What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?

http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-storm-hit-the-eart-1724650105

by tomohawk • 11 years ago

84 30 11 years ago

Avalaxy2• 11 years ago

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?

DarkTree• 11 years ago

I mean we barely try to combat climate change, which is actually happening in front of our faces. To expect the government to direct knowledge or funds towards something that may happen just seems... extremely unlikely at best. And honestly, I don't disagree. I think we have a lot of problems that are present that we need to take care of. If these aren't mutually exclusive then we should definitely be trying to take all of it serious, but if they are, well then we should focus on the problems that are happening now. But I guess it's all relative.. does a dirt-poor person care about a something that could cause world-hunger in 30 years? I'd guess they are more worried about feeding themselves now. Is an ultra-wealthy mogul worried? Who knows, but I would assume they have less life-or-death problems occupying their thinking space, that maybe they are considering what may wipe out humanity in 100 years.

1stop• 11 years ago

I don't really know the physics of this, but it seems CMEs only really effect power supply, not electronics in general. So we are taking massive damage to power infrastructure, but that can be repaired, and there are already mitigation plans in place.

I'm probably missing something?

jjoonathan3• 11 years ago

No, I think Avalaxy is confusing CMEs and EMPs (he's concerned about tractors, trucks, sundry battery-powered computers, and hugely inductive industrial machinery) and he's extrapolating wildly from his own inability to think outside the box (e.g. how checks / offline card processing work, how computer experts might be useful in a world where a good chunk of computing infrastructure suddenly gets fried, etc).

A big CME could be hella destructive and having a backup stash of supplies is a fine idea. That $2T damage estimate doesn't sound crazy if we assume that the heads-up from astronomers gets ignored and real-time distribution management isn't capable of shutting things down in time (both possible AFAIK). But even in that scenario...

western society will probably collapse

No.

SoftwareMaven• 11 years ago

This is not just an issue with regard to CMEs. An electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon could do catastrophic damage. One Second After[1] was written in an attempt to help bring attention to the devastation that a single, well-placed nuke could do off the coast of the US.

I think people don't take is seriously, like many things in our society, because when you look at it closely, you begin to realize our entire society is a house of cards. There are so many places that are vulnerable that even thinking about it becomes overwhelming.

1. http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/...

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Well, we'll have months to prepare, and at worst case, all we need to do is to cut our power supply for a couple of days.

Yes, we need watch systems. Luckily we do have them, and they are getting even more precise with time. We got very luck that it didn't strike us sooner.

Also, yes, the entire planet disconnecting for a few days is indeed a tragedy. But not at the dimension you (and the article) are describing.

jjoonathan3• 11 years ago

Yes, we need watch systems. Luckily we do have them.

For those who haven't seen, distribution management is actually pretty cool. Balancing power on the grid is a real-time task and it's not as trivial as you might think. There are three phases of AC, different voltages, and different frequencies (think slightly-different so that they drift with respect to each other...). Generators are potentially out of phase with respect to each other and ramping up/down throughout the day. Loads ramp up/down too, noticeably shift in response to things like TV programs coming on, and change their inductive/resistive profile. This is all managed in super-nifty control centers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX0G9F42puY

These guys already take TV shows and wind forecasts into account during grid planning but a CME is going to throw them for a loop? Doesn't seem likely.

pyre2• 11 years ago

Also, yes, the entire planet disconnecting for a few days is indeed a tragedy. But not at the dimension you (and the article) are describing.

Disconnecting for a few days is different from "our major electrical infrastructure will take months to repair."

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

7952• 11 years ago

A lot of basic infrastructure (such as water) will have diesel generators that would hopefully keep things going. Presumably food production (such as freezers, fridges, baking) could have generators brought in. At that point the key factor in survival is making sure the refineries are kept on-line and are protected against solar storms.

tajen• 11 years ago

The article is unspecific about the short-term vs long-term effects.

Assuming a perfect world where there's a 12hrs notice and everyone is informed, we unplug all devices and shut down the power grid. We plug them back a day later, whenever we notice the ground current isn't steong anymore. Would we still have a lot of damage?

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

I'm not sure that you can shut down the power grid at 12hrs notice. From what I read, the closer the equipment is to the actual power generation, the less likely it is to be able to shut down like this and survive the process. So the end result would be that everyone's fridge still works, but the city can't get its electricity anyway.

ekianjo• 11 years ago

Fixing all of that would probably take years, and in the mean time we would see looting, famine (and huge starvation), violence, etc.

Things get fixed much faster than you think. The tramway in Hiroshima was running again within a week after the bomb destroyed the whole center, for example. Scientists said that trees would not grow there in 100 years, yet the city ended up looking like a normal city within 30 years after the bomb.

So, "society collapse", meh.

backtoyoujim• 11 years ago

It doesn't take that long for people to become frustrated at a lack of services they depend day to day on thoughtlessly. Also energy delivery systems that traverse state lines are not a city tramway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977

pixl97• 11 years ago

Things get fixed much faster than you think.

Because things were working other places.

Example 1: your town catches on fire and every building burns. Everybody leaves your town, or people from other towns bring you supplies.

Example 2: Every town catches on fire and every building burns. There is no where to go. People from other towns are in the same situation.

You run into the bootstrap problem. Everybody needs the resources to get going again, but there will not be enough resources to get everybody going at once. If you don't get the resources to get going quickly you might die of starvation or exposure, so you're willing to fight for them. Who gets the resources?

cbr• 11 years ago

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...

bedhead• 11 years ago

I wish no one would link to anything from Gawker

sunnid• 11 years ago

It's because Reddit is leaking.

Callmenorm• 11 years ago

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

jcfrei• 11 years ago

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).

tempestn• 11 years ago

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.)

What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?

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