I wonder if there's a Paleo-proxy or some kind of natural record that could be used to trace the frequency and magnitude of these events throughout Earth's geological past and if anyone is looking into it? For example we can look at the ocean sediments (usually by measuring changes in isotopic ratio of different compounds) and infer a great deal on temperature, carbon cycling, polar reversal, ocean circulation, chemistry etc. going back millions of years. It would be really neat and helpful if we discovered a proxy that we could use to trace solar flares hitting earth.
This reminds me of the warnings about a coronavirus pandemic from over 10 years ago.
We know from geological records that these are periodic events that happened every so often. We are due for one, and it is in our best interest to take the periodicity of nature seriously.
Yeah can you imagine if it affected young people in the way Spanish flu did? I honestly think we’d be lucky if our civilization didn’t collapse in the face of something like that, given how this version went down.
I'm not a virusologist, but I read that Spansh flu would be beaten pretty quickly with modern knowledge and procedures. COVID's advantage is that it's not that lethal and often asymptomatic.
The current weakening of Earth's Geomagnetic field (Geomagnetic Excursion) would leave Earth relatively unprotected from a CME as well. Weakened Geomagnetic Fields seem to be correlated to mass extinction/evolution events.
The strength of Earth's magnetic field in the past, recorded by rocks and sediments, provides a proxy for past flux of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) to Earth's surface due to the role of the field in modulating stratigraphic ozone. About 40,000 years ago, mammalian fossils in Australia and Eurasia record an important die‐off of large mammals that included Neanderthals in Europe. In the Americas and Europe, a large mammalian die‐off appears to have occurred ~13,000 years ago. Both die‐offs can be linked to minima in Earth's magnetic field strength implying that UVR flux variations to Earth's surface influenced mammalian evolution. For the last ~200,000 years, estimates of the timing of branching episodes in the human evolutionary tree, from modern and fossil DNA and Y chromosomes, can be linked to minima in field strength, which implies a long‐term role for UVR in human evolution. New fossil finds, improved fossil dating, knowledge of the past strength of Earth's magnetic field, and refinements in the human evolutionary tree, are sharpening the focus on a possible link between UVR arriving at the Earth's surface, magnetic field strength, and events in mammalian evolution.
I am not an astrophysicist, but I don't see any reason to doubt the study's conclusions. But isn't the more pressing question the probability of such a CME hitting the Earth? The sun is not small, and CMEs could be ejected away from it in any direction, I would think relatively few of them hit any of the planets?
Kurzgesagt has a nice and objective summary on the topic. If I remember correctly, 50% chance of a big one hitting us over the next 50 years (or by 2050, can't remember exactly):
https://youtu.be/oHHSSJDJ4oo
>Auroras were seen around the world, those in the northern hemisphere as far south as the Caribbean; those over the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. were so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.[8] People in the northeastern United States could read a newspaper by the aurora's light.[15] The aurora was visible from the poles to low latitude areas such as south-central Mexico,[16][17] Queensland, Cuba, Hawaii,[18] southern Japan and China,[19] and even at lower latitudes very close to the equator, such as in Colombia.
I believe it is the fact that the solar system was once a spinning ball of gas and dust, and the spinning motion caused the cloud to flatten out into the protoplanetary disk. Like flattening a ball of pizza dough by spinning it in the air.
When the solar system formed, the gas cloud collapsed along the shortest axis first into a spinning disc and then formed the planets and sun. This naturally aligns the largest bodies in most systems along the astral axis.
The timing of the Carrington Event was strangely fortuitous - only when a few telegraph lines had been installed. So the cost of the adverse event was relatively minor. Good thing the aliens controlling our simulation tested us early.
Early enough that only a few telegraph lines were affected, but late enough that there were some and we noticed that it was more than some unusually bright auroras.
It can be avoided if we will start to protect our electronics and networks right now. At least most critical ones. The protection technology is available already, just need to be integrated everywhere.
I'd rather have fibre on the ground for a lot of reasons, but if enough people moved to LEO orbit sats, and then huge numbers of them get affected by reduced magnetosphere protection, the compounding problems here are huge.
It would be interesting to model the way different societies would deal with such an event. Some presumably would have a run on toilet paper and other essentials. Other societies might ration resources on a need basis.
This is a preppers fantasy, not reality. Engines and generators would not suddenly stop working. Any electronics inside even a lightly shielded building (or even just a grounded metal case) would survive. It would suck for a short time - but only a short time.
Isn’t the big concern around transformers? Every time this topic (or EMPs) comes up, the concern is raised that there are effectively no spare transformers (relative on a global scale) available and that building new ones takes years.
It's certainly a significant problem, and one that would cause some intense short-term pain, AND one that we should just bite the trivial cost and make a spare set somewhere for, but......
It would take years in normal times. In a crisis like this, you'd see resources allocated to transformers on the scale of (perhaps greater than) that allocated to COVID-19 vaccines and PPE, and that time scale would almost certainly be dramatically reduced.
I have wondered about this. From my understanding the reason main power lines etc are affected is that the long cables turn into an antenna of sorts which allows induction to occur from the CMe. So things like small electronics etc shouldn't be affected.
However, that's where I wonder about the "shouldn't" part. Wouldn't a large CME like this cause excessive power surges, which modern electronics don't respond well to? i.e. nearby lightning strikes can kill a computer or microwave even if you've got a circuit breaker, so wouldn't the grid suddenly having a massive surge go through it still be a cause for concern? Or are we talking voltage/amp levels below that of a lightning strike?
You need a better ground and surge protector if nearby lightening strikes are frying your electronics. I would assume an EMP/CME event would also be covered so long as it doesn’t surpass the rating of your protector (assuming whole house suppressor or battery backup, your wimpy surge protector strip probably won’t survive)
How about the effect on all the satellites? I think th Carrington event size one would be catastrophic in the modern day. Imagine large urban areas going losing power for days or weeks. No electricity and no running water. Pretty scary stuff.
The loss of satellites does not imply power outages and it especially does not imply no running water.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be disruptive, but people seem to have a fetish for disaster. Society is resilient, and life would return to near-normal within weeks, if not days, I predict.
I never implied that the loss of satellite = loss of power and water. I'm just saying that even a smaller solar flare (Compared to the Carrington event) cause large disturbances. Look at the 1989 that left Quebec and millions without power for 9 hours. Now imagine an entire country/continent losing power almost simultaneously.
If the grid goes down nationwide for any length of time it's worse than any event in the last two hundred years. Spent nuclear fuel pool failure is one thing to consider.
Not directly, no. But the water plants do require electricity to pump/filter/sanitize water to fill their reservoirs. A prolonged outage will cause the clean-water reservoirs to drain empty.
Toilet paper hoarding in these scenarios is always funny. Look, you're not going to be flushing precious water down the toilet (if sewage even works), you will be shitting in a hole somewhere outside. In which case any paper, rags or big leaves will do just fine :D
Didn't Apple make it completely obvious that people will do everything for only a tiny bit more convenience? Anyone owning toilet paper in an apocalyptic world will be king!
I think major cities would fall apart but I can speak from experience that the where I grew up in the deep south would fare just fine. Still lots of old world knowledge left to keep local farms and towns running. Of course it would be the stone age but a lot of people live for it there.
Models of major disruptions from other countries don't support this. In general, urban areas do quite well because neighbors and communities look after each other, whereas as isolated communities fall over as soon as they run out of something.
Distribution is also easier in the cities due to population density.
In general there's a fiction pushed by people who live in lower density areas that somehow they're tougher or more caring or something - that for some reason everyone in cities is just waiting for a moment to suddenly slaughter each other. It doesn't happen.
I too would be interested to view these models. Coming from a rural background, people in my hometown still have gardens and hunt/fish. We're one, maybe two, generations removed from people producing most of their own food. I don't see how cities deal when they can't refrigerate food and the supply chain is interrupted.
> I don't see how cities deal when they can't refrigerate food and the supply chain is interrupted.
A large majority of people, including all but the youngest children in the developed world are healthy enough to survive just fine on zero calories for a week as long as they have clean water. You wouldn’t have zero calories and that’s probably enough time to start milling animal feed corn and processing other animal feed into something edible by humans. The developed world is well capable of feeding itself even in very bad situations. This is a coordination problem and in catastrophes people do not turn into locusts. They pull together. See WW2 in all combatant nations. I’d expect high mortality among the very young, very old and very sick and well over 90% survival rates four most of the developed world besides those groups.
Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. I don't see how it can fall apart of it's mostly self sustaining. There are still loads of people in my hometown that don't have power. What are they gonna lose if society falls apart? lol
Lots of the local trucks run on vegetable oil so they don't even need a working supply chain for diesel. It'll be an inconvenience but it's no death.
On top of that, a huge amount hunt and fish like you said and have hundreds of pounds of meat for a year or two with only 2-4 deer which breed like locusts.
For sure, a lot of rural people are much closer to and have actual living practical knowledge of farming and hunting. However, I wonder if there are really enough resources to support them. Two concerns, short term and long term.
Short term, depending on the season, it could be over a year before sustainable crops can be grown to eat. Best case, it happens in early spring, and everyone can go immediately till and plant as many acres as possible, presuming they have the seeds. And the stored fuel and sufficient labor to prepare the extra ground, fell trees and turn them to fields, etc. Even then, what is the fastest-maturing crop, 10 weeks? A long few months to live on the scraps in your no-longer-working refrigerator. And if it happens too late in the growing season? yikes, but less bad for those in more temperate climates.
Hunting? If everyone even in small towns started hunting for food, including out of season, most food species would be hunted to local extinction in short order.
Longer term, is there really enough to sustain more than a small population? I recall one rule of thumb of 20+ acres/household just to have wood to heat with (an acre/year, 20 years to regrow). With little tech, we'd pretty quickly be back to 98% of the population doing primarily farming activities.
Cities? Sure, everyone would help each other, but what other things stop working when there is no electricity? Water, refrigeration, fuel pumps, heating systems. The populations of cities are so dependent on just-in-time or constant supplies, I have a hard time seeing how they survive in any numbers unless massive aid can be immediately mobilized and sustained, which would be very tough if all the cities are out of power at once...
Well if us city dwellers will turn into savages due to lack of any food, the first thing we will turn into is go out to those nice farming communities for food. Obviously if your nearest big town is 500-1000km away then you're OK for some time. Maybe.
That seems like the commonly held belief, but is it really the case?
1st world countries are well stocked, have know-how, have a lot of people (and a lot of educated people).
I'm inclined to believe they'd recover faster and with better results (i.e. no anarchy, no descent into dictatorship, good QoL) than third world countries. Worst case, they'll be invading poorer countries, sadly.
I’d expect pretty much exactly the opposite. The first world is rich, developed and full of knowledgeable people and more competent governments. There’s so much more capital to cannibalize to get something working. Anywhere dependent on international trade or aid to feed its people would be fucked by even a two month hiatus in international trade. Starvation and war within two weeks and peacekeepers are busy at home dealing with their own countries’ disasters. Most of Africa is not self-sufficient in food.
You're saying that in the event of a worldwide, extended loss of power and communications, the currency you'll use will be the one that only exists, in any useful form, on a worldwide communications network, using loads of power? What am I missing?
a) an immediate steep drop in difficult will allow the network to resolve transactions without loads of power, and the few nodes online will still comprise the network. some networks have much longer difficulty adjustment periods and they will be debilitated for months as blocks will not come, other networks have much shorter adjustment periods and will generate new blocks in minutes
b) that transactions can be signed offline and broadcast eventually, far far in the future.
c) alternatively, in a temporarily trusted environment, physical notes with private keys can be handed to someone else in exchange for goods and services. anybody can check the current balance with their own copy of the chain state without the internet, the date/block height of the physical notes balance should be stated alongside the note and anybody with a chain after that block height can verify it. if a provider really wants the latest copy of the chain to accept these notes, order it on a physical disk shipped to you and verify the checksum with multiple sources.
d) this means the user can exchange for goods and services without the internet, and the people that are still connected to other nodes such as a radio tower or internet cafe can act as tellers at banks and broadcast transactions periodically for people.
No power, societal fabric is breaking down, credit cards don't work.
Assumption: people will accept crypto at any value.
Reality: people will barter for tangible items and use force to maintain their desired order. If I'm auctioning a spare 10kw generator the guy offering a 5.56 rifle and 100 rounds has infinitely more value than 100k bitcoins (~$5,000,000,000.00)
Maybe this fantasy can play out if the person you're bartering with knows a lot about bitcoin, knows that the disaster is localized, and knows that they can escape and survive the disaster zone without the tangible alternatives. That's a lot of assumptions. You're better off hoarding 9mm bullets, water purification tabs, generators, trucks without electronics and their repair parts, solar panels, deep cycle batteries, gasoline/diesel, bullet proof vests, and MREs. But at that point any substantial tradeable stock pile is going to cost as much or more than a well designed bunker stocked to run and survive independently for >10yrs. You won't make any money during the disaster, and you must survive it to have the opportunity to be robbed before you can start to realize gains during the aftermath/rebuild period.
Right I think that will happen as well, I am interested in better price discovery instead of arbitrary barter.
I will support the cause to build the infrastructure for better price discovery. Transactions can be broadcast to the chain which is supported by an asset with many assurances and confidence about its supply.
I don't actually care about the cryptocurrency being a reserve currency or any ideology fantasizing that, I care about its network being an option to support better price discovery in barter.
I legitimately do not understand what you're getting at.
Society collapses, and you believe people will use cryptocurrency for barter instead of tangibles like water, food, ammunition and/or weapons because people will want to optimize the prices? What are you saying?
that they'll use it for easier reference value and an option, yes
if its easier for you, just imagine that its for the monocle wearing investment bankers that still want to offer intangible services and settlement over a network
The network would either fragment or die. Depending on how many local/regional networks still exist or are brought up, there would be too many forks to count and then any spends are impossible to really rely on, or just no stable forks at all.
You can sign things offline, sure, but you can't really verify them. I could spend the same coins a thousand times if the people accepting them can't reliably check for verifications using the same consistent chain.
I don't even understand how the scheme in "c" would work to be honest, and I have a decent background in crypto and cryptocoins. How many people are going to be able to make that work?
I just can't see any of that happening. I'd expect a combination of a barter economy, some precious metals and whatever physical currency is around.
This makes me think about Taleb's fragile vs robust vs antifragile systems with relation to the power grid.
Is a nation-sized power grid even a good idea anymore? If most places were powered by a local cooperative solar + wind + storage system, it would be less efficient, but wouldn't it also be a lot more robust against a CME, and also everything else? Individual systems would go down all the time, but overall the system as a whole would never be able to be taken down by pretty much anything.
Just here to point out this idea (no spoilers) is a major plot point in the Oppenheimer Alternative, the newest book by famed science fiction author Robert Sawyer. A good read.
Given all the ICS security threats of late I wonder has any government gamed out how to take advantage of an impending CME. For example preventing a shutdown of critical CME vulnerable equipment to cause maximum damage. Given the CME is the thing doing the damage it would be a hard one politically to push back on if tracks were covered by the actor.
I understand that cryptocurrencies are tied to technology and the sketchy nature of the DOGE hype, but how is this potential event the main reason you haven't bought DOGE?
Depending solely on electricity is a bad idea. In a past weather event that lead to a power loss for nearly two weeks, everyone I knew was thankful to have piped natural gas. I am not sure I trust electric cars and fully electric homes to be sufficiently redundant.
This kills all the satellites in our orbit as well? Satellites are already vulnerable to solar events and magnetic anomalies like SAA.
In additional to everything on Earth being wiped out would this would create a mini Kessler Syndrome since all satellites are now space junk which we will never be able to communicate with again?
The more we depend on automation, the more vulnerable we are to power failure.
Consider grocery shopping: what fraction of sales are online? What fraction in-store are card-based? Do the tills work offline, and if not, how fast can the cashiers work by hand? Does the store request resupply either automatically or via a manager looking at a spreadsheet, and if so, can the manager manage that without computer assistance? Do the freezers and refrigerators still work? Do the gas pumps used by the delivery trucks? Can current distribution warehouses function if there is no electric lighting? What are the power requirements of modern factories that turn ingredients into food products?
These questions probably have multiple answers, one for each different business, but the chain breaks on the weakest link.
I may have misunderstood how CMEs damage things, but I think the problem is the grid rather than the electricity? And even then, it could be designed around, but that’s expensive?
In any event, it is the kind of scale that only governments (and possibly Foxconn, Apple, Amazon, and Google) can really engage with.
What's the plan B for that? These are foundational capabilities of 'civilization'. We can protect them, and take actions to be able to quickly restore, but 'plan B' isn't really in the cards.
In the U.S., there was a study, with results published by the EMP Commission, indicating that as many as 90% of people could die within a year as a result of a pulse event hitting the electrical grid.[0]
I don't know if the same extends to other places, but once distribution and sanitation systems break down, which are heavily dependent on electricity, it'll become pretty clear very quickly just how ill-equipped we are for a world without reliable electricity.
We have not experienced a large solar storm since the Carrington Event, before the electric grid. There have been larger solar storms than the Carrington Event in the past. Note that there are other factors such as being in the direct path of the blast, the Phi angle, the Geomagnetic field strength, etc.
I don't see how you can say with confidence "That doesn't happen with a solar storm". We have only had the electric grid for a short period of time & have not been keeping detailed records for very long either.
The supply chain contains about 3 days worth of food. Without power there is no 1) gas for trucks 2)food in stores 3) food being produced 4) water to homes 5)lifesaving medical devices
Many people depend on medical devices that will no longer work. All those people would die immediately.
Many people depend on lifesaving drugs. They will die in the short term (e.g. insulin).
Within a few months People will die from untreated water and starvation.
I doubt 90% of the population will die. You can look at the siege of leningrad and see that people survived years of a siege and I think 25% died.
People will find a way to survive even if it means eating bugs.
The nightmare scenario is a follows; You get a really large solar storm and no one notices it, so all of the high voltage grid transformers are connected to the grid.
The currents induced by the grid burn out these transformers and
they have to be replaced before power can flow again. But these are very large, long lead time items that we don’t leave just laying around. And now you need hundreds of them, but the supply chain to build them has collapsed.
Thankfully, most of these transformers are connected to grids that automatically detect the high DC currents and shut down. And this assumes everyone missed the massive impending space weather event and grid operators forgot to shut them down.
I would like to submit Texas' recent near grid collapse due to cold weather as exhibit A to prove that knowing about a potential problem for over a decade does not mean that a bunch of disparate private entities will do their due diligence to prevent disaster.
You don't have to take it from me, you can hear it from ERCOT via many sources.
Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
There is a pretty simple test: attempt to go a week not using any tool, service, or person that relies on electricity or telecommunications even in the slightest little bit and see how you fare.
The doomsday people like to say we are 72 hours away from anarchy, and, if true, it will be the fallout from people instantaneously competing for very scarce resources that will be the real problem.
Your phone will be wiped out. For A LOT of people that is the END.
It'd probably be something like loosing 10 years of world GDP all at once. Probably pretty good for the environment if we used the opportunity to build back greener.
I think the often cited problem is that if a national electricity grid goes down, its a very long and complex job to get them back up again, especially if transformers are damaged.
If there's no damage, it doesn't take that long. We had a blackout in 2009 in which the national grid of two countries (Itaipu is shared between Brazil and Paraguay) went down; I'm looking at the official report right now, and it took less than half a day to restore nearly all of the system for this country. Of course, if there's damage beyond the redundancies, it can take much longer; see for instance the recent blackout in the Amapá state, in which two transformers at a key substation were damaged by fire (and the third was under maintenance).
Wouldn't this involve losing all communication grids and access to bank accounts? That'd be pretty disruptive.
I suppose the immediate challenge would be how to organise food 7 days out if we got hit by something like that. Assuming people put in a desperate effort and sort that out somehow, then the medium term problem would be something like a long period where effective communication is gone and any JIT systems fall apart. COVID shortages times 100 possibly.
It would also disrupt food, drinking water and sweage. And all transportation, so even fuel would not be available. Without clean water and sanitation at home cities would be death traps.
People living on an area with rivers and wild animals could do a bit better. Unless they are at reach of people walking out of the cities.
Think about a zombie apocalypse, but with starving people by the hundreds of thousands. Starving and, if in the US, armed.
Keeping food and water at home for at least for a couple of months is a very sensitive thing to do for this kind of events. Think about a new pandemic but this time the virus has 10% or 20% of mortality. Exactly.
I would say that's what the State the ultimate community) is for (police, army but also judges, doctors, laws requiring companies to implement the required safewards, ...), but I'm European, so I guess we simply see the world in very different ways.
It's much worse than normal grid failure because the grid goes down, the dominant means of communication go down, and the means of transport go down. Can't communicate and can't get anywhere even if you wanted to.
Also anyone reliant on perishable medicines or regular treatments that would be threatened by utility outages - some medicines need to be refrigerated, for example, so after a week or so without power all of that stuff is probably a goner.
How about creating a mass-ejection-storm-powered sunwards satellite, that creates a magnetic field and allows earth to orbit in its "calmer" cone-wake? It would be basically just "dead" components + coolant at point of event, held in place till then by a steering module.
I don't subscribe to the incident statistics on this anymore.
We had similar incident statistics pre-chernobyl, pre-fukushima and they are not mereley useless, they are actually harmful and dangerous.
They prevent discussion, calm down politicans and public, fuel a short-sighted prevent-cost-at-allcost-preventionism that sabotages any disaster awareness and preparedness.
I think there is a context to Chernobyl or Fukushima - they were industrial accidents, and there is a very long history of industrial accidents, many of which were far more deadly.
Obviously, in both the USSR and Japan, there were/are problems with regulatory capture, and in the USSR, safety culture. I think people overfocus on the dramatic explosion and underfocus on the legion of maimed, poisoned, and permanently disabled people that suffer from industrial accidents every day. It's both unjust and ineffective - you can't make a dangerous industrial process safe in a society where civil servants see their job as to promote the interests of big industrial concerns, and that's at the root of both Fukishima and Minamata disease.
As long as you have a surge protector you'd probably be fine. Most of the damage on earth would be to the power grid itself, especially really long cables
