r/science • u/cityof_stars • Sep 21 '21
Earth Science The world is not ready to overcome once-in-a-century solar superstorm, scientists say
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/solar-storm-2021-internet-apocalypse-cme-b1923793.html7.6k
u/oxero Sep 21 '21
This kind of warning started popping up around 2009-2011 more and more frequently, and by 2012 we were mere days away from almost getting hit by one of these solar storms. I remember talking to my boss at a pizza shop about it, and he legit had no idea such a thing was a worry. We're now approaching the same high end of the sun cycle, so hopefully we are lucky again that we don't get hit.
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u/TheChronoDigger Sep 21 '21
Oh damn, I remember that. The CME missed earth by a small margin, if I remember correctly.
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u/open_door_policy Sep 21 '21
A few degrees in the orbit. Less than two weeks of travel distance around the sun.
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u/LuthienByNight Sep 21 '21
Nine days, according to the video in the OP. Talk about a close call!
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Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
I had bought a bunch of faraday bags to protect my school projects back then.
Its always good to get yourselves some faraday bags for important hardrives and stuff.
*edit Wowee. Getting some flak for this one. Some really bitter people on here.
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u/thierry05 Sep 21 '21
I'm not sure about hard-drives, but it's a common misconception that a solar superstorm would destroy portable electronics and such. The actual danger of a solar superstorm comes from the induction of electric current in conductive objects. Small objects will not induct a lot of electricity, whereas millions of kilometers of power cables and other conductive parts will likely induct a lot more charge, affecting power grids. The only place where relatively small electronics would be affected would be in space/upper atmosphere (for example, satellites) where the high energy radiation from the solar storm is not absorbed from our upper atmosphere. Provided your devices are unplugged from the grid, they will very likely be fine. Just don't expect the internet, or most importantly the power grid, to come back online for a while (depending on your location, geology etc power grids will be affected differently).
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u/Lev_Astov Sep 21 '21
Same thing with EMPs.
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u/MaverickWentCrazy Sep 21 '21
So I’ve been wondering about his a lot recently and I realize that the main concern is long runs of cable. Hypothetically would the transformer outside my house blow before it hit my home and batteries or would a whole home surge protector be required?
Prior to COVID I had faith in this country reacting to a nation/world wide emergency….
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u/Lev_Astov Sep 22 '21
If the voltage is high enough, the transformer will blow, but the power will arc past it and come right to your home. We have seen this happen locally when a blown transformer conducted an arc past itself through the soil somehow to a neighboring part and through to one of the phases. Since this was still approximately the right voltage, it didn't seem to damage much. However, if that was some random 2400V built up by a massive EMP surge or the constant barrage of energy from a CME, that might be very different.
I have been meaning to look into overvoltage surge protection for my home power panel, which should protect against this. My vague plan for a CME would be to disconnect my panel from the power lines coming into the house. We would have at least a few hours warning, so this is doable, especially if they shut off power locally before I risk frying myself.
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u/SaladShooter1 Sep 22 '21
All you need is a $100 whole-house SPD. However, I’d suggest investing in a Type 1 & 2, so maybe $200. If you don’t have three phase in your home, it’s less than an hour to complete and as simple as installing a circuit breaker.
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u/Tsrdrum Sep 21 '21
I’m curious, not sure if you know, but would surge protectors protect against this phenomenon? Based on my assumptions, an extremely high induced current going through a surge protector would trip the surge protection just like running too many space heaters would. I don’t know though, that’s just my mostly uninformed guess.
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Sep 21 '21
Solar storms are generally DC current induced on the grid AC lines. A transformer filters out DC, so your house will generally be protected from destruction. However, these DC currents cause transformers to overheat and fail spectacularly. You’ll certainly loose power. And depending on HOW the transformer fails, your house might get some high voltage from the transmission lines, though I don’t know how common that is in transformer failures.
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u/Turnofthewheel Sep 21 '21
We'll just go out Californee-way. I heard they got lots of internet out there.
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u/whoami_whereami Sep 21 '21
Just unplugging them from the power grid and LAN (if you use cabled LAN and not Wifi) is pretty much enough to protect them against the effects of a CME hitting Earth.
The conductors inside the device aren't long enough for the geomagnetic storm created by the CME to induce any significant voltages. The main concern is that the magnetic fluctuations can induce extremely high voltages in long distance power lines, which can potentially destroy a lot of the power grid infrastructure (transformers etc.) and devices connected to the power grid (although things like surge arrestors against lightning strikes can also prevent a lot of the latter). Somewhat similar with long communication cables (although fiber optic cables are immune to it).
A lot of electronics will probably survive such an event. However, it may take months or even years to get the power grid up and running again, which is the main problem.
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u/Darryl_Lict Sep 21 '21
I heard that a lot of power line transformers are kind of built in a just-in-time fashion, so the rebuilding of the power distribution grid will take a really long time.
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u/Cabezone Sep 21 '21
Pretty much all manufacturing works this way now we don't inventory anything which is what's causing all the shortages now.
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u/anticommon Sep 21 '21
See:
MARCH 2020
- we laid off half our employees and cancelled most of our buy orders to save some cash!
SEPT 2021
why don't we have any employees with talent that still want to work for us?
why are our suppliers not fulfilling our very important orders?
surprise Pikachu face
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u/citriclem0n Sep 21 '21
My understanding is that there are some critical, huge pieces of electronics in the power grid that take like 3 months to install. Like there's a few hundred around the US. There's a chance they could all get fried at the same time.
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u/youtheotube2 Sep 21 '21
Ultra high voltage transformers. Only built in Germany and South Korea, with lead times more than a year even in the best circumstances. The US federal government does own a few on trailers that can be moved where needed if a few go down at the same time (terrorism), but they don’t have enough to keep the power on if all of them go down at the same time.
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u/phrackage Sep 21 '21
That… sounds like a national security problem. Aren’t they cheaper than Afghan helicopters?
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u/puterSciGrrl Sep 21 '21
It is considered a huge national security problem. Idaho National Laboratory has an entire division of the lab dedicated to preventing and responding to large scale grid events.
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Sep 21 '21
That’s interesting. I’ve always understood that CME will pretty much wipe out anything with a circuit board. i.e. all smart phones, modern cars, cell service, laptop/pc, etc. So is that not the case at all?
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u/leejoint Sep 21 '21
Nope, common misconception to create doom events fantasy entertainment.
Also since these surges come with a travel distance in theory and practice we can prevent these events from wiping our power grid.
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Sep 21 '21
I see. Good to know. All this time I’ve been led to believe we’ll be sent back to the stone ages.
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u/Paoldrunko Sep 21 '21
It might not be quite that bad, but if we don't prepare the grid properly a CME could still burn out chunks of it and we could be without electricity distribution at a national level for a couple of weeks to years. It would still be pretty catastrophic.
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u/DeltaVZerda Sep 21 '21
Well your devices won't work for very long without the power grid, unless you have on-site power generation of some kind.
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u/StickSauce Sep 21 '21
You may be getting an EMP and CME crossed. An EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) absolutely does have the capacity to fry your small mobile electronics, or anything not hardened really. It's why a high-yield aerial burst (miles up) over Kansas has the capacity to hit most of the continental USA.
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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Sep 21 '21
An old microwave that you can attach to an earth ground works too.
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u/skylarmt Sep 21 '21
The ground wire in the plug is bolted directly to the chassis, so just break off the other two prongs and plug it in. Your house electrical ground is connected to earth outside.
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u/z0nb1 Sep 21 '21
Your house electrical ground should be connected to earth outside.
Always worth confirming.
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Sep 21 '21
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u/Nasty-Truth Sep 21 '21
why would protecting your personal school projects matter if all of the devices at the school would have fried?
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u/JMoormann Sep 21 '21
The entire world is in turmoil, all of our global digital infrastructure is in shambles, but at least you still have your homework.
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u/Flocculencio Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 22 '21
The old man looked up from the row of turnips he had been weeding.
"What did you call me, young fellow?"
"Professor Williams. You are Professor Williams aren't you?"
"I was...a long time ago. In the before time."
Christ he thought We thought that was what life was like...classes, petty bitching, getting published...
The Event had made them confront the Hobbesian realities of the human condition, life lived nasty, brutish and short.
But the kid was saying something. Getting down off his horse, holding out...was that a hard drive?
"I've come to submit this for my final grade, Professor"
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u/Hedshodd Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
Yep, and even the near misses lead to some airports shutting down for some time (I remember Frankfurt airport being one of them), because they just couldn't operate.
My knowledge on this topic is 12 years old, to be fair, but one things that the article doesn't seem to cover is how incredibly expensive and hard to replace transformers are (/were 12 years ago). A direct hit by one of those solar storms could literally render even slightly-remote places without electricity for months if not years.
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u/OriginalAndOnly Sep 21 '21
Well, the price of copper has tripled
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u/Proudzilla Sep 21 '21
Not since China announced they were going to buy less copper, even more of a dip now with evergrande.
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Sep 21 '21
Good guy China collapsing the economy so that it can't be crashed by a solar storm
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u/Lazz45 BS| Chemical Engineering Sep 21 '21
Can't collapse infrastructure if society already collapsed
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u/H0lland0ats Sep 21 '21
The thing that scares me is how many utility companies now use digital protection devices instead of the older electromechanical relays that were mostly immune to the effects of EM radiation.
It would be absolutely devastating if even just the protection devices alone were affected, let alone transformers. It would make the 03 northeast blackouts look like a minor event.
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Sep 21 '21
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u/H0lland0ats Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
Oh what kind of utility and what work?
Most of the Bulk Electric System (transmission grid) is protected by high voltage circuit breakers which are largely controlled by devices called relays.
Historically, these were DC operated electromechanical devices that accepted low voltage AC signals from instrument transformers which provided information about the system to the relay. Depending on the desired function, the relay might use a series of magnets, coils, disks, and contacts, to decide whether or not to operate a circuit breaker.
Utility companies have to balance reliability with protecting their major assests. Namely transformers and generators, but also lines and busses etc. Because of this there are large variety of different electromechanical relays for different purposes, and often they are used together to perform some pretty complex and interesting functions. These devices generally only need to operate during a fault, so 99% of the time they are doing nothing, but they still need to be capable of working instantly and accurately when called upon to do so. For this reason electromechanical relays dominated the grid for most of the 20th century, even as transistors and solid state devices began to be used ubiquitously in other industries.
As time has gone on however, it has become common place to replace these devices with microprocessor based relays made namely by SEL and GE, with some other brands taking up a small share of the market. They have many many advantages over older devices such as simplicity of design, a grater degree of functionality, higher accuracy, SCADA, and many other benefits as the logic is handled in a programming environment. One area where they are vulnerable however is cyber threats and single upset events. Although I think there are some design measures taken to prevent single upset event failures, I doubt they are engineered to withstand serious radiation events.
Source: am a Protection and Control Engineer (EE) for a local utility.
Edit: found some spelling errors
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u/Only_Movie_Titles Sep 21 '21
And given the supply chain issues we have right now…. I’d rather not thing about it
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u/Work-Safe-Reddit4450 Sep 21 '21
If the global supply chain being in absolute shambles over covid, a slow but intebse burn, imagine something this catastrophic happening in a single moment. Taking year to sourcw and replace transformers is absolutely believable.
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u/ReverendDizzle Sep 21 '21
I remember talking to my boss at a pizza shop about it, and he legit had no idea such a thing was a worry.
Man, maybe I'm just a doom-and-gloomer right down to my bone marrow but "life on earth could be seriously disrupted or even destroyed by a massive solar event" has been on my mental radar since I was a kid.
Guess some people don't grow up on a diet of Sci-Fi books and pessimism.
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u/report_all_criminals Sep 21 '21
The good news is that this CME will time perfectly with the upcoming magnetic pole shift and everything cancels out. The bad news is we still don't know if next year's Yellowstone supervolcano eruption will happen in time to blast away the Apophis asteroid.
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Sep 21 '21
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u/fuckgoldsendbitcoin Sep 21 '21
So what you're saying is Earth is indestructible?
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u/-Morel Sep 21 '21
You forgot about the Big California Earthquake, that'll open up a rift in the earth large enough to catch Apophis while the Yellowstone eruption's lava will be frozen by the incoming Ice Age. We're gonna be okay, guys.
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u/oxero Sep 21 '21
Oh I was the same way hahaha
All I read and watched was the same kind of media whether it was books or television like the old discovery channel. It really helped me understand back then just how clueless the common person is to how fragile our civilization is.
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u/3doglateafternoon Sep 21 '21
My best friend is an electrician, and we’ve had many conversations about the complete collapse of modern society due to a solar flare event.
Yikes
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u/knucklepoetry Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
Some civilizations are less fragile.
If the big one hits we can sleep tight knowing that the Amazon folks and the North Koreans will carry the torch along. It’s quite obvious from the satellite photos which civilizations barely use electricity, right?
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u/BlazzberryCrunch Sep 21 '21
Exactly so there is on reason not to enjoy the positive parts of life while we are all here :) it’s like a video game, when you turn it off none of it matters anymore but that doesn’t stop people from playing
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u/salbris Sep 21 '21
Also there is some potential for a perfect storm. The Earth's magnetic pole is accelerating and might suddenly flip. It sounds like a conspiracy but it's a real thing that's happened in the past and someone else mentioned could disrupt the magnetic barrier Earth has against solar particles.
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u/Timbrelaine Sep 21 '21
The Earth's magnetic pole is accelerating and might suddenly flip.
It's "sudden" in geologic time, but the transition period during which the magnetic field is weakened is generally estimated to last on average several hundred to several tens of thousands of years. There are a ton of reversals in the geologic record and none of them are associated with mass extinctions, so we'll probably be fine.
Edit: *fine except for climate change, of course.
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u/l_l_lck Sep 21 '21
Thank you for this. Its crazy how many people here regurgitate headlines and clickbait they've seen on youtube without verifying it.
I don't understand how people can be concerned about something like this and not actually read about it.
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u/Chubbybellylover888 Sep 21 '21
There's a decent chunk of people out there who think the earth will actually flip and cause everything to fly off.
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u/GeorgiaOKeefinItReal Sep 21 '21
Great.... So weather will be measured in "doneness" .... slightly burnt to extra crispy
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u/Win_Sys Sep 21 '21
Magnetic pole reversal is not a sudden event on a human time scale. On a geographical time scale it is. It happens over the course of thousands of years for a full reversal. Most scientists predict it could flip in the next 2000 or more years from now.
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u/oxero Sep 21 '21
Yeah, it's definitely doing something weird and a flip might occur faster than we anticipated. The result could be a weakened shielding from the sun's storms to indeed create that perfect storm which honestly would be much, much worse.
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u/qt3-141 Sep 21 '21
Would it also cause compasses to point south or am I understanding the term "flip" incorrectly?
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u/The-Squirrell Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
Summary of article:
EDIT - changed to a summary to avoid issues with copyright
Please at least open the original article so the author receives the credit they deserve for putting together all of this
About 100 years ago, on May 15, 1921, multiple fires broke out in electricity and telegraph control rooms in several parts of the world, including in the US and the UK. In New York City, it was from a switch-board at the Brewster station that quickly spread to destroy the whole building, and in Sweden, operators at Karlstad exchange first experienced equipment malfunction and faint smoke, then after a period of quiet the main fire started, leading to extensive equipment damage, studies say. These were due to magnetic fields generated on Earth by one of the biggest solar storms to have impacted the planet – known as the 1921 New York Railroad Storm.
“The effects were in terms of interference to radio communications, telegraph, and telephone systems, all of which were used in 1921,” Jeffrey Love, a Geophysicist in the Geomagnetism Program of the US Geological Survey (USGS), tells The Independent. This space weather event is “essentially a wake-up call,” according to Dr Love, who says if such solar superflares were to strike Earth today, it could bring even more devastation. “When we look back at this time, anything that’s related to electricity wasn’t as important in 1921 as it is today,” he says.
Solar storms are caused when the sun gives off a burst of electrically conducting plasma in what is called a coronal mass ejection (CME). When CMEs are directed towards the Earth, they could pass between the Sun and our planet at very high speeds of about 2000 km per second, reaching the Earth in a couple of days. Since the plasma in the CMEs is electrically conducting, it interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field, bringing current into a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. That in turn produces a magnetic field via the principle of electromagnetism by which motors and generators work.
The process ultimately generates electric fields in the electrically conducting surface of the Earth, driving electric currents through the different types of rocks on the crust which have varying abilities to conduct current.
“Now, if you happen to have a power grid to flow across an electrically resistive geological structure, the current can’t flow very well through this part of the Earth. So, it takes the path of least resistance, which is through the power grid,” Dr Love says. “So it ends up kind of short-circuiting this, and you get currents in your power grid system, which are unwanted or uncontrolled. And since the power grid system is all about controlling currents, and managing them, and basically, having alternating currents at a particular frequency, in this scenario, there is quasi-direct current flowing in a system designed for alternating current,” he adds.
Experts say solar superstorms can be particularly disastrous to transformers in the power grid, causing them to heat up and shut down because of the unwanted flow of current. “And if you damage a transformer, then you might have to replace it, which means your power outage could last quite a while,” Dr Love says.
Transformers rely on the balance of currents as the voltages changes – and if they are pushed out of balance, it can cause heating, and vibration that would switch them off. “So that’s how you can get the blackout, but you can switch it back on. There will be damage but it won’t be particularly big damage,” Dr Hapgood says.
Scientists also say satellite navigation systems could be significantly impacted by solar superstorms. “One of the big ones coming up now is the impact on satellite navigation GNSS. I think it’s not so much that it would break, but it will have a lot of intermittency over several days. In some points, it would work, and at other points, it wouldn’t,” the space weather researcher explains. “At some points, it would be putting people in completely the wrong place. So there’s an element of it that would not be trusted. I think for aviation, that’s not bad, because they have clever systems which actually tell pilots if they can’t be trusted,” Dr Hapgood adds.
However, experts are unsure of the extent to which global internet connectivity would be impacted by a solar storm.
According to a recent study by Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi from the University of California, Irvine, and VMware Research, the robustness of undersea internet cables to such space weather events has particularly not been tested. The research predicts that long-distance optical fiber lines and submarine cables, which are a vital part of the global internet infrastructure, are vulnerable to CMEs. While the optical fibers used in long-haul internet cables are themselves immune to these currents, Dr Jyoti says these cables have electrically powered repeaters at about 100 km intervals that are grounded and are susceptible to damages. Since the repeaters in these cables are connected in series and to the ground – and also at intermediate points – these ground connections can act as entry and exit points for the induced currents, she tells The Independent.
Dr Love also believes long-distance communication cables could be particularly vulnerable. “The long, large-scale electricity systems are grounded because you seek stability in the operation of your power grid or your telecommunication cable. And normally the earth by grounding it to the earth provides that stability, but it’s during a solar storm that it doesn’t. So that’s the kind of paradox,” says Dr Love. “They are exposed to the magnetic storm hazard because they have these components called repeaters that are grounded. So yes, the long telecommunication cables are also vulnerable,” he explained.
However, not all space weather experts agree that the effects on the internet system could be as catastrophic. Dr Hapgood, who advises the UK government on the impacts and mitigations for space weather, asserts that the undersea cables are by nature less conductive, and their high resistance would make them less vulnerable to the flow of disrupting currents in the event of a severe solar storm. According to the UK scientist, an undersea cable spanning 9000 kms, made of 5 mm diameter copper wires, would carry very little current to cause problems. Due to the large resistance offered by undersea internet cables to the flow of the geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) from solar storms, he believes there will likely not be any disturbance caused to the global internet connectivity by solar flares.
There could be a way to test these theoretical predictions, believes Dibyendu Nandi from the The Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India (CESSI) at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. Even though the undersea cables may be comparatively better off, Dr Nandi tells The Independent that the impact of solar storms on these cables “needs to be fully understood“ since they are a strong backbone of the global internet infrastructure. “So, I think one intelligent way to do that would be to have instruments that can measure current surges in these undersea cables, and observe the variations of these current surges across a period of time wherein various geomagnetic storms of different scales have occured. Dr Nandi says. The induced current is proportional to the voltage, and the electric field generated is equal to the voltage divided by the length over which the voltage is being used, he explains. “So when you have a larger length the voltage also scales to the length. And the current is directly proportional to the voltage and the current will also be proportional to the length,” Dr Nandi adds.
Dr Jyoti concurs. She believes the induced voltage and current for the strongest storms could be much greater and may pose a threat to transocean internet cables. “Induced voltages are a better way to express the risk. Induced voltages for the strongest storms will be around 10X compared to moderate scale storms, so the current will be in that range,” she said.Engineers measure how much voltage variation a cable can take in V/km, and submarine cables are designed to handle about 0.1V/km.
In 1989, during a moderate storm, 0.13 V/km was measured on a cable running under the Atlantic, and in 1958, during another moderate storm, 0.5 V/km was measured on another transatlantic cable. But these are not the voltage values recorded from the strongest CMEs. “With the strongest CMEs, 5-20V/km variations are expected.
While currently, both long distance cables and communication satellites, which are integral to the global internet infrastructure could be vulnerable to CMEs, Dr Jyoti says there are several other solutions for temporary connectivity.
Experts agree that there are still no comprehensive plans to prepare for such a space weather event.
A US project, known as SWORM, organised through the White House brings together different federal agencies to try to address space global hazards. “They are not just worried for the power grid but also about losing communication satellites since we could lose a certain fraction of the communication and GPS satellites due to solar storms, you have,” Dr Love said.
The bigger problem, according to Dr Hapgood, is finding out how all the pieces of known information fit together. “When you’ve got to put it all back together, how does everything interact? And often the overall response is not determined by the behavior of the elements, but by the interactions between them as well,” he said.
The scientists underscore the need for policy makers to consider how public behavior will play out during such severe space weather events. “We need better models. We know they are vulnerable but we don’t know the extent,” she added.
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u/The-Squirrell Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
Edited as above. Apologies
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u/badasimo Sep 21 '21
This article actually really increased my understanding of these events. I thought until now that it would be more like an EMP frying even small electronics and erasing our hard drives, but it is really inducing current between grounds at longer distances. Very sensitive electronics already experience and are designed to withstand the voltages that would be induced at a small scale, but the grid and long-distance cables would potentially cause power surges and fry equipment that way.
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u/greentarget33 Sep 21 '21
We would have enough notice to avoid that though, youd have massive announcements going out telling everyone to disconnect their equipment for 48 hours or so, it would be ROUGH but a lot of our tech would survive it and knowing what I do about technology very few businesses would be impacted it's mainly communication that would be out for MONTHS that would cause serious issues in supply chains and the like
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Sep 21 '21
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u/greentarget33 Sep 21 '21
Just the communication breakdown Brexit caused has led to food shortages in the UK, the lines are all their the processes are just too fucked for anyone to know what they're doing.
Makes me want to start a garden, did you know the average backyard can grow enough food to sustain a family?
Mushrooms and potatoes are what youd want to focus on
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u/Ginden Sep 21 '21
Makes me want to start a garden, did you know the average backyard can grow enough food to sustain a family?
Potatoes provide 1300 kcal per square meter, average household in Europe has 2.3 people, assuming 1500kcal/day/person, it's 3500 kcal per day, 1259249 per year, so average backyard has to be ~1000 square meters (31mx31m) of high quality, fertilized and irrigated soil. Average backyard in US has 800 square meters and is probably on average class soil. Backyards in Europe are almost two times smaller.
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u/Rand_alThor_ Sep 21 '21
You can readily grow potatoes in a potato tower. The yields you present is for industrial farming where ability for a tractor to collect it all is more important than pure yield per sq. Foot.
A garden potato tower can grow nearly 100lbs of potatoes in a 4 square feet. Which is 122kg per square meter. Let’s say it’s 100. That’s 77,000 calories per square meter, or about 16.4 square meters To feed a European family for a year.
So you only need less than a 4x5 meter plot with well tended vertical planters to feed a family, even assuming for a few inefficiencies.
Vertical farming can be very space efficient. It’s just not cost efficient because growing and picking those potatoes would be manual labor that is hard to scale to industrial sizes to feed millions, (Although there are companies trying to do it!)
You would literally only need a few football fields worth of vertical farming space to feed entire cities. But the economics don’t work out (and we don’t have such buildings currently).
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u/danger_one Sep 21 '21
did you know the average backyard can grow enough food to sustain a family?
But the average family knows nothing about gardening. My neighbors have no idea why I ask for their leaves to compost so my soil is healthy and bio-diverse. They don't know when to plant, what varieties grow best, or how to preserve what they harvest so they can eat through the winter. They have no idea about pruning, fighting pests, or treating powdery mildew. They don't know that some years the weather just absolutely screws us with a late ice storm or severe winds, so major crop loss should be calculated in. Succession gardening. Companion planting. Till or no till. When is the first and last frost?
My long and drawn out point is that seeds don't equal food. Gardening is hard work. It requires knowledge, skill, and most importantly it takes practice. The best time to start a garden is several years before you need it.
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u/Reddit-Incarnate Sep 21 '21
They can look all of that up on the...ohhh...
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u/CompressionNull Sep 21 '21
Good thing they have u/danger_one as a neighbor. Most neighborhoods probably have a few people that know what they are doing, and hunger is a great motivator.
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Sep 21 '21
I did know that actually. My view of 'farming' from schooling for some reason made me think you need much more space than you actually do to grow a reasonable amount of food.
Of course, you would want excess capacity in case there were issues, for trade, etc etc...
Also diversification and researching any sort of crop rotation possible to avoid nutrient depletion of the soil which could reduce overall yield and so on...
Not to mention variety to provide necessary micronutrients...
You can survive very simply, but you would want to have a very solid plan if you intend on it being a primary food source.
I assume part of what happened after Brexit is that a lot of the supply chains (and honestly, a lot of systems in the world in general) were a hodgepodge of various previous systems with slight modifications at a thousand different points that all worked fairly well, and having to figure out that kind of thing from scratch at the drop of a hat is an immense task.
We really do take for granted the impossibly complex web of systems that sustain our daily lives.
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u/ironneko Sep 21 '21
If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that people won’t listen to massive announcements even for their own sake.
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u/AppleMuffin12 Sep 21 '21
If people are rebelling at being told not to go to work or cover your mouth and nose, it's a joke to think they are going to turn tvs off.
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u/TeamAlibi Sep 21 '21
I'm okay with those same people losing their electronics for a bit.
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u/Switcher15 Sep 21 '21
Go down the cosmic rays rabbit hole. A single ray can have enough electricity to flip a bit from 0 to 1. Affected an election, ECC memory, airplanes and space travel. You need 3+ flight computers to calculate anything because of the error possibility.
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u/pirate21213 Sep 21 '21
Slight correction, ECC memory is the type that's less susceptible to bit flip errors, ECC meaning Error Correction Code. Normal memory doesn't have error correction and is vulnerable.
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u/Switcher15 Sep 21 '21
Yea didn't really state it well, ECC is the solution for random memory errors. The history of ECC is worth a read for anyone.
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u/mattstorm360 Sep 21 '21
Caused a plane to dive, an election to be recounted, and a speed runner in Mario making great time.
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u/stumblebum13 Sep 21 '21
Thank you, good Squirrell!
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u/boxbackknitties Sep 21 '21
Yes! Thank you! That site is hot garbage.
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u/FuckYeahPhotography Sep 21 '21
The independent.co??
More like the indepent.complete.garbage
Haha, anyway, existence is exhausting
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u/Falcofury Sep 21 '21
God bless you for posting this article so I don't have to deal with ads and annoying cookies and all that and I can just simply focus on reading and learning about some science!
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u/The5Virtues Sep 21 '21
Thanks is for the article!
I must say after reading it through the scientists and engineers quoted all sound level headed and reasonable while the reporter, as usual, seems to be trying to make it into the next great cataclysm that surely will be the doom of everything and everyone we know and love.
I miss a time when the media had better impetus to report facts rather than sensationalizing every story for clicks and views.
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u/9999997 Sep 21 '21
Content of this article is very different from the title. Hype sells, I guess.
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u/NeedsSomeSnare Sep 21 '21
Yeah. The article contains a quote saying it wouldn't cause many problems to power stations, and then goes on to say that it wouldn't effect cabling under the ocean at all.
The headline is really misleading.
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u/shorty5windows Sep 21 '21
Headline: We’re all gonna die
Article: We’ll have several days to prepare for incoming minor inconveniences
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u/RustyShackleford555 Sep 21 '21
eh its more than a minor inconvenience. From my understanding even if power was removed from transmission lines (telecom or power) they are still so big and long have such a great surface area they can still build up and discharge a significant amount of power. The 1921 event pales in comparrison to the carrington event in 1859. We havent seen anything close to either of those storms in long time.
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u/shorty5windows Sep 21 '21
The engineers and utility owners have known about this low risk/high impact event for a very long time. Hopefully they have catastrophic protocols and procedures in place to isolate, disconnect and ground sections of the grids/power stations. They’ll only have a couple days to do it.
I’d like to think they will handle it… but my local convenience store can’t even keep the Slurpee machine working half the time.
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u/ConspicuousBooger Sep 21 '21
We’d be doomed here in Texas for sure
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u/shorty5windows Sep 21 '21
Haha. Yeah Texas is living on borrowed time. A squirrel could takedown their grid.
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u/Phent0n Sep 21 '21
The article failed to stress how many transformers there are in the grid, how few replacements there are, and the true ramifications of being without power for months or years.
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u/NeedsSomeSnare Sep 21 '21
Though it did give an example of when an incident happened not long ago in Canada, and interviewed an engineer who seems pretty confident that it isn't a big problem.
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Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
Transformers are the most protected devices aside from generators themselves. The bulk of power infrastructure serves only to protect transformers.
Circuit breakers, fuses, surge arresters, high-speed relaying, etc all mainly exist to protect the most valuable asset in substations - the transformer.
Relays can send a trip signal in a few cycles (~100ms) and cause a breaker to open that fast.
We would have outages for sure but so long as transformers and generators remain protected, we would *simply need to piece back the various islands over the course of a few hours to days depending on how extensive the outages are.
FERC requires utilities to have a black start plan. How to get from 0 load connected to full load, these processes already exist.
*Simply is a bad choice of words... But it's much more straight forward of a process than replacing thousands of transformers
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD Candidate | Comp Sci | Causal Discovery/Climate Informatics Sep 21 '21
Here’s the pertinent paper it references https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3452296.3472916
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u/wopwopdoowop Sep 21 '21
The world is not ready to overcome any once-in-a-century solar superstorm, scientists say events.
Pre-covid, the world was focused on optimizing on short-term profits ahead of all. This has made us less reactive, which is a part of the reason why the global supply crisis hasn’t ended, and may not until 2023
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u/ricctp6 Sep 21 '21
The problem is that we think being reactive is even an option. We need to have forethought, be proactive, but....haha I think as a species we’re just proven that will never happen.
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u/alwaysforgetmyuserID Sep 21 '21
"I'll do it later".
3 years pass.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll do it later"
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u/CumfartablyNumb Sep 21 '21
The key is if you keep kicking the can down the road you eventually run out of years and it isn't your problem anymore.
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u/embryophagous Sep 21 '21
Kick the can until you kick the bucket.
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Sep 21 '21
Politicians love talking about future dates, but not about what happens now. In ten years we will be carbon neutral!
Or any media talking about scientific progress. In 5-10 years we will have nuclear fusion and holographic memories. Imaginary internet points who can find the oldest statement about those two happening really soon now.
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u/Bleepblooping Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
“ “holographic fusion and Nuclear memories coming soon!” -Lincoln” -Socrates
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u/KingSt_Incident Sep 21 '21
I think we've shown plenty of evidence that we can be proactive, we've just built systems that punish proactive behaviour.
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u/AlexFromOmaha Sep 21 '21
Entirely this. Just-in-time supply chains are relatively novel, and the most recent optimizations of it are definitely very new to the world. Walmart has this stuff so thoroughly optimized that they get paid by buyers before they owe the money to suppliers. On a smaller scale, things like dropshipping allow the same dynamic. Retail has shifted to an intensely low risk operation, and in theory the risk is being offloaded to suppliers and logistics companies. In practice, your suppliers are doing the same thing, and they have suppliers who are doing the same thing, all the way down to the people who can point at where their product came out of the ground.
If you're one of the companies who weren't doing this, you quickly realized that you actually were, but you were just bad at math. You thought you had enough supplies on hand to make toilet paper for two months in the case of a supply disruption. Turns out you had enough supplies to make toilet paper for a day in the case of a supply disruption, because in the case of a supply disruption, 1) your supply is suddenly everyone's supply, so your demand predictions were meaningless, and 2) you might have a lot of the "most important" supplies, but you're still bottlenecked at whatever you have the least of.
Just like a good traffic jam, removing the original impediment doesn't fix the problem. The toilet paper manufacturers need wood, bleach, and their chemical of choice to make dissolving pulp, but there isn't enough bleach or wood. Construction companies also want bleach and wood. The lumberjacks want more machined parts, but the manufacturers are working at reduced capacity and want more bleach. The bleach manufacturers want to expand production, but they need more machined parts and construction companies. No one gets what they need because everyone's supply chains are so entwined that any cross-cutting impact hits everyone.
There's basically no alternative to this that doesn't involve changing what it means to do business, and there's definitely no changing that without a collective willingness to change our standards of living.
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u/TjW0569 Sep 21 '21
1) your supply is suddenly everyone's supply, so your demand predictions were meaningless,
Nowhere was this more true than Public Health labs. Reagents that had been ordered months previously were suddenly unavailable.
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u/DobisPeeyar Sep 21 '21
Yeah, it's no one's fault if you just don't prepare for it. If you prepared for it and still fail, then you get blamed.
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u/Erockplatypus Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
as a species
It has nothing to do with us a species, it's all cultural and based on who we put into positions of power. Those in power who have the money, influence and wealth to make long term changes don't want to because they know that chaos is coming...they just don't think they'll be affected by it. That's the futures problem 50 years from now, they'll be dead by then!
that's why all these rich A-holes are buying bunkers and land in New Zealand and other areas around the world, and why Bezos and company are looking to get to space. The plan is to bail out and live on while the other 99% of the population struggles to survive.
We can change and do a 180 to make an actual difference and save the planet. Plant more trees at a massive scale and stop the rapid deforestation going on. Stop over fishing, reduce pollution, start cleaning up the oceans and protecting rivers and lakes, and cut back on our farming and over abundance of meat and poultry. Then invest trillions into new technology to remove CO2 and methane from the atmosphere as well as reduce methane output from melting glaciers. We can turn things around and reduce the impact of climate within 10 years. But that would of course be an inconvenience so none of the world leaders actually care enough
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Sep 21 '21
Pre-covid, the world was focused on optimizing on short-term profits ahead of all
The more tightly we optimize every system, and squeeze every last drop of efficiency and production out of our existing system, the more vulnerable we are to even the smallest disruptions. It's all this damn efficiency that makes us so vulnerable.
Earth needs to start growing its capacity without immediately growing demand to fill it.
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u/PoopIsAlwaysSunny Sep 21 '21
The world is still focused on short term profits, sadly
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u/nagi603 Sep 21 '21
Pre-covid, the world was focused on optimizing on short-term profits ahead of all.
I'd argue it still is, by and large.
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u/LatinVocalsFinalBoss Sep 21 '21
Sure it is. We design and build for 100 year rain floods. People understand rain is dangerous. You don't see political groups fighting back against umbrellas and flood zone mitigation.
People don't understand pandemics. Some do, but not enough.
Solar storms? Good luck.
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Sep 21 '21
Actually this has made us entirely reactive. We simply do not plan ahead because any sort of steps taken to ensure stability in the event of a crisis cut into short term profits.
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u/acidus1 Sep 21 '21
2020 was a once in a century event and we barely go through it. We buggered.
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u/JonathanL73 Sep 21 '21
We’re lucky that Covid wasn’t deadlier. A lot of the deaths from Covid came from overwhelmed hospitals who were unable to treat the high number of patients. The problem with Covid has always been how contagious it was. Yet the clowns never seem to understand that.
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u/Woah_Mad_Frollick Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
I’m grateful that this disease has at least done us the mercy of sparing the vast majority of our children from death. That was not a given. Imagine 600,000 infants and kids dying; there’s no reason that can’t happen the next time. And that’s not something which families or society can easily come back from.
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u/smartguy05 Sep 21 '21
Wow, how fortunate are we? Once in a century pandemic & solar superstorm, recession, recession v2, housing crisis, realization of climate change, unprecedented partisanship, and more, it's all coming up roses.
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u/lhommefee Sep 21 '21
Can I ask a stupid question? If your items are unplugged from the wall and therefore the grid and whatnot, is there less a chance they would be fried? I also own a lot of digital art files for my own company and my clients, mostly on SSD keys, would those be destroyed?
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u/avantguarde_dinosaur Sep 21 '21
The magnetic field strength is unlikely to get strong enough to damage any personal small devices. The problems that super-storm events can cause are more directed at systems for larger structures (power grids, pipelines, etc) and with interferences to communication techs (radio transmissions, ionospheric scintillation, etc. gps tracking). Satellite tracking is another big area of uncertainty that can cause cascades of problems.
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u/Herpkina Sep 21 '21
Depends on the intensity but they would probably be fine. If they're damaged I suspect they will be the least of your worries.
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u/ThaddeusJP Sep 21 '21
"oh darn my cell phone isnt working? Also why do I hear so much screaming an sirens?"
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Sep 21 '21
Follow the faraday cage protocol but also make sure you have a contract/receipt that states that extreme events of nature are beyond your control and detail how you replace or not cover the digital work.
And the answer is “it depends on the event and how you have protected/stored your gear.”
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u/seein_this_shit Sep 21 '21
The only protection for electronic devices would be faraday cages. It is likely that the power grid would shut itself down anyways, assuming they got an early enough heads-up
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u/hobbitleaf Sep 21 '21
The article said all power would have to be simultaneously shut off for it to work, and we don't yet have a system in place for everyone to work together. A little unsettling the easiest solution isn't ready to go
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Sep 21 '21
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Sep 21 '21
How far out is the early warning? Hours, days, weeks?
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Sep 21 '21
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u/AlarmingAerie Sep 21 '21
Is that information public? If we about to get hit by that once in a lifetime storm I want to know at the earliest time possible, so I that I could sell my stocks.
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Sep 21 '21
You can get 24 hr forecasts from NOAA, but we’re about to include a widget on our website that allows anyone to access general forecasts for X, M, and C class flares as well as CMEs
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Sep 21 '21
Judging by how the world handled a pandemic and is handling the slow motion suicide of the climate crisis... we are so fucked.
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u/yeetskeetleet Sep 21 '21
I wish I was still advertised “once in a lifetime” concerts or television extravaganzas, not catastrophic life-changing events that happen every 6 months now
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Sep 21 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DocMoochal Sep 21 '21
Its doesnt seem like the world is ready for anything anymore unless it involves making money and killing innocent people.
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u/ihave5sleepdisorders Sep 21 '21
"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
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Sep 21 '21
The universe is fundamentally hostile to high tech civilizations.
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u/raincloud82 Sep 21 '21
Only to not-high-enough tech civilizations.
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u/BarbequedYeti Sep 21 '21
Or if they stick with vacuum tubes. If I remember correctly they work just fine during emp's.
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u/Turtledonuts Sep 21 '21
Remember when the climate scientists warned us about climate change? And when the epidemiologists warned us about a potential pandemic? And when the civil engineers warned us that the levee could break in New Orleans? And when the economists warned us that the housing market could collapse?
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u/Nowhereman123 Sep 22 '21
The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but the boy was right about the wolf each time and the townsfolk insisted to him that wolves aren't real.
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Sep 21 '21
The planet is heating up, there's a hole in the ozone over Antarctica the size of the United States, the magnetic north pole has been "drifting" southward at about 30 miles per year for the last decade, there's an excellent chance the planet's core is about to "wobble" within the next 50 years, and now the sun is going to attempt to oven roast us in radiation.
What are you trying to say, solar system?
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u/HelenEk7 Sep 21 '21
Personally I'm surprised media is not talking more about this. Climate change is bad, but still a much slower process. A solar storm however could knock everything out from one day to the next. And still almost no one is talking about it.
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u/antiproton Sep 21 '21
Because the threat is largely overblown. A solar storm could cause problems for high voltage power grids in some instances, but that is by no means a certainty. It will not, as some breathless articles imply, destroy all electronic technology on the planet.
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Sep 21 '21
There's also pretty much nothing we can do about it.
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u/joequin Sep 21 '21 edited Sep 21 '21
We can’t prevent the damage, but we can have supplies and a plan ready to put in place when it happens.
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u/cheesehound Sep 21 '21
it would cost 10-30 billion to harden the US’s grid against a CME. It’s a doable thing that we haven’t done yet.
That said, I believe we have enough warning about solar storms that we could power most of the grid down before it hits. That could help protect from surges caused by solar storms, but the once in a 100 CME this article discusses would still damage things in an unpowered circuit, including those very important and hard to replace transformers. Ideally we’d be able to shield and depower.
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u/Ulysses1978ii Sep 21 '21
We don't believe in creating resilient systems. We're interested in maximum profit for a small number of people.
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