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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I guess "destroyed life as we know it" is awfully literal. It means that "life as we know it" is "electricty costs 22 cents a kilowatt hour and GPS exists".

Yes, the power grid could have blown up. We would have then paid more for electricity. (It's unclear to me if the effect is global, or Earth shields the nighttime side from the impact.)

Satellites would probably stop working. So air traffic would have to use VOR/NDB/DME instead of GPS. Ships would use LORAN. Weather forecasters would use radar instead of satellite (a problem during hurricane season).

This headline makes me angry. It's not like we would have been instantly vaporized. Some stuff would be less convenient until we rebuilt it. That's it.

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> We would have then paid more for electricity

With the current power grid structure in most developed countries, this would not be an option: some components (such as large transformers) in the current grid would be destroyed by a large CME event and it would take years to replace enough of them to restore the grid.

> Ships would use LORAN.

That would be difficult since LORAN doesn't exist any more; it was taken off line years ago when GPS became widely available.

> Some stuff would be less convenient until we rebuilt it.

As things stand currently, some stuff would not exist until we rebuilt it.

I certainly think we could get to a point where a large CME event would only be an inconvenience. But doing that will require redesigning significant parts of our infrastructure to be much more decentralized, and having plans in place to replace key components quickly. We are not at that point now.

I assume we would just use generators in the meantime. Yes, this is expensive. Very expensive.

It's not just expensive, it's impossible. There isn't enough fuel for all those generators, even if enough of them could be built.

The point is that the price will move to reduce demand to some level that's sustainable. That probably means critical infrastructure.

Which means most people will not be "paying more for electricity"; they will be without electricity, because generators are only affordable (which really means "available", since the steep price rise is just the market's way of rationing a very scarce resource, as you say) for critical infrastructure.

Yes, the power grid could have blown up. We would have then paid more for electricity.

Many people wouldn't be able to get electricity at all. Sure, you can buy portable generators, so having the power grid collapse isn't automatically a problem -- but there aren't enough portable generators in the world to power everything, even if we had the necessary quantities of fuel on hand.

So air traffic would have to use VOR/NDB/DME instead of GPS

Assuming VOR/NDB/DME stations had power and hadn't been set on fire by induced currents during the magnetic storm, sure...

To think of primary scenarios is a wrong way to think about it. We may not get blown to ash. But production of much of critical stuff[Food/Medicine/Sanitation] requires electricity these days. There is absolutely no way you are going mass produce and sustain food production for the level of population we have on earth, by using old stone age techniques. And this is first secondary effect. Food needs to transported, processed etc. How will all this happen without electricity?

Image what would happen if there is no electricity in the military. Which is such critical functions like that will get bulk of the available supply, leaving very little for everything else.

We may not go extinct, but given general shortage of food, struggle for resources and break down of law and order. The world will be a very different place.

It would be a disaster no doubt, but people would use generators and older vehicles to temporarily fill critical functions. There might be an economic collapse, but there would also be a lot of new jobs to rebuild stuff.

Beware not to fall for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I'm not sure how that's relevant.

The idea that rebuilding from disaster generates jobs doesn't require a mention of the Broken Window Fallacy. No one is creating the disaster with the aim be 'generating jobs' or attempting to argue that the disaster is a good things because it creates jobs.

> but people would use generators and older vehicles to temporarily fill critical functions

Only if they remained calm and organized. When your (electricity-dependent) job is gone your first worry will be securing access to food and medicine. So depending on how much damage the incident does to power grid and how quickly governments react, you may see anything from short-term economical crisis to riots and collapse of the society.

The links for up voting and down voting are notoriously too small for mobile. For this post, I made sure to zoom to max so I could make 100% sure to upvote rather than risk the alternative.

"Life as we know it" is a valuable idiomatic phrase and we should protect it as such.

I think you're pretty woefully underestimating the consequences of subjecting our frighteningly fragile electrical grid to a CME of this magnitude.

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