
What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth? - tomohawk
http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-storm-hit-the-eart-1724650105
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Avalaxy
I hate it that so little is being done to prevent the damage that will be
caused by a CME. I think it's very likely that a CME will hit the earth within
the next 100 years. If that will happen, western society will probably
collapse. The only reason we can feed everyone right now is because we
automated lots of things. The whole food chain is ran by machines, none of
which will still be working after a CME. We won't be able to purchase anything
because our electronic payment systems won't work, many of us will lose our
jobs (because the computers are broken) and so on. Fixing all of that would
probably take years, and in the mean time we would see looting, famine (and
huge starvation), violence, etc.

Personally I'm trying to be prepared for a CME by at least having a food stash
for a couple of months, plus all the other necessities. I wish governments
would be doing more as well.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong here or is this problem just not being
taken serious enough?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_What do you guys think?_

It depends on if you believe the following (from the article):

    
    
       Regions with high percentages of at-risk
       capacity could experience long-duration
       outages extending for several years.
    

If that happens, then I agree with you when you say "we would see looting,
famine (and huge starvation), violence, etc".

Take a big city like NYC. Without electricity there is no water, no sewage
treatment. Within a few days, at-risk people start dying. By the thousands.

And let's say that power can't be restored for years (see quote above). Then
what exactly do you do with those people? They can't live in NYC without
electricity. Period.

So do you try to move them to refugee camps in the country? Really? Eight
million plus people? How do you feed them? How do they get water? And if the
problem is happening in NYC it's probably happening all over the country, so
it's not like all of the USA's resources can be devoted to just the NYC metro
area.

There are farms and houses in the country that have outhouses and have water
wells that can be pumped by hand. They have stored food. But that's such a
small portion of the country. 90% of the country would have a hard time
surviving an extended period without electricity.

Fortunately this is truly a first world problem. There are so many people in
other countries that live a day-to-day subsistence life, without electricity.
They grow their own food (or trade locally for it), they don't depend on it
being delivered every few days to within a few miles of them. Those people
will be fine.

~~~
ZenoArrow
If the power was going to be out for months, and no chance of access to water
or a working sewage system, then yes you'd want to evacuate NYC, perhaps not
all of those 8 million people, but anyone without alternative means of
disposing of their human waste.

As for how to get water to people, you could use trucks to deliver water
tanks. You could also have small scale electricity production through solar
and wind and mobile electricity generators.

It'd require considerable effort to pull off, but we would have options.

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tempestn
The pictures of the flares are really something when you consider how
incredibly bright the sun is normally.

This one sentence irked me a bit though: "We don’t have a great way of
forecasting solar flares, and they hit the Earth too quickly for NOAA to
provide airline companies with advance notice (it takes about eight minutes
for sunlight to reach us)."

Those are two true statements, but they aren't really related. Regardless of
how many light minutes away the sun was, it wouldn't make any difference,
because even if we had a satellite right near the sun watching for flares,
there would be no way to get a signal back to earth _faster_ than the light.

I'm assuming what the scientist meant was that after any warning signs of a
flare, the flare itself comes too quickly to have useful warning. (Which is
completely unrelated to the time it takes the light (either from the warning
signs or from the flare itself) to reach the Earth.)

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Callmenorm
How would home installation solar panels be affected by this? Would they be
ruined as well?

~~~
jcfrei
Coronal mass ejections increase radiation on the whole electromagnetic
spectrum so your solar panels would most likely just produce more electricity.
This shouldn't damage your cells but it would probably contribute to
overloading your local energy grid (and hence damage lots of appliances).

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cbr
David Roodman at GiveWell has an excellent series looking into geomagnetic
storms, and published the last of four posts today:
[http://blog.givewell.org/2015/08/21/coming-down-to-earth-
wha...](http://blog.givewell.org/2015/08/21/coming-down-to-earth-what-if-a-
big-geomagnetic-storm-does-hit/)

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bedhead
I wish no one would link to anything from Gawker

~~~
sunnid
It's because Reddit is leaking.

