
1859's "Great Auroral Storm"—the week the Sun touched the earth - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-stormthe-week-the-sun-touched-the-earth.ars
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fractallyte
Why so much emphasis on the negative aspects of aurorae? More constructive
would be to devise ways of harnessing the solar wind. Just consider: no lossy
conversion from one form of energy to another; solar wind is 'electricity'.

In the 1950s, SF writer Murray Leinster already had the idea of drawing energy
from the ionosphere (for spacecraft 'landing grids').

Scientific American in 1974 had an Amateur Scientist article about
electrostatic motors, which are powered by atmospheric electricity. (And how
many times in history has a curiosity led on to something with rather more
tangible benefits...? (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)>)

And recent experiments with lasers demonstrate that it is possible to open up
a channel of ionized air to direct lightning
([http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328584.200-lightning...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328584.200-lightning-
directed-by-laser-beams.html)).

All that free electricity above us, wasted on pretty colored lights... ;-)

~~~
diminish
Aurora is like fire; taming it would serve us yes, but it is easy to predict
when they will occur, and that seems a problem with continuity of electricity
supply.

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fractallyte
That's a very apt description of the problem!

Technology should be developed to tap the ionosphere, where there's a fairly
constant stream of electrons. I think the biggest obstacle in the past was
storage: breakthroughs were needed in material science to be able to construct
suitable capacitors. But I wonder if anyone's looked at this problem
recently...

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spatten
Made me wonder how you could prepare for something like this. If you had
warning, and a metal box, would throwing all of your electronics in there be
good enough to save them?

I'm thinking computer, phone, stuff like that.

Either way, I'm guessing the internet would be down for quite a while. Not to
mention what this would do to our electrical infrastructure.

Hmm. I wonder if the fields would strong enough to kill the computers in cars.

This might make for a good near-future apocalyptic scenario. It doesn't sound
_too_ scary, but then you start thinking of the possibilities.

Think I'll go make myself a tinfoil hat :D.

~~~
unimpressive
> Think I'll go make myself a tinfoil hat :D.

Aluminum can _attract_ radio waves. Among other things. I wouldn't recommend
it.

([http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csai...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/))

>If you had warning, and a metal box, would throwing all of your electronics
in there be good enough to save them?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage>

~~~
ars
A Faraday cage will not work, the frequency is too low. You'd need some Mu-
metal.

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ChuckMcM
One wonders if we would not be mourning the loss of life in the International
Space Station. In 2004 a program to beef up the shielding was kicked off [1]
but nobody would commit to saying it would keep the crew alive in a
'Carrington' type event.

My hope is that by the time the next one comes we have both a way to shield
satellites and a way to launch replacements quickly.

[1]
[http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/radiation_...](http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/radiation_shielding.html)

~~~
kamaal
While the technology might be available there is also something called as
economic cost. A lot of what we have today is because we are building
something on top of something.

If everything were to go away starting from scratch is not going to be very
economically viable.

Add to this the external woes. Loss of electronic life means, several millions
will loose jobs and will have to fall back on manual work. The population of
the planet has increased substantially. Food, medical and other needs have
increased. Much of that scalability depends on electronic means to controlling
stuff.

Disruption on a massive level only means extreme chaos.

~~~
jakeonthemove
But we have all the blueprints and know how - we don't have to build
everything from scratch (most of the time is spent on R&D, building the stuff
is actually the easy part). Organize the military and the civilians to start
rebuilding everything and we're back on track in several months for sure
(except for the satellites, maybe)...

~~~
kamaal
Firstly a lot of information today is on hard drives.

We are talking of a massive solar flare. Electronic equipment down, hard disks
fried, access to energy limited, communication equipment down. Information in
books is safe, but how much of modern information today is in printed books?

If you look at the whole equation. There are going to chained failures of
systems. Each depending on other to recover. While none can at the moment.

A scary situation though.

~~~
Retric
Hard drives sit in their own Faraday Cage.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage>. So they are a lot more protected
than you might think. Induction in long power cables is a problem, but things
have to get ridiculous before surge protectors become useless.

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quaz3l
I like how they still use Comic Sans in 1859.

~~~
richardkeller
Funny, this does look like Comic Sans. Any reasonable explanation for this? I
can only imagine that the text was added onto the digital image recently.

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nja
This event was mentioned on the Nova show Secrets of the Sun, which aired a
few days ago: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/secrets-sun.html>

