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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.

We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.

On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.

Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...

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Damn, you took me from “hope that doesn’t happen again in my lifetime” to “oh Jesus please let that happen tomorrow” in just a few words.

I spent my whole life only breathing through half a nostril on a good day. About 10 years ago I got surgery and Sublingual Immunotherapy drops, and the results have been life changing.

I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.

Oxygen is a hell of a drug.

I use nose strips, and I'm addicted now too.

I tried nose strips but I don't like disposables. I now use silicone nostril openers - two little tubes attached at the base that you stick up your nose. It came as a set of 4 sizes so a bit of waste there, but one size fit me and one size fit my wife.

I would love to know where you got them from!

You can find them under the search phrase: "nasal dilator".

These work well, but I wonder about hygiene. I keep mine in a glass dish on my desktop and attempt to cleanse them in hydrogen peroxide on occasion.

Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.

If it's silicone, just put it in boiling water sometimes, as you would a menstrual cup.

Silicones are common in cooking utensils and used at temperatures way beyond what you'd need for your hygiene purpose.

Flonase (fluticasone) has been a life changer. I have taken for granted how valuable breathing is in terms of speech, let alone sleep and general fatigue.

Same for me. I spent the first 45 years of my life breathing almost entirely though my mouth. Then I tried some nasal spray that was great, but made the situation worse when I inevitably overused it, so I went to a doctor. I had been told when I was a kid that I had polyps, so I went to see about getting them removed. She put me on Flonase, which at the time was prescription, and since then I've been able to breathe through my nose unless I'm sick. It has been a significant quality of life improvement for me.

I’ve taken it for over 30 years now. It has indeed been a lifesaver and so much better than all the pills. One side effect is blurred vision and I have definitely noticed a slight blurring in the last couple of years. I gladly accept it as a small price to pay for decades of relief.

I feel like this is a trade-off not always understood and accepted in modern times; we expect our medicines to be perfect and our bodies to be restored to new condition, and when this isn't the case we feel betrayed.

Moving to the coast made me feel like I finally woke up, after growing up perpetually stuffy and sniffly. Turns out I'm not a mouth breather after all!

Yep - moving away from the coast basically did the opposite for me. :(

Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.

I have had bad allergies for a lot of my life. I probably have some sort of histamine intolerance behind it all.

Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).

I was recently on cortisone for 3 months due to another condition and whoa I didn't remember how cool life was without a perpetual running nose.

What specific surgery and what specific drops?

I had a turbinate reduction, a deviated septum adjusted, and a balloon sinuplasty. I'm unclear on what the drops are specifically but they're sublingual immunotherapy.

Thanks for sharing

How would this effect computers and everyday electrical devices? If we detected something like this heading towards us would we have to turn everything off for the day/week? That's just not possible though is it, can't just turn off nuclear power plants for the day.

There won't be any effect.

Solar flares do NOT affect the devices on the ground. All the fast-moving charged particles are completely absorbed in the upper atmosphere. And to give you some perspective, the most energetic flares can produce 10^-3 W/m^2 flux at the Earth's orbit.

The flares do affect the geomagnetic field. And a changing magnetic field induces current, but it becomes non-negligible only for very long conductors. So long-distance power transmission lines might suddenly become biased with a persistent DC voltage, and some long optical cables might start experiencing over/undervoltage problems with amplifiers.

But locally? You won't see anything unusual.

Well there you go then, a little dull but probably for the best.

The panic about these is way out of proportion with the real risks. Modern systems have all sorts of over-voltage protection, and we no longer use "telegraph wires" directly connected to vulnerable electronics like speakers and amplifiers.

All modern telecommunications are over fibre or radio links.

How much do wire distance, intended voltage matter? All the power electronics are almost certainly protected by caps, but are big office ethernet runs long enough to cause issues? What about coax cables? It seems like with how many more cables we have now, that one of them probably has a design that would cause notable inconvenience.

You need at least hundreds of kilometers for the effects to become significant (as in "tens of volts"). Nothing on the small scale will be affected.

Power lines might be the most vulnerable part, actually. The geomagnetic field can induce current that will bias the core of transformers, causing them to overheat. This can lead to blackouts if the networks are close to capacity, and it's suspected that the 2003 North East Blackout was at least partially caused by them.

Over voltage protection is not provided by caps (generally), but MOV’s, Zenier Diodes, spark gaps, etc. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_protector].

Essentially, components that kick in when a voltage exceeds a certain limit to allow that excess voltage to shunt to ground instead of continue to build up in the circuit.

Similar devices in pneumatics or hydraulics are pressure relief valves [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_valve], and they provide similar functionality - giving a easier/lower resistance path for the high voltage/pressure, so delicate things downstream don’t fail.

Geomagnetically induced currents generally become a problem over hundreds of kilometers. Long range electricity transmission lines are the main worry I believe and solar storm events have knocked off large grids occasionally.

I have no idea what the correlation is between particle flux (the metric reported here) and actual geomagnetic variation which induces the current (varying magnetic field causes voltage). Basically the charged particles zoom past earth, then loop back from the magnetotail towards the poles. The magnetohydrodynamics cause effects large enough to modulate the magnetic field on earths surface.

”We have this long conducting loop” is the issue. The Earth is one component of the loop.

What about ground to satellite communication?

That would be radio links. Not many satellites connected to the ground by copper cable.

Yeah, I was asking generally with regard to panic involving "computers and everyday electrical devices", which I thought would be obvious, apologies.

honestly I'd be more worried about the upper atmosphere puffing up and taking out low satellites, like what happened with a starlink launch last year.

There was a blackout in Canada caused by a solar storm in 1989. Has this changed dramatically since then?

> But locally? You won't see anything unusual.

Not necessarily?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset

Some Miyake events are also thought have lasted a year or longer. I think there could be a very bad time if an event like this lasted a year?

Solar flares consist of protons and electrons, that are pretty slow-moving by nuclear standards. So they get absorbed by the atmosphere completely.

What solar flares do, they deform the Earth's magnetic field so that more cosmic rays (from outside the Solar System) can reach the surface. But the cosmic ray flux is not that high to begin with. And electronic devices certainly won't self-destruct if the radiation is slightly higher than normal.

After all, you experience far more cosmic ray radiation when you're flying on an airplane than during one of these events!

Right, but there are still risks (aside from SEUs) that one would "experience locally"?

https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...

They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.

An X-class flare won't do anything. But in the size of the article? Localised temporary blackouts would be entirely unsurprising.

> They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.

They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.

CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.

>Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...

Not exactly both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle

You're overestimating the effects. They would have been imperceptible on the ground, except for the stunning aurorae.

> would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover

How do solar flares render pollen groundborne?

How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?

> How did research on the solar event find a layer deposited in what is undoubtedly surface not upper atmosphere?

FTFA: "Solar particle storms can greatly enhance the normal production of cosmogenic isotopes like radiocarbon (14C) in the atmosphere by galactic cosmic rays. Such enhanced production, preserved in annual tree rings, serves as a clear cosmic timestamp making possible absolute dating of tree samples."

I feel like primitive man had no problems breathing through both nostrils anyway.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/allergies-are-common...

The ones that had - died as small kids.

I recall reading about some link between respiratory effectiveness and human development.

No idea how valid that research might have been. In retrospect, it almost borders on phrenology.

Aren’t smaller microprocessor die sizes more vulnerable to this? Should we be building integrated circuits with larger feature sizes now that we have power and performance figured out?

Nature's way of saying sorry for the EMP apocalypse

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