MIGHTY SOLAR FLARES fail to DESTROY CIVILISATION. Yes! Humanity has once again dodged apocalypse after a solar flare failed to bring civilisation to its knees. NASA gives particularly huge flares the rating of X-Class, with an X2 being twice as powerful as X1 and an X3 twice as intense as X2 again. The latest one was a whopping X2.2 and erupted into space on June 10. NASA …
Not just the Internet. A fair lot of power generation will be down due to failed electronics, including the inverter for your rooftop solar panels (and quite likely the panels themselves will be fried too, given a serious enough belch). Telephony will go titsup, and transport and logistics with it. Traffic control, including trains. Vehicles themselves, unless they're sufficiently vintage that they don't rely on electronics.
In other words: a Whole Fucking Lot more than "just internet".
My understanding is that it's only long (50km+) wires that are seriously vulnerable. Your rooftop solar panels are OK, and your inverter isn't directly vulnerable. I think you may be confusing a solar storm with an atomic-weapon-induced EMP.
What happens ina solar storm is that a large DC current is induced in long wires. Conventional 50Hz or 60Hz AC mains transformers can't transform that DC current, instead they dissipate it resistively, meaning they heat up. If the circuit is not made open-circuit pretty soon, the transformers then melt down and catch fire. HVDC transmission is immune - the solar storm either adds a bit more DC juice or subtracts a bit. Short urban-grid-scale wires do suffer induced curents, but less so proportional to their shorter length. The risk to them is a disorderly shut-down or melt-down of the long-distance grid, causing voltage surges, local overload conditions, etc.
Telecomms is similar, except that it's rarely copper and even more rarely DC coupled these days. Most of the long-distance internet is optical fiber. Long-distance copper is probably found only in very rural parts, connecting one farmouse or hamlet to the nearest town's telephone exchange many miles down the road in the old-fashioned way.
Telecomms is similar, except that it's rarely copper and even more rarely DC coupled these days. Most of the long-distance internet is optical fiber. Long-distance copper is probably found only in very rural parts, connecting one farmouse or hamlet to the nearest town's telephone exchange many miles down the road in the old-fashioned way.
I think you'll find there are huge swaths of the US where the telecoms have not yet made the investment to update their antiquated copper lines. By strictest definition these areas are rural, but not 'very' rural. My part of the country is a good example, with only 4 towns in this half of the state with populations over 10,000 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of small farming towns dotted all throughout the region, most of which still communicate with the outside world via copper.
Besides all the equipment would be fried by the rampant power surges, so the data lines would be irrelevant. Plus transformers catching fire tend to do bad things to nearby above ground fiber optics.
I watched a documentary (sorry no sources) that claimed that the UK power grid was actually pretty resilient to CMEs because at any given time, a significant proportion of the network is not in use. In the event of a CME, the procedure is to connect all the dormant bits of the network rather than taking things offline, as it spreads the impact of the induced currents.
This article also suggests the UK Grid would not be badly affected.
in the 90's Hydro Quebec which has particularly long lines lost the network for a period exactly because of the particularly long lengths of cable going from James Bay to Montreal. That has been fixed they are now able to handle the situation without the extensive downtime and cost . I thought it worthy to let know that this is a phenomena that we dealt with a long time ago and that power companies should have all corrected by now.
"Telecomms is similar, except that it's rarely copper and even more rarely DC coupled these days. Most of the long-distance internet is optical fiber."
True. Sometimes there may be a locator/tracer wire in the duct to aid location which could be vulnerable to induction currents. If the cable's direct buried, there may be risks from currents in armour wire or possibly DC power in the cable. That's less common in Europe given it's usually a lot easier/cheaper to route via habitation and power amp/regen kit from utility power. Locator wires aren't always used though on 'cost saving grounds', but where they are, spans can be 40-80km long for the fibre sections but wires usually shorter to prevent high induction currents.
Do some research, this was an X2.2, the largest measured flare from a satellite was an X28 that is nearly 2 to the power 26 times bigger (about a factor of 67 million), so unsurprisingly civilisation still stands after an X2.2
The largest event we know about was the Carrington Event which is thought to be about an X40, so 2 to the power 12 or about 4000 times more powerful than the largest flare measured so far... If one of those hits and nothing much happens then this article would probably stand.
It's probably fair to say that if we'd been hit by a Carrington event in the 1920s through 1990s, our civilisation would have crashed.
Two things have changed / are changing. Firstly, the danger is recognised, and we now have satellites watching the sun that would give us a few hours' warning. That's long enough to prepare the grid. Controlled shutdown instead of fatal melt-down. Of course, whether they do enough "solar safety" drills to actually avoid getting the electricity grid fried, is an unknown until it happens.
Secondly, we are moving from a synchronous transformer-coupled HVAC grid (vulnerable) to HVDC long-distance electricity transmission (more efficient and not vulnerable). Likewise telecomms are moving from copper wires (vulnerable) to optical fibres (not vulnerable).
If we don't get hit by another X-unprecedented flare in the next couple of decades, we're probably OK. Except, we don't know what is the biggest flare our nearest star is capable of! The upper limit is only that it was never powerful enough to wipe out all land-based life (and there have been a few extinction events when something wiped out *most* land-based life ...).
Whether the X scale is exponential or linear seems to be a hot topic of discussion here. But the focus should be on what, if anything, can be done to ensure that civilization survives an X40 solar flare.
Given that the primary danger appears to be the currents induced in long wires, it sounds as though the first step would be to properly isolate all the very long wires that are part of the power grid.
That might be very difficult to achieve. And having vacuum tube (thermionic valve) based backup systems for important electronic services would be a proposal sure to invite derision.
How many IBM 704 computers would it take to substitute for one smartphone? But that isn't the question; instead the idea is to have some very limited computing capacity for important services that can't be handled by pencil and paper. So the most critical government offices would save their most vital data on the equivalent of an IBM 355 disk drive usable by the equivalent of an IBM 650 in the event of disaster.
And companies like Intel and TSMC would need to have contingency plans too for rebuilding civilization and selling people computers all over again. Just keeping a few old computers wrapped in tinfoil might be better than trying to keep museum pieces in operation...
Given, how many meters of wiring could be found in a IBM 650 or other contemporary computers, they might be more susceptible to solar flares than modern machines. That said, it would be interesting to see, what happens if all flash memory on earth is wiped out at the same moment. (From a purely academic point of view, of course).
Is anyone still using PROMS these days? Hmm, my old C64 might still work. Perhaps it will be the supercomputer of the future...
I don't buy the hysteria. It's from IT illiterate users who are fantasising about all IT vanishing. That won't happen. Cable that burned through in 1859 was of similar thickness (AFAIK) as 1 pair cat5. Burning out a pair of cat5 with overvoltage is easy. Burning out an inch thick power cable is not.
About the worst that would happen is that the main power generation networks are going to disconnect their transformers and we'll have a couple day long power cut.
According to a NASA web site, the different letters that classify solar flares, A, B, C, M, and X, follow an exponential scale, with each letter being 10 times as intense as the one before. Within each letter, there are numbers that go from 1 to 9.
If each number was 2x as intense than the one before, then the difference between letters should be a factor of 1024, not a factor of 10. So, although I thought that 2x was more likely to be true, it seems the people saying the scale is instead merely linear are more likely to be right.
Add digital media ie flash chips to the list of stuff that can be fried by a Carrington level event.
The feature sizes on a modern flash chip are small enough that as little as a 60V/m EMP caused by say a big transformer blowing up can cook devices up to 500 feet away in every direction and further if the EMP is transmitted along interconnected cables.
Original poster was right, solar cells are indeed vulnerable as the induced currents on a large array can exceed the reverse voltage limits of the cells and fry them into pieces of expensive junk.
Once damaged in this way the cell acts like a short which quickly cascades to the neighboring cells until the whole array is cooked.
Newer panels have bypass diodes but if the hypothetical X-44 event happens on a hot sunny day then the panels won't be working until every one of the cooked diodes (assuming the panels aren't damaged feeding power into a dead short) is replaced by hand.
This is actually a bigger issue than Joe Average thinks, the folks with solar arrays could be looking at a potential fire on their roof or wherever the array is located due to short circuits in the grid tied inverter causing superheated cables and bypass diodes.
Ah, sounds like the recent ridiculously over-dramatic documentary about "Sun Storms" which I watched a little while ago with lots of doom-mongering predictions about how society could be destroyed by one of these events because we don't have a disaster plan to deal with it.
We also don't have a disaster plan for another Tunguska style event or a massive volcanic eruption causing a year without a summer etc, but it doesn't mean the sky is falling...
...just wait until the next terrestrial magnetic pole shift occurs and the earth's poles are pointed right at the sun instead of parallel to the sun's magnetic poles. Then the earth's magnetic field will be sucking all that radiation right down to the surface. That's what happened before and that's why we're the descedants of cavemen. Only the one's who lived in caves survived.
Cool graphic: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/wsa-enlil/
I spotted one of the two through my solar scope, and caught the aftermath of one on camera (it is the bright spot on the left on the linked image). The active region shown here has produced quite a bit of fireworks, lately.
As can clearly be seen, these were not pointing anywhere nearly in our direction (even accounting for the rotation of the sun. Even an X20+ would be highly unlikely to harm us in that case. The headline is therefore the equivalent of "Bullet aimed elsewhere fails to kill man"
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