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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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