I've worked in critical infra. We had a risk matrix anything above a certain rating meant it had to have a quarterly update to our executive committee. We had some satellites which had a severe impact. Anyway we raised a case about aliens destroying the satellites which was ranked the lowest likelihood. But due to the matrix it meant our director needed to report on aliens attacking our satellites every quarter.
You jest, but when the aliens really come, or when countries downwell decide to start lobbing antisatellite weapons around, any mitigations coming off that threat matrix may suddenly come in handy.
Yep 100%, probability is a variable. Weather events were a major consideration for us but things like confirmation of UFOs would also influence that rating.
- Donate some money to the Planetary Defence Team? Yes, that’s a real thing. We can donate to Nasa and ask that this be earmarked for that team. Also, try to help cool things down with North Korea in case they get nervous?
- North Ko… I thought by “aliens” you meant creatures from outer space!?
- Space, yes, but if something detonates on that orbit, we lose capacity. Whether that’s an alternative life form or an alternative form of government.
For those who don't know, capital expenditures that are funded out of a rate case make investor-owned utilities money. If you can get the relevant regulatory body (often a public utility commission) to approve raising rates to cover x dollars of grid resilience projects, the utilities will happily take the money and go forth and implement.
The trick is justifying the spend to said regulators. This is hard with black swan events and regulators that are explicitly tasked with being ratepayer advocates, guarding against the utilities unnecessarily gold-plating things to get a greater rate of return for their investors. It's not like the utilities don't want the money, or the "work" of doing it, or anything like that. Rather, if PG&E went to CPUC and asked for several billion dollars to build a hardened bunker filled with things like transformers that may never be used in the lifetime of the people signing the documents (but the profits realized by the rate of return on the CAPEX will immediately go to investors), they'll likely get laughed out of the room. This issue complicates the discussion about grid resilience, because it can seem to Jeff & Jane Ratepayer (/taxpayer if we're talking national projects) it's all just an excuse to route regular people's money to executives & investors over something that won't happen, the rich get richer, yadda yadda yadda.
Ratepayers should never be on the hook for this. We need to compare the capital expenditure of these grid resilience projects (like the spare transformers in a hardened bunker) against the costs of what if such an event happened. It's obvious that for such black swan events, FEMA will get involved and ultimately the funds to recover from this disaster will come from the federal government. So as long as the capex is reasonable, this should be funded by the government.
Out of curiosity, what do you see as the practical differences between taxpayers footing the bill compared to ratepayers given that most people pay both?
(In other words, is paying for this with higher taxes substantially better compared to paying for this with higher utility bills?)
The one major practical difference is that the bill should be doled out according to income. The second major practical difference is that (almost) everyone in the nation should share the cost, not just the customers of a specific utility in a specific geographic area.
> the bill should be doled out according to income
First, income and electricity usage are already correlated for most residential customers -- in general wealthier individuals use more electricity and therefore pay more under either approach. More importantly, making taxpayers subsidize very-high-electricity consuming businesses and manufacturing seems unfair and regressive. (For example, an aluminum smelter may use as much electricity as a large residential neighborhood but pay lower net taxes than that neighborhood.) Third, paying for the actual cost of electricity helps incentivize energy efficiency which incentivizes energy efficiency and has environmental benefits. Finally, if your goal is to prevent rate increases from burdening low-income households then using taxpayer funds to bolster targeted subsidies such as LIHEAP seems like a more direct and cost-effective approach.
> (almost) everyone in the nation should share the cost, not just the customers of a specific utility in a specific geographic area
Why? If we make it easy for utility executives to ask for handouts and grants then who among them would bother with the comparatively harder task of convincing local customers to pay the true costs of producing the service they are using? More generally, asking everyone to collectively subsidize organizations or regions that make poor, short-sighted decisions is a moral hazard that shields utilities from consequences and discourages them from planning responsibly. Sure, a government may need to be prepared to step in to take over a failing utility but that seems like it ought to be a last resort in emergencies, not a standard way of funding predictable business costs.
The biggest worry is GPS. Way too much stuff is dependent on GPS. Including stationary stuff that ought not to be.
Meanwhile, here's the PJM plan for geomagnetic disturbances.[1] Start at page 37. It's a very real problem, but the people in the control rooms know what to do. The basic effect is that certain specific transformers overheat. This is now monitored.
Most recent event:
104095 Warning Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning 12.01.2023 06:55 PJM-RTO
A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued
for 06:55 on 12.01.2023 through 16:00 on 12.01.2023.
A GMD warning of K7 or greater is in effect for this period.
Additional Comments: End time extended to 1600 EST
This never got to the point that action had to be taken.
Looking at documents from NERC and the various ISOs, I get the impression that PJM is serious about this, but there's a lot of hand-waving from everybody else.
It only affects very long wires with a voltage to ground. Most long-haul is fiber now, which is totally indifferent to this effect. Balanced or twisted pair, no problem. Electric railways, maybe.
> Including stationary stuff that ought not to be.
This has piqued my curiosity. What stuff is this? If something needs to know where it is and it's not going to move, can't someone just program its location once and be done with it?
It's the cell network. The basic problem is that adjacent cells need to be in tight sync for time division agreement and handoff, but the obvious algorithm of "just sync to your neighbors" is highly problematic at scale because even if a big group of towers does a good job of drifting together there is always a boundary and the problems will just happen there. Since the cell network is highly profitable infrastructure, they just used the overkill strategy: "GPS sync everything and put atomic clocks everywhere for good measure." At least hobbyists get cheap and plentiful Rubidium clocks out of the deal! I don't know if newer standards are still as sensitive about timing agreement but it was definitely the case for a good long while.
Mostly for time synchronization. GPS/GNSS is cheap, widely available, and accurate down to nanoseconds, so it's displaced every other technology.
As an example, consider the blinking lights on top of wind turbines and other tall things. If you've got a lot of these in one area, the FAA recommends they blink in unison, to make them more visible and less distracting to pilots. Turns out the cheap and foolproof way to synchronize is to give each one a GPS receiver. This is fine until GPS goes down, and now something as innocuous as "blinking hazard light" is dependent on GPS.
This example fails safe if the lights fall out of sync ("oh no, anyway..."), but it's still emblematic of how widespread the problem can be.
Can I assume that they are meant to blink in one-second intervals and the GPS is just adjusting them to be synchronous, but they won’t stop blinking if GPD goes down?
Not that avoiding windmills is the priority on an airplane hit by a solar storm…
It's not even location data. A lot of stuff uses GPS to get time information and then propagate that using NTP or other timing infrastructure. Seeing a lot of stratum 0 or stratum 1 time servers go offline could potentially cause a lot of issues if systems start to drift away from each other.
I've heard it justified as a safety measure - those machines are carefully balanced on installation, and if the sensors detect it being moved, the machine locks itself out to avoid damaging itself, workpieces and/or operators.
I can't unlock a bikeshare in my city without GPS validating thru the app that I'm nearby. It's stupid. Assuming he means stuff like this.
As I understand, no one without a physical bikeshare rental card can check out a bike if GPS went down. Lots of apps that try to control user behavior and get access to permissions are probably similar
I'm guessing it's for time sync, but any clock worth it's crystals will keep good time for quite a while. Every substation generally has GPS time sync if it isn't fibre connected, for synchrophasor measurements or accurate timestamped waveform captures for example.
> The biggest worry is GPS. Way too much stuff is dependent on GPS. Including stationary stuff that ought not to be.
Yeah, it's a major concern. It's not just from solar storm events, but also warfare/cyber security. I suspect if a major world war were to breakout tomorrow, the internet (under sea cables) and satellites of all kind would be a significant target.
Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by turning off electricity, although this is a difficult thing for power companies and grid operators to do. One issue this article doesn't discuss is the risk to undersea internet cables[0]. Undersea fiberoptic cables need repeaters, these need electricity, so they have very long conductors and it's expected that sea water's conductivity could make induced currents worse. Shutting off power won't necessarily work, because induced currents could be 100x more than the equipment is rated for. Although, global connectivity is still likely to exist.
> Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by turning off electricity
That isn't entirely true.
I guess, in reality, "turning off electricity" can work, if "turning off" means shutting down generation at the same time throughout an entire interconnected grid and physically disconnecting literally every transformer throughout that transmission grid before they're cooked by geomagnetically-induced current (GIC).
Induced DC current alone can heat the windings in high-voltage transformers to the point of catastrophic failure, and that's assuming they can disconnect the AC current already flowing through the windings—if they can't, it heats even faster. This can possibly be mitigated by using a CT or hall sensor combined with a separate winding to cancel out the flux in the transformer's core, but I suspect that kind of work hasn't been done because there's no cost benefit.
Some electricity providers have relaying systems in place meant to protect equipment, but the last time that was tested in real-world conditions (1989, in Québec) they failed to prevent equipment damage.
That says nothing about the transmission lines themselves, most of which are nowhere near protected from GIC, and could either overheat or allow enough DC to flow through smaller pole-mounted transformers , which magnetizes them and dramatically reduces their serviceable life (if not outright destroying them).
In the case of Hydro-Québec, GIC didn't cause equipment damage; their protection systems—the stuff meant to "turn off the electricity"—allowed damage to occur anyway.
Turning the power off would work, but is that feasible? Even if we’d be able to spot the CME, would then have enough time left to shut down the entire power grid?
The time between detection and the CME hitting us would probably be measured in minutes. I don’t think it’s possible to shut down the grid in that timeframe.
The problem is figuring out how big the event is, and how directly it will hit us. So while we have over 17 hours to prepare, there might be some false positives due to our limited prediction skills. And, no matter the real consequences, people have limited patience for large economic disruptions over things that turned out to be nothing.
Even better, if you turn off the electricity and prevent major destruction and nothing happens (other than the power down/up) then you're the one who caused "the problem".
There's no reward for fixing a problem that doesn't happen and that people don't want to believe even exists. Bonus, if other networks are damaged while yours aren't, it must be because you protected your network so you're responsible!
17 hours sounds like a long time, but it's not like there's a big red button and a guy standing by to press it.
So the information chain, starting with the telescope that detects the flare, and then has to work it's way up the food chain, so that sufficient people agree, and take presumably synchronised action, well, good luck with that.
You'd also ideally need a multi-hour warning, planes gotta land etc.
Make no mistake, shutting it down will result in some deaths [1]. And those deaths will be on the news tomorrow (if indeed news still exists.) On the other hand not shutting down will cause more deaths and massive destruction.
[1] think hospitals where the backup power failed, or didn't last long enough. Traffic intersections. Elevators. Water pumps. Airplanes. Trains. Take your pick.
CME are "Coronal Mass Ejection" with mass being the operative word here.
Electromagnetic radiation (electrons photons) can make the trip between
sun and earth in about 8 minute but anything with neutrons or protons
(such as the coronal plasma) takes much longer as in,
a day and a half to several days.
CME are not hard to spot leaving the sun with even with tiny amateur telescopes
(the sun does not require much in the way of light gathering) so even without
the professional scopes (SOHO) with dedicated satellites leading and trailing earth orbit
constantly viewing around the edge of the sun as seen from earth
or being able to acoustically "hear" (if you can call 5 minute pressure waves sound)
the far side of the sun,
it is not conceivable to me we would not be warned a CME was incoming,
doing something about it is another story.
It takes 15-24 hours for CME to arrive at the Earth after solar flare. The particles are much slower than the radiation which arrive immediately. We have pretty good prediction if CME will hit Earth.
Since it is light, the concept of immediacy breaks down, right? Do events outside our light cone exist yet?
Let’s ask the photon how much time has passed between it being created and hitting our eyeballs. I’m sure it will produce a very sensible answer—oh dear, hmm…
I can do a lot in 8 mins. If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what could you do? Luckily, we get more notice than that now for tornadoes, but 8 minutes is enough time to seek shelter. In 8 minutes, there's plenty of time to ctrl-s on everything, and then close apps and shut down computers.
The problem is communicating to everyone when that 8 minutes starts and how much time is left.
It is something we computed. Why? Because there is no way to measure the time it takes for light to get from the sun to the earth. You cannot synchronize a message. There is no "hello". There is no beginning. This is not like firing a starting pistol. We cannot ever know what is happening at the sun with less than 8 minutes of lag. It is a fundamental limit. Even sending a highly robust and extremely precise clock into the sun to measure events, then comparing those events to timelines on earth, would not work. You cannot do it in real time, but even after the fact is pretty much not possible due to relativistic effects.
Even more pedantically, you'd be measuring the round trip time from the earth to a mirror located near the sun and back, but not at the sun. Does there even exist a mirror anywhere in this universe that could survive and float on the "surface" of the sun? Does the sun even have a surface? Is there a laser powerful enough to overcome all of the electromagnetic radiation from the sun such that you could actually discern it's signal? Not pedantically, I stand by my assertion that it cannot be directly measured.
>If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what could you do
That's not how it works. There may be detectable precursors that could actually give warning, but the 8 minutes referenced is the time it takes light from the sun to reach earth. It's immediate in the sense that it is physically impossible to detect that before those 8 minutes have already elapsed and the light is hitting your detectors. You could try to move your detectors closer to the sun to detect earlier, but any signal you can possibly send back to earth goes at the same speed, so it doesn't help.
It's pointless to talk about that 8 minute warning because the speed of light is effectively the speed of causality. There is no way we can signal back faster than that initial wave of radiation hitting us. There is no way to alert us that that 8 minutes is starting because are theoretical fastest communication will still take 8 minutes to get to us.
But we're not worried about that part of things anyway - it's the mass part of the CME that is the issue.
We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Take the 2003 blackout. Yes, the whole shut down took 15 minutes (?). But thats because it was a cascading effect that had to travel down the lines. Once the fault was detected by a particular segment of the grid, the relays responded in milliseconds. They have since the 1920s? Add in an "incoming solar flare" fault condition and we can trip the whole grid in seconds and send a start signal to the diesel generators to warm up to bring her back up.
Pretty nifty trick.
Question is why would we? The grid has been undergoing a lot of strengthening against EMPs and flares for decades. Its not obvious to me that a flare can take it out, especially if we shed dumb loads (partial blackout, say data centers) before it hits to give the conductors and transformers head space.
If we had done enough to mitigate EMPs, the nuclear powers of the world wouldn't have space-based nuclear EMPs as the first step of their attack plan. We still do, and so does Russia.
Geomagnetically-induced current is different from the plain-vanilla EMPs anyway—GIC can last for hours.
I don't think there are any space-based EMPs, at least no publicly known ones. There have been and perhaps still are plans to detonate high-yield nuclear weapons at high altitude above enemy territory to cause an EMP, but that is a very different situation from a CME solar storm. We're able to spot a CME hours in advance vs mere minutes for submarine-launched ICBMs, and the latter would only ever be deployed in the opening minutes of an all-out nuclear war, in which the electric grid and all grid-level precautions against solar flares are likely to be irrelevant, because most of its critical components would be vaporized or torn to shreds by attacks on ground targets anyway. Even just forcing the other side to keep burning money on military countermeasures that do work might be worth a few launchers and warheads.
Ish. There seems to be some vocabulary fuckery going on around the term "orbital", most likely due to a poor choice of wording upstream. "Orbital" in the shit-blew-up-outside-the-atmosphere sense EMP strikes are absolutely phase 1A of any large scale nuclear attack and such capabilities are trivially executed by ICBMs with appropriate warhead selection and detonation altitude parameters. "Orbital" in the EMP-weapons-literally-orbiting-the-planet sense violates several international treaties. Given the levels of secrecy required to pull that off for any length of time it seems unlikely but is impossible to rule out entirely.
I fail to understand why we don't do more to make equipment robust to this kind of thing. There's a whole range of problems that this solves looong before we get to general nuclear exchange.
If stuff was shielded, isolated, and grounded better, everything from your phone to your WiFi would work a lot better and have longer range. Wind slapping power lines together wouldn't destroy everything plugged in inside your house and solar flares wouldn't be more than a passing concern. The design changes to affect all of this aren't remotely expensive or difficult, we just don't.
There is no need to shield electronics. The induced currents only cause damage to long conductors, to the electrical grid and to long fiber optic cables.
That's a complicated one, it's still the electronics but they need a particular circuit that can stop short rise time transients. Also, any larger devices probably want to have shielding and ethernet devices will need some extra hardening, we're talking 25+kv/m events here so unless your computer can handle the monitor being at a 25kv differential from the tower you're gonna have a bad time.
It's not very different in terms of amplitude, though rise times for an E1 EMP impulse can supposedly be single digit nanoseconds so equivalent to a >400 MHz impulse. I know from experience that modern electronics can't handle that because I've fried USB ports by operating radio systems in that band, though there are some obvious differences there.
We might easily be unprepared, but that the military tries things that might not work. Military attack is all about trying things that might cripple the enemy and/or increase the cost of an effective defence. So an EMP isn't necessarily because it is expected to do horrific damage. It is just part of a thorough test of an adversaries preparations, making it harder to protect their infrastructure.
> We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Speaking from personal experience, this is BS. During a bad wind event, a bunch of lines came down, started a huge forest fire around 10 or 11pm which was heading for a small town with 50-70mph winds. First responders couldn't get in to warn anyone because the downed lines were energized, so they called up the power plant. The whole process to de-energize took hours. There is a kill-switch now, but most power plants apparently can't shut off the juice in a matter of seconds, and they may not even have a plan to do so in an emergency.
Yeah I question if it's something we even could do.
But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people. Probably less than setting every electrical device on (half of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their food spoils and they can't get to the store.
I thought it was incredibly difficult to "cold start" a system after such a complete shutdown. You'd prevent infrastructure damage which is fantastic, but the blackout could still last months anyways.
I'm not seeing any mention of a Miyake event[1]:
"It gets even scarier when you compare the Carrington Event with the Miyake Event. Scientist were able to estimate the strength of the Carrington Event based on the fluctuations of Earth’s magnetic field as recorded by observatories at the time. There was no way to measure the magnetic fluctuation of the Miyake event. Instead, scientists measured the increase in carbon-14 in tree rings from that time period. The Miyake Event produced a 12 percent increase in carbon-14. By comparison, the Carrington Event produced less than 1 percent increase in Carbon-14, so the Miyake Event likely dwarfed the G5 Carrington Event."
Wild thought, is any nation preparing for this as an opportunity to attack?
For example Russia using its whole arsenal to create maximum chaos to create some opportunities, or North Korea invading South Korea. Pakistan, China and Iran could def. also be cooking something.
Might as well go balls to the wall now that the enemy is weakened and you have a lot less to lose. Especially if your economy is mostly self-sustained and doesn't rely on globalization to function properly.
Not a wild thought. The China, Russia, and the US (if not the other nuclear powers) have made known their plans to use a nuclear electromagnetic pulse as the first phase of any attack.
That seems to be talking about using EMP as a targeted weapon.
I think the question was more if any countries have ready made plans to exploit the natural disaster for military gain. Like does any country have a standing order to in the case of massive global disruption subdue or attack their geopolitical rivals?
The Carrington event was about 7 days, so one could assume this would affect EVERY country.
So the hypothetical nation state here would need a ready-to-go plan ready to roll out at any time, and the plan must assume the native country also has all electronics knocked out along with the adversarial country. Such an all-out attack by itself would turn the world against this aggressor, moreso since it exploited the event and was premeditated. I think it's unlikely, it would be a crazy thing to do.
Now, who do I think might want to pull off something like this? A terrorist group could have a plan spooled up just waiting for this event. That, and I would expect some opportunists to appear as well.
Hardening essential comms and energy infrastructure has been funded. Trouble is, the rest of us don't benefit from the government redundancies, since they're focused on continuity of government rather than continuity of the electorate.
My scifi prediction is that if the worst predictions of AGI come to fruition that a Carrington event would actually save us (albeit we'd be radically changed).
Even before AGI, suppose a data center uptime optimization algorithm is given a broad range of possible actions to achieve more 9's of uptime. Across all failure modes the algorithm sees that to achieve the next 9, it needs its parent company to lobby national governments to subsidize energy grid maintainers to install fast breakers at all transformers.
What other things are in this category – unlikely bad-seeming events with somewhat recent precedents? I remember seeing a lot about things like super volcanoes when I was young but that’s not what I mean here. I’m thinking of things like:
- Carrington event
- Krakatoa eruption of 1883
- large or prolonged earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone
- the big one around San Francisco
- non-apocalyptic meteor impact (can’t think of a good example)
- there have been reasonably significant variations in climate in the last 5k years or so, and somewhat significant changes on the scale of centuries but I’m not counting them as they’re too slow. The current anthropogenic climate change is faster but I also want to exclude it (and catastrophes in the technical sense like changes to large-scale air/ocean currents, ocean acidification, etc) from the list.
I'll chime in with gamma ray bursts from a very nearby supernova, and I suppose a black hole passing through the solar system messing up the orbits. Some simulations have suggested a small chance that Mercury's orbit will at some point be destablised by the influence of Jupiter, and that it might end up colliding with the Earth.
gamma ray burst is a fun one (though unlikely thankfully!) -- a similar one that gets me excited is "false vacuum collapse" whereby the "energy" of the fabric of space itself is at a local but not global minimum. So in some unspecified conditions it drops to a lower/lowest minima and a destructive wavefront expands through the universe at the speed of light. Since the universe is so large, maybe one is already expanding right now, you'd never know (since speed of light). The upside is you'd never know it happened since death would take nanoseconds. Last I read about it, we don't know whether it's a local minima "false vacuum" versus global minimum.
I saw something about that one recently, maybe it was on Spacetime. At first it bothered me, but then I sort of made my peace with it since like you said, it's physically impossible to see it coming and we'd all die instantly. It's almost like the civilisation equivalent of going in your sleep. I could drop dead from an aneurysm 5 minutes from now. No point worrying about it though. There's sort of a morbid comfort in that.
The good news is that since the universe on the whole is expanding faster than the speed of light due to dark energy, as long as it happens far enough away the universe will be expanding too quickly for it to ever reach us.
the earth has cycles, the sun has cycles, the galaxy has cycles.
Last event was 6k years, half harmonic of the main 12k years cycle.
The carrington event signed the arrival of the galatic current sheet (a rippling magnetic wave emitted by the core of the milky way) which, among other things, causes the earth magnetic field to decrease.
There was no "very nearby supernova", it's just the sun and the event is much smaller but still a kind of nova (called micronova).
The induced current from the micronova is believed to be able to unlock the crust from the mantle which adds to the magnetic pole shift a physical pole shift.
The younger dryas impact theory is wrong in the way that the impact was just a proxy of the micronova (full coronal mass ejection) and not the cause.
A massive earthquake around San Francisco is unlikely to happen. The lower-magnitude earthquakes that area experiences release crust stress and prevent it from building up to the levels necessary to create a Magnitude 9+ earthquake.
The big one will be further north, leveling Seattle and Portland.
A magnetic pulse induces (Faraday effect) a powerful (high-voltage) electrical pulse in exposed wiring, effectively generating its own power.
This doesn't have to be a wire in a coil, like in a motor, transformer, or generator, but can simply be a standalone wire, like the telegraph lines burning down their own poles during the Carrington Event.
Or, a high-voltage power line could induce a massive surge while the coils in its transformers are also generating their own spike on each side of each transformer.
A wide-spread event with a powerful magnetic storm would result in utter chaos, and it'd be nearly impossible to repair the damage. In the case of a solar storm, it's likely that a wide swath of the entire planet would receive a portion of the CME as the Earth turns on its axis from day to night.
Telegraph lines were long, unterminated, unisolated stetches. Their effective loop area was absurdly large. Yeah a large CME would likely pop a lot of unprotected transformers which would take years to replace, but it's not like kV are being induced in personal computers. Even then, I zapped my laptop chassis with 10 kV pulses a dozen times this Winter.
Great article. And also perhaps, should we always have the steering wheels in Cars even though level 5 FSD is reached?
Edit: If its not obvious, level 5 FSD will assume permanent availability of communication, GPS, sensors etc to be working at all times. So having a steering wheel backup for critical unforeseen situations should be a good redundancy and safety measure.
Isn't this the same author who wrote that feature a decade ago speculating on the potential for a massive earthquake along the Pacific Northwest? It's too early in the week, but I'm bookmarking this for a weekend read. Incidentally, there's been news about huge solar flares in the last week (e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/solar-flar...).
Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9 on the Richter scale. Seeing what Microsoft's business back up plan for that is, would be interesting, especially since Seattle would be the largest affected city.
I lived in Vancouver bc and in general they’re prepared. The office building I worked from had many earthquake supply cabinets that had rations, water, thermal blankets, and we all knew where the community muster points were. They had people come in to talk about the risks and remind you about earthquake preparedness.
In general it’s going to be a disaster, but people are prepared for it (as much as one can be anyhow)
The chance for Cascadia magnitude 8 is 37% is next 50 years, and magnitude 9 is 15%. The 37% chance is for the southern section, and 15% is for the full fault.
That's not precisely accurate. The cascadian subductions zone uas produced magnitude 9 quakes in the past.
The results I've seen (from a decade and a half ago) pegged the probability of a magnitude > 9 in the next 50 years at 1/10 and a magnitude > 8 at 1/3.
The 500 years average is if you look at the last 7 events. 7 is a horribly low sample size and if you extend the timescale, that average drops by half and indicates we are past the 250 year average.
FEMA and State agencies have been advocating people get at least a 3 day bag ready in there house for each family member.
A better plan is for two weeks.
Back in the day, with the first surge of the Avian flu, Governor Schwarzenegger ordered an bought a large supply of respirators, "just in case".
That stock pile was released and not maintained by later administrations. Then COVID hit.
The problem with something like a Carrington event is that the potential impact is very widespread. The large bulk of our disaster planning is local. The planning rightly expects the cavalry to come to the rescue directly. Katrina was a poster child of both a good and bad response. The Houston boat lift is another. The rest of the country rallies and pivots to the disaster area sending material and people to aid the stricken.
Having a 2 week store when you can shelter in place is a Good Plan for a very large majority of potential disasters. It doesn't work great for fire or floods (where you lose your home, and thus have no place to shelter). But the plan is to be able to maintain for the 2 weeks while the cavalry arrives.
The problem with something like a Carrington event, is the disaster is no longer localized. But very wide spread, thus that cavalry that was planned for is probably not coming. Not soon. Not in time. And the rules have changed dramatically. It's a nightmare scenario. Despite the wide spread devastation of the Tsunami, it, too, was localized, and aid flowed quickly, even across the sea. With a Carrington event, not so much.
This is where, ideally, communities must rally themselves, on their own initiative, to share resources and manage as best they can. As you can imagine, some communities may be able to do this better than others. But your 2 week supply for your family is now likely better used to support others in your community. For every Ant preparing for winter, there are a lot of Grasshoppers. And they get unruly when they get hungry.
It would be unprecedented, and the only real course is to muddle through best we can. State and Federal disaster planning may or may not help here. Back in the day, the USDA running the Welfare programs stockpiled and delivered food (the infamous "government cheese"). Today they just offer debit cards. I don't know if there are warehouses of cheese and peanut butter standing by anywhere any more.
Still, you can do you part, you can do your best. Engage with your neighbors, stockpile a bit more food (don't need to fill the garage with a year supply of dried beans, but an extra case of tuna won't hurt). Make your preparedness part of a continuing cycle of giving, as your stockpile starts reaching the 6 month due date, donate it to a food pantry, and get some more. But reaching out to your neighbors can help a lot, get them to work on their 2 weeks supply.
Its not all about guns and gear. It's more about civility, and having a little more food or blankets to share with others in times of crisis. No reason to expect to feed the whole neighborhood, but don't expect them to leave you alone with your stocked garage while they go hungry.
I think a lot of this is better and more efficient centrally-managed. There are two things:
1) We want food production overcapacity, so if there is e.g. a 25% hit due to a freak weather event, or a diseases killing 100% of this years' corn crop, we don't have widespread food shortages.
2) That overcapacity should go somewhere. Large warehouses seem like reasonable places for it to go.
A lot of other things -- like medicines -- I can't realistically manage.
And rotating food is, well, a lot of hard work for someone absent-minded. I think one of my key questions is about how bad expired food gets. I've heard of people eating (and even growing) literally ancient grains. "Best before" isn't always "toxic after."
We used to be able to make big plans like this maybe a 75 years ago, during the era of WWII and the early cold war. Let's stick a man on the moon! Make a nuclear bomb! Create a whole new system of government! Etc.
I have not seen increased reporting on the effects of solar flares. I closely follow space weather as someone who uses the ionosphere to bounce radio signals.
Instead, we're on the upswing from a solar minimum, so we'll see more solar activity. Notice on Google trends the last time the news got excited about solar activity, which was at the predicted height of the last solar cycle.
I trust the US military to always do the oo-rah thing, I think if EMP space weapons were practical they would be asking for money to build one. After all, we have that rail gun.
Long article for something that can be summed up in two paragraphs. The primary danger is plasma from a CME or solar energic particles from a flare causing a rapid compression of the geomagnetic field by dynamic pressure and the the rate of change in magnetic field inducing large currents in very long conductors (power grid, pipelines, etc) down on earth.
If the large backbone transformers in the grid are not outfitted with fast ground fault interrupters they would be damaged and the grid for large regions would go down. There are no backup transformers waiting. It would take a few to many months to produce and install new backbone transformers even in normal times. It might take more when the grid is down. This lack of electricity would have compounding effects.
A much lesser worry is the satellites in orbit getting deep ion charging and sparking and getting damaged.
> Long article for something that can be summed up in two paragraphs
Sure, you can answer the question "What can a major solar storm do to our planet?" in two paragraphs, why not, if one would need a very quick, very short summary of what a major solar storm could to our planet.
But.
Some people might want a more in-depth answer, going into great detail. Some people might want so much detail that they might read a whole-ass book about a subject.
Long form articles are not bad or unwanted; they bridge the space between a short summary and a book (along with essays, studies, etc). What is bad, though, is thinking everything should be reduced to a short two paragraph summary, or a 1min tiktok video, or a video. All mediums of communication have their uses and their niches, serving different needs.
I'd have to imagine that now-a-days these transformers are all or mostly fast grounding. If they weren't, I'd expect lightning storms to be a much bigger and more frequent issue.
Lighting rarely hits transformers directly nor does it commonly hit the carrier lines. Typically you see a wire along the top that's grounded that 'catches' the lighting at the highest point and sends it to ground. Also lightning is pretty easy to arrest over short burst because of it's large influx and short duration.
It's kind of like the difference between a single (smallish) wave caused by a boat and a tsunami. The boats wave can cause damage but it's typically very limited. Meanwhile the tsunami doesn't stop coming and becomes your environment. Fast grounding doesn't mean much when dumping to ground stops working because the ground gets so hot it's a resistor.
I feel like you're underestimating how old so much of our grid is. There are lines near my house (in a rural area) that are still just held up by warped bent poles with white ceramic insulators on them, a (hopefully) beefier version of what you'd see on an old electric fence before people started using plastic. Obviously old poles and cabling doesn't mean the transformers are outdated but I wouldn't be shocked.
Every single instance of "being prepared" has to go past an accountant who has to make the math, math for the next 90 days. The conversation will go something like this.
Engineer at electric company: "We'd like to get this project on the calendar for the quarter; should make the equipment more resilient against the risk of solar storms."
Accountant at electric company: "What are the odds this solar storm happens in the next quarter?"
Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1."
Accountant: "That's not enough certainty when compared to the necessity of profitability." scratches grid hardening off priority list
Now, "prepared" means "society not collapsing", and "profitability" means that a retired couple can buy a timeshare on a golf course in Florida where they can swing until the dementia sets in, but priorities are priorities.
The accountants are given the receipts after the engineers have already spent company money, and their job is to account for that spending.
The finance department are the people who decide whether the engineers get to spend the money. (They're also known as the FP&A team = financial planning and analysis.)
I thought the engineers turned in the receipts in hopes of being reimbursed for the critical purchase that the accountants then get to decide if it meets their definition of critical.
Don't blame the accountants for enforcing your company's expense policy. That's set by management.
If I had a dollar for every time a programmer claimed something was "critical" but was actually just an expense for something they were doing to pad their resume for their next job, I would be as rich as Warren Buffet.
Didn't we agree to stop using logic around here? This is a place for irrational berating of $evilTopic.
Edit to match parent's edit: I like how you turned it from a hardware engineering discussion with large and expensive equipment necessary to some flippant software comment. If I had a dollar for every time someone derails a conversation, I'd be Bezos rich
> Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1."
Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar storm; however, over a long enough timeframe, the probability of a solar storm causing damage to our equipment is close to 1."
Indeed. There was a strong push for funding for installing and mantaining fast ground fault interrupters after the EMP Commision in congress in 2001 (http://www.empcommission.org/) determined it was the best solution. And then again in 2008. But nothing actually happened besides words.
I'm not sure that we haven't already prepared for this. Lightning is a thing and fast grounding transformers are the solution to that.
As a kid, thunderstorms commonly knocked out the grid. Now as an adult I've rarely seen the power go out (It usually happens due to someone ramming a power line with their car).
Seemingly in these threads a lot of people don't understand solar storms at all.
When lighting hits you get a few microsecond burst of a whole lot of power that gets dumped to ground. Your grounding will get very hot from this, but typically you're not getting hit constantly all day in the same grounding location.
Now imagine this. You start getting excess power to the point it's starting to drive primary movers on the grid. You disconnect them because you don't want bad shit happening to your generators. But your grid is still generating power, in some places an awful lot of power that is acting more like DC rather than AC. So you're going to dump this to ground right? Have you ever welded? Because when you dump power to ground it's still power and it makes things hot. Unless you build in massive heatsinks you're going to have a problem.
Honest question, because I don't know: Are fast ground fault interrupters "cheap and easy"? I mean, sure, they're cheap and easy compared to replacing transformers. But they don't just grow on trees, either. What's the lead time on getting one?
This is what I dislike about the New Yorker. It's a literary circle jerk. I get that you want to show me what a great writer you are, but I don't really need to hear about growing up on Alcatraz at the start of the article about a solar storm. If I want to read something that's 10x as long as it needs to be to get the point across I'll just pick up another Gladwell book.
I really need an Abridged New Yorker feed. I love about 20-30% of their articles, by volume, but they're so, uh, "well written", that they're difficult to even scan for high-value information.
I find it interesting that last week, we had a nationwide AT&T outage and one of the causes speculated on local news outlets (within a couple hours) was a solar flare [1]. Now, less than a week later, we have articles in the New Yorker priming thoughts about solar storms.
Why is this relevant? Consider where that speculation started: local news networks [2].
It's worth reading Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars [3] if you haven't already to understand why it's worth me mentioning this. Easily dismissed as "conspiracy nonsense," but it's worth asking "why this, why now?"
I just read the pamphlet "Silent Weapons to Quiet Wars" that you suggested and would say it is not worth reading.
There is not much in it, besides a (presumably) faked origin and typesetting, a brief analogy to physics and electronics, hushed talk of banks and domination, and a lot of hand waving and winking at the reader
There's a lot more to it than that and I'd encourage people to form their own opinions. It maps fairly close to our current reality, even if that mapping is uncomfortable for some to read. Considering the publication date, you can use abductive logic to say "yep, all of this chaos was intentional."
I disagree. It gestures to a lot more (operational research, electronics, physics, etc), but just loosely points to them to make analogies. If you have no familiarity with those subjects, it is better to read about them elsewhere. If you are familar with them, then the analogies just seem shallow and don't provide to the pamphlet other than to fluff it up to make it seem more scientific than it is.
The rest of it refers to bankers (Rothchild!), domination and sub-nations. It also has a presumably fake origin story, and smacks of being a modern Elders of Zion like work.
I didn't know anything about this pamphlet other than what you posted before reading it (and I only read it because it has a provocative title), but I would suggest to anyone else not to waste their time- go read instructive books on operational research, cybernetics, etc, instead of this pretending to be a secret book from the 70's
Comments like yours are why I like HN. Reasonable discussion calling out BS and craziness with rebuttals grounded in fact, kept on topic, with minimal/no emotional flair.
That’s because it is conspiracy nonsense. It’s totally bonkers if you read it with an actual open mind… as opposed to a mind already seeking to reinforce notions about some NWO and that most others are simply cattle with their brains tuned off.
TBH, Reddit is a better place for fancy math and circuit diagrams to be taken at face value to help perpetuate conspiratorial systems thinking.
I read much of it as well, and agree with the conspiracy nonsense evaluation. Many references to supposed secret meetings held between international/university/etc. elites in one year or another with no specifics or evidence whatsoever. It's literally conspiracy nonsense.
Pick me! I think it would upset people, at least until after dinner has passed. After that, and once people have figured out who has a functional ice maker and whos cars still run, I think its back to the grind.
