Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

Edit: context

https://youtu.be/s95mEchLZEA

Is PFAS rain that much better than acid rain? Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth.

As for the whales, that's nice they got a reprive... But we're still extinctifying species at 100-1,000x the background rate.

And the people responsible for all of this are not strung up, nor even imprisoned. They're fucking around on mega-yachts and private planes (environmental atrocities in themselves).

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall uses the web as an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law

But this _is_ the psychological deficiency of our species.

Imagine humanity being forced to react to an impending impact, say within a few years, from a newly detected 1km+ asteroid, never mind something like the colossal Chicxulub impactor.

And this is exactly my point. We aren’t investing into inventing the technology to do this. Instead we just say “if we can detect a small asteroid early enough then we might be able to divert it” and then count that problem as solved. Even though Bennu is small, we still can’t see the vast majority of objects in the solar system and the advance notice we are talking about is impracticality long.

If this was a software engineering Jira ticket, it wouldn’t pass PR. And software developers aren’t even the most diligent of professionals compared engineers, doctors and scientists. But there’s no incentive for governments to sink money into a theoretical risk that impacts their “enemies” equally. And man do I hate how nations refer to other nations as “enemies” — but that’s a whole other argument.

' A Geomagnetic Disturbance Action has been issued as of 22:15 on 05.10.2024 to protect the power system from damage or disruptions due to increased geomagnetic activity.'

Good scale, I like it.

Storms like this one flood the Earth's magnetosphere with energetic particles, increasing geomagnetic currents that can affect both large-scale and local infrastructure. This might lead to unusual behavior in ground-level electronics, such as increased bit flips, clock shifts, or even unexpected resets in sensitive systems.

As for satellites, their advanced shielding often keeps them running smoothly, which likely explains why your internet service didn't get borked. But during extreme events like now, disruptions to satellite functions and GPS signals will occur, as these systems face direct exposure to the storm's impact. Most likely spare capacity rerouted to supply your link during the impact.

I think it's interesting that secondary particles formed when these high-energy solar particles smash into atmospheric molecules also make their way down to us. These include muons and neutrons—particles that, while generally harmless, can penetrate deep into the atmosphere and occasionally impact ground-level electronics, adding another layer of interaction during severe solar events.

There's also the way that alterations to the flux of EM fields induced locally by the larger currents fluxing in the global electric circuit can cause glitches in microelectronics. And how the fluxing of current in the Earth's magnetosphere causes electron and other charged particle release from the ground. All of these things are amped up now and can contribute.

This whole interaction of solar activity / space weather with our technology is a dynamic area of study—there's always more to learn about how these cosmic and solar stuff affect our ground based or Earth based tech. Hahaha! :)

It is easy to make that longer by keeping extras of stable food they normally eat. I like to keep extras of everything I use regularly. Which really helped during the pandemic.

OK, no. If you're running a marathon, in hot weather, you're at maybe a liter per hour. Unless you plan to run 20h marathons and the sun never sets, 5 gallon is well beyond drinking needs.

And unless you're able to exert yourself at that level at all, this isn't the "worst case", this is pure fantasy.

And if you're preparing for -20C in your house, I recommend investing in insulation, not more calories stored away. (I also question 3x, the figures I've seen point to 2x, with exertion somewhat counteracting cold)

Another cool thing is that you can make (in a pinch, I wouldn’t recommend this over berkey filters) filters from the same type of bulkheads berkey uses attached to home-made ceramic filters. They work remarkably well in emergencies and are trivial to make if you’ve got clay and a hot fire. There’s definitely trial and error involved for getting perfect seals, and some advanced DIYers I’ve seen used glazing to create a more easily sealed rim which can have a plastic tube jammed into it for a friction fit, which then attaches to the inner part of the bulkhead.

Totally unnecessary if civilization is working but awesome if things go sideways and you’re out of filters. There might be better methods too, I haven’t looked into it for years.

mud or damp vegetation can be a water source.

The way to allow for extras is to store water for a longer length of time. If recommended value is two weeks, and it is in my area, then a month is a good buffer.

> It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.

It's easy in gallons and pounds, too, if the correct gallon is used: 10 pounds per imperial gallon of water, by definition.

These are all things which are generally known to Americans. But HN has an international audience, for whom "gallon" is presumably somewhat vague.

If you understand pressure Regulators and can hook up a BBQ, [is it really] more risky than skydiving

Edit: Switched a safety assertion to a question

If I really need to go light I'm carrying isobutane canisters or using an alcohol stove.

That's not what the cited article says. Instead, it says:

“But it’s not that simple in flour because Salmonella is more heat resistant when moisture is low. We still need more research data to confirm how hot you’d have to get the flour or how long you’d have to hold it at that temperature to make the flour safe to eat.”

You said "baking does not render flour safe". The article says we still need more research about "165 degrees", and does not even say baking flour at 165 degrees is unsafe. In other words, it could render it safe, we just don't apparently know.

Definitely sad.

The only disagreement I think is in the definition of community. We could either say that community is just, like, our extended circle of acquaintances; we’ve all got one and it isn’t very robust against disasters. Or we could say that a resilient community is some deeper thing on which people can lean in a disaster, but which needs to be carefully tended to, and most of us lack.

The latter is, I think, what the original poster meant.

If there are functional societies elsewhere in the world, then help in the form of food could be on its way. The question is, will it be distributed efficiently to the people who need it? Something like Food Not Bombs could respond quite effectively to such a situation.

Primarily volunteering with them creates two things that are basically the most important things in any emergency:

1. Knowledge of who to talk to and where to go when shit hits the fan

2. Established practices of organization

If community resources are scarce, and you have a FNB cohort in the community, you have a group of people with lots of practice stretching out food, preparing it, and redistributing it to many people. Again I recommend solnit, she wrote about this exact thing happening in one of SF's earliest devastating earthquakes.

The other upside is when the State turns up to fuck your community efforts up (like they did in SF, or Louisiana after Katrina) you also have a group with established methods of peaceful resistance. They probably already have clout with the local State enforcement group: the SFPD have gotten to the point where it's basically impossible to get them to harass FNB because of years of softening individual officers to the cause.

Edit: I see now you mean, practically speaking, what actions could they take.

Well in a place like NYC I have no idea. Probably there would be huge issues with famine. Realistically the first thing everyone should do is get the fuck out of that city lmao.

I don't know if SF would be so bad. There's also groups like Food Not Lawns trying to get people into growing their own food. If their efforts continue to be successful we can have closer to home food supply chains. As for convincing people to share, for some reason that isn't all that hard. When capitalism and its disincentives fall away, it seems people revert to our basic evolutionary advantage of social bonding and organization.

Not to mention all the dry goods stashed in stores throughout the city can be stretched pretty far by the people who have practice at it. If FNB minded folks can redistribute from the stores quickly enough they might even be able to get to the meat and etc to turn into jerky etc - hopefully they'd abandon veganism in an actual emergency. Knowing them, probably not lol. But if I'm there that's what I'm doing.

Others have written on the plight of cities in anarchy, and I don't think it's quite so doom and gloom. "Conquest of Bread" was the OG and I think it still holds up.