiosity, what do you see as the practical differences between taxpayers footing the bill compared to ratepayers given that most people pay both?

(In other words, is paying for this with higher taxes substantially better compared to paying for this with higher utility bills?)

The amount of profit a utility makes is usually regulated.

I'm guessing it's for time sync, but any clock worth it's crystals will keep good time for quite a while. Every substation generally has GPS time sync if it isn't fibre connected, for synchrophasor measurements or accurate timestamped waveform captures for example.

It's the cell network. The basic problem is that adjacent cells need to be in tight sync for time division agreement and handoff, but the obvious algorithm of "just sync to your neighbors" is highly problematic at scale because even if a big group of towers does a good job of drifting together there is always a boundary and the problems will just happen there. Since the cell network is highly profitable infrastructure, they just used the overkill strategy: "GPS sync everything and put atomic clocks everywhere for good measure." At least hobbyists get cheap and plentiful Rubidium clocks out of the deal! I don't know if newer standards are still as sensitive about timing agreement but it was definitely the case for a good long while.

Large CNC machines that are not exportable under ITAR use GPS and other sensors to detect movement.

I can't unlock a bikeshare in my city without GPS validating thru the app that I'm nearby. It's stupid. Assuming he means stuff like this.

As I understand, no one without a physical bikeshare rental card can check out a bike if GPS went down. Lots of apps that try to control user behavior and get access to permissions are probably similar

It's not even location data. A lot of stuff uses GPS to get time information and then propagate that using NTP or other timing infrastructure. Seeing a lot of stratum 0 or stratum 1 time servers go offline could potentially cause a lot of issues if systems start to drift away from each other.

Most financial trading systems use GPS timestamps to coordinate all of their transactions.

Mostly for time synchronization. GPS/GNSS is cheap, widely available, and accurate down to nanoseconds, so it's displaced every other technology.

As an example, consider the blinking lights on top of wind turbines and other tall things. If you've got a lot of these in one area, the FAA recommends they blink in unison, to make them more visible and less distracting to pilots. Turns out the cheap and foolproof way to synchronize is to give each one a GPS receiver. This is fine until GPS goes down, and now something as innocuous as "blinking hazard light" is dependent on GPS.

This example fails safe if the lights fall out of sync ("oh no, anyway..."), but it's still emblematic of how widespread the problem can be.

Yeah I question if it's something we even could do.

But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people. Probably less than setting every electrical device on (half of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their food spoils and they can't get to the store.

I say this only half in jest, but could we not request that an adversary trigger their malware to shut down our grid? When life gives you lemons...

We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.

Take the 2003 blackout. Yes, the whole shut down took 15 minutes (?). But thats because it was a cascading effect that had to travel down the lines. Once the fault was detected by a particular segment of the grid, the relays responded in milliseconds. They have since the 1920s? Add in an "incoming solar flare" fault condition and we can trip the whole grid in seconds and send a start signal to the diesel generators to warm up to bring her back up.

Pretty nifty trick.

Question is why would we? The grid has been undergoing a lot of strengthening against EMPs and flares for decades. Its not obvious to me that a flare can take it out, especially if we shed dumb loads (partial blackout, say data centers) before it hits to give the conductors and transformers head space.

It is feasible.

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event it is estimated that the time from spotting the flare to the solar storm was 17.6 hours. That's plenty of time.

The problem is figuring out how big the event is, and how directly it will hit us. So while we have over 17 hours to prepare, there might be some false positives due to our limited prediction skills. And, no matter the real consequences, people have limited patience for large economic disruptions over things that turned out to be nothing.

CME are "Coronal Mass Ejection" with mass being the operative word here. Electromagnetic radiation (electrons photons) can make the trip between sun and earth in about 8 minute but anything with neutrons or protons (such as the coronal plasma) takes much longer as in, a day and a half to several days. CME are not hard to spot leaving the sun with even with tiny amateur telescopes (the sun does not require much in the way of light gathering) so even without the professional scopes (SOHO) with dedicated satellites leading and trailing earth orbit constantly viewing around the edge of the sun as seen from earth or being able to acoustically "hear" (if you can call 5 minute pressure waves sound) the far side of the sun, it is not conceivable to me we would not be warned a CME was incoming, doing something about it is another story.

It takes 15-24 hours for CME to arrive at the Earth after solar flare. The particles are much slower than the radiation which arrive immediately. We have pretty good prediction if CME will hit Earth.

With that being the case, you would think that grid hardening would not have trouble getting funding, as a matter of national security.

That seems to be talking about using EMP as a targeted weapon.

I think the question was more if any countries have ready made plans to exploit the natural disaster for military gain. Like does any country have a standing order to in the case of massive global disruption subdue or attack their geopolitical rivals?

It's post 2022, it will not be used.

but where's the scifi-ness fun of that?

How could a thing that doesn't exist yet or remotely have support for it save us from an event that has near certainty of 1?

I think that’s probably what I was trying to remember, thanks

gamma ray burst is a fun one (though unlikely thankfully!) -- a similar one that gets me excited is "false vacuum collapse" whereby the "energy" of the fabric of space itself is at a local but not global minimum. So in some unspecified conditions it drops to a lower/lowest minima and a destructive wavefront expands through the universe at the speed of light. Since the universe is so large, maybe one is already expanding right now, you'd never know (since speed of light). The upside is you'd never know it happened since death would take nanoseconds. Last I read about it, we don't know whether it's a local minima "false vacuum" versus global minimum.

Do any of those events have recent precedents (say in the last 5k years) apart from pandemics?

I lived in Vancouver bc and in general they’re prepared. The office building I worked from had many earthquake supply cabinets that had rations, water, thermal blankets, and we all knew where the community muster points were. They had people come in to talk about the risks and remind you about earthquake preparedness.

In general it’s going to be a disaster, but people are prepared for it (as much as one can be anyhow)

> Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9

More precisely, it's 8, the average is 500 years, and the last one was in 1700.

Statistically a lot of things are overdue. Like the big flood in California. https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Dettinger_I...

The chance for Cascadia magnitude 8 is 37% is next 50 years, and magnitude 9 is 15%. The 37% chance is for the southern section, and 15% is for the full fault.

FEMA and State agencies have been advocating people get at least a 3 day bag ready in there house for each family member.

A better plan is for two weeks.

Back in the day, with the first surge of the Avian flu, Governor Schwarzenegger ordered an bought a large supply of respirators, "just in case".

That stock pile was released and not maintained by later administrations. Then COVID hit.

The problem with something like a Carrington event is that the potential impact is very widespread. The large bulk of our disaster planning is local. The planning rightly expects the cavalry to come to the rescue directly. Katrina was a poster child of both a good and bad response. The Houston boat lift is another. The rest of the country rallies and pivots to the disaster area sending material and people to aid the stricken.

Having a 2 week store when you can shelter in place is a Good Plan for a very large majority of potential disasters. It doesn't work great for fire or floods (where you lose your home, and thus have no place to shelter). But the plan is to be able to maintain for the 2 weeks while the cavalry arrives.

The problem with something like a Carrington event, is the disaster is no longer localized. But very wide spread, thus that cavalry that was planned for is probably not coming. Not soon. Not in time. And the rules have changed dramatically. It's a nightmare scenario. Despite the wide spread devastation of the Tsunami, it, too, was localized, and aid flowed quickly, even across the sea. With a Carrington event, not so much.

This is where, ideally, communities must rally themselves, on their own initiative, to share resources and manage as best they can. As you can imagine, some communities may be able to do this better than others. But your 2 week supply for your family is now likely better used to support others in your community. For every Ant preparing for winter, there are a lot of Grasshoppers. And they get unruly when they get hungry.

It would be unprecedented, and the only real course is to muddle through best we can. State and Federal disaster planning may or may not help here. Back in the day, the USDA running the Welfare programs stockpiled and delivered food (the infamous "government cheese"). Today they just offer debit cards. I don't know if there are warehouses of cheese and peanut butter standing by anywhere any more.

Still, you can do you part, you can do your best. Engage with your neighbors, stockpile a bit more food (don't need to fill the garage with a year supply of dried beans, but an extra case of tuna won't hurt). Make your preparedness part of a continuing cycle of giving, as your stockpile starts reaching the 6 month due date, donate it to a food pantry, and get some more. But reaching out to your neighbors can help a lot, get them to work on their 2 weeks supply.

Its not all about guns and gear. It's more about civility, and having a little more food or blankets to share with others in times of crisis. No reason to expect to feed the whole neighborhood, but don't expect them to leave you alone with your stocked garage while they go hungry.

Indeed. There was a strong push for funding for installing and mantaining fast ground fault interrupters after the EMP Commision in congress in 2001 (http://www.empcommission.org/) determined it was the best solution. And then again in 2008. But nothing actually happened besides words.

I'm not sure that we haven't already prepared for this. Lightning is a thing and fast grounding transformers are the solution to that.

As a kid, thunderstorms commonly knocked out the grid. Now as an adult I've rarely seen the power go out (It usually happens due to someone ramming a power line with their car).

Honest question, because I don't know: Are fast ground fault interrupters "cheap and easy"? I mean, sure, they're cheap and easy compared to replacing transformers. But they don't just grow on trees, either. What's the lead time on getting one?

Every single instance of "being prepared" has to go past an accountant who has to make the math, math for the next 90 days. The conversation will go something like this.

Engineer at electric company: "We'd like to get this project on the calendar for the quarter; should make the equipment more resilient against the risk of solar storms."

Accountant at electric company: "What are the odds this solar storm happens in the next quarter?"

Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1."

Accountant: "That's not enough certainty when compared to the necessity of profitability." scratches grid hardening off priority list

Now, "prepared" means "society not collapsing", and "profitability" means that a retired couple can buy a timeshare on a golf course in Florida where they can swing until the dementia sets in, but priorities are priorities.

The vendors who sell fast grounding transformers must love these articles...

Lighting rarely hits transformers directly nor does it commonly hit the carrier lines. Typically you see a wire along the top that's grounded that 'catches' the lighting at the highest point and sends it to ground. Also lightning is pretty easy to arrest over short burst because of it's large influx and short duration.

It's kind of like the difference between a single (smallish) wave caused by a boat and a tsunami. The boats wave can cause damage but it's typically very limited. Meanwhile the tsunami doesn't stop coming and becomes your environment. Fast grounding doesn't mean much when dumping to ground stops working because the ground gets so hot it's a resistor.

I feel like you're underestimating how old so much of our grid is. There are lines near my house (in a rural area) that are still just held up by warped bent poles with white ceramic insulators on them, a (hopefully) beefier version of what you'd see on an old electric fence before people started using plastic. Obviously old poles and cabling doesn't mean the transformers are outdated but I wouldn't be shocked.

You think that's bad, wait until you see the recipe blog ;)

Its my biggest gripe with the New Yorker, their articles are incredibly long winded and meandering at times.

It's not just the New Yorker. This "Gladwell-ification" of non-fiction has been happening for a long time now.

This isn't a more in-depth answer... it's a biography of a man researching solar flares.

There's a lot more to it than that and I'd encourage people to form their own opinions. It maps fairly close to our current reality, even if that mapping is uncomfortable for some to read. Considering the publication date, you can use abductive logic to say "yep, all of this chaos was intentional."

I read much of it as well, and agree with the conspiracy nonsense evaluation. Many references to supposed secret meetings held between international/university/etc. elites in one year or another with no specifics or evidence whatsoever. It's literally conspiracy nonsense.

It is conspiracy nonsense. It's the bedrock of people like Alex Jones along with the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the John Birch Society.