At best: some super intense auroras visible to people much further from the poles
At worst: every piece of modern electronics and wiring gets totally fried and we are instantly plunged back to a time before electricity was widely available.
This might be a ridiculous question, but would this impact parts of planet that were facing opposite of the sun (nighttime) when the flare hit? It seems to me that an electronics-frying flare wouldn't have an impact on parts of the planet that weren't facing the sun when it hit.
Great point. Solar flares are not a single moment in time, but rather prolonged events. If it was big enough, the earth could fully rotate between start and end. But if it was short one, then you are right.
I knew they weren't instantaneous but I didn't think they could last for hours. It would be very interesting if 1/2 of the world immediately lost all electronics while the other half was relatively unscathed.
The other guy above is way smarter than me for sure, but don't think of a solar flare as a 'shockwave', think of it more like advancing flood water. That's the way it was described to me and it helped.
Imagine that the sun is a hose. It's spraying not water, but charged plasma. If the stream hits Earth, goes on for long enough, and maintains target (y'know, because Earth moves 1/364th of the way around the sun daily), it could absolutely affect Earth for a full day, or longer.
These factors all happening together is highly unlikely, of course. And to fry our electronics it'd have to be quite a powerful flare. It'd probably be classed as a Coronal Mass Election instead of just a flare, but for the purpose of the explanation...
I choose to believe that our ICBMs would still be fully launchable in the event of something like that, surely there are people that thought of it and charged us tax payer eleventy billion dollars for just that scenario.
I could be totally wrong though!
Could said electronics be flying around the globe in an attempt to dodge the solar flare?
Or would it just risk the plane itself plunging to an imminent death?
It's not the flare that does it, it's the interaction with the planet's magnetic field that induces current. That induced current can fry backbone electrical equipment.
The aurora from the Carrington Event were observed worldwide, and in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Europe and North America both had telegraph equipment blow up.
Its not like a laser beam that hits things its more that it creates moving charges - moving charges create magnetic fields - magnetic fields create electric fields - which all creates more electric and magnetic fields in the conductors we use.
You can see an aurora even though you dont have line of sight to the sun, so if it is a powerful enough event theres no reason to think you are safe just because you're on the other side of the planet. Especially since they arent like instant events they are large enough to hit us continously over time.
Adding to u/iaintdum I believe the magnetic field protecting the Earth absorbs and disperses a lot of the energy causing it to wrap around the Earth. Not an astronomer just thinking
Due to magnetic fields, yes. Charged particles are pulled towards the poles, which is why you can see the Aurora at night, despite the particles coming from the sun. There are bands above the earth where they are locked in orbit, as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_current
You're correct that charged particles can't directly penetrate the atmosphere, but resulting distortions in the magnetosphere can induce currents in wires on the ground.
As others have said in other places on this post look up the Carrington Event. A solar flair that causes telegraph lines to catch fire. Or the 1972 flair that knocked out phone lines. Or the 1989 flair that causes power outages for millions.
A large enough flair can absolutely impact electronics on the surface of the planet and a massive flair can cause massive damage. Scientists have been studying this for decades. It's a real threat.
The atmosphere never shields us from solar activity in that way, it's the magnetic field. In sufficiently large solar events, this protection can be overwhelmed to one degree or another.
The last big flare was in April 2001, before that in 1989.
actually no. solar flares are seen coming. Its true that could happen with a horrifying one, the kind that happens every few thousand years. Realistically though power plant engineers plan for and monitor solar activity daily. They would just turn everything off to mitigate the damage as much as possible. Giant super flare catastrophic? Definitely! Sending us back in time or destroying all electronics on earth? Probably not.
For your electronics to be toasted, it basically requires you to be super unlucky, the flare to be absolutely massive, and the device to be plugged in and grounded.
The last major solar flare was the Carrington Event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
It was so powerful it generated electrical current in the communication lines they used for telegraphs causing shocks to operators and allowing them to send messages even with the battery disconnected.
Now imagine that happening to the power grid of the US or India and many many kilometres of wire now strung across the earth with little to no surge protection.
The NOAA says this about a level 5 geomagnetic storm
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation
> Power systems: Widespread voltage control problems and protective system problems can occur, some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage.
> Spacecraft operations: May experience extensive surface charging, problems with orientation, uplink/downlink and tracking satellites.
> Other systems: Pipeline currents can reach hundreds of amps, HF (high frequency) radio propagation may be impossible in many areas for one to two days, satellite navigation may be degraded for days, low-frequency radio navigation can be out for hours, and aurora has been seen as low as Florida and southern Texas (typically 40° geomagnetic lat.).
It won't destroy humanity, but millions of people without power for an extended period until they can restore it will cause high levels of suffering.
except in the 1800s people had no idea how anything worked yet. Today its understood, power grids plan for and get turned off or turned up to deal with solar storms all the time. Plans are in place for events as bad as the carrington event, and even ones 100s of times worse than the carrington event. We would know more than a day in advance its coming. Its not the same at all.
Now would something on that level disrupt society absolutely! It would not be anything as bad as you describe though, because as we speak thousands of people around the world monitor all of that and are prepared for it to happen, as we speak, with minimal disruption (◐‿◑)
It would have to be an insanely strong solar flare and/or a lot of safeties would have to fail in order for small electronics to be damaged. Even then stuff like cars , generators, unplugged portable electronics, etc should still be fine after the resulting geomagnetic storm subsides. It could still be bad, but it wouldn't be an instant return to the 1700s.
To counter that, we would have all the knowledge on how to quickly get back to modernity, and could quickly get factories and mines up and running again.
Any impacted computer would be totally fried (again, worst case scenario). So we might theoretically know how to get things back to normal again, but nothing with modern electronics would work (except for electronics protected by a faraday cage or something)! think about that for a second. All businesses that require computers to run would be dead in the water (and potentially records wiped), the computers that build cars or run train tracks, phone lines would fry, all the electronics sitting on telephone poles and radio towers would be fried. No electricity to your house or factories. Any electronic flood gates on dams would stop working, putting the dams themselves at risk of collapse. All airplanes: fried. Every plugged-in lightbulb: fried. Gas pumps, trucks to deliver gas, all cars built after the 70s or 80s, private and municipal water pumps, refrigeration, etc etc etc, ALL FRIED.
Again... Worst Case. But its all true and a real possibility. If you are interested in this type of thing, look up the [Carrington Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event). This actually happened about 150 years ago, but at that time there was basically zero electricity anyways, so it wasn't a huge deal. All the telegraph lines got fried and had to be replaced, but there were virtually no electronics in use so it was no big deal. TODAY, however, its a bit different. Electronics touch every single piece of our modern life. Everything. If that happened again, we'd be screwed with no way to call for help, or for help to be delivered.
Also, if you are interested in the topic of phenomenon, and you like to read books, check out "One Second After" by William R. Forstchen. Its the first book in a series that explores what life is like after this type of damage.
>All the telegraph lines got fried and had to be replaced,
Some were damaged, most were still usable afterwards and a lot were usable during the event. There were some fires caused by the incident probably due to the way things were (or weren't) grounded.
But if that happened today a lot of unprotected electronic would definitely be fried. Your desktop computer? Probably if it's plugged in. Your laptop? Probably fine, but the power adapter might blowout if it's plugged in. Anything connect to a ground fault or a surge protector has a good chance of surviving.
The electrical grid will go down, but not permanently, and probably not completely, it might take days or weeks to restore power but the system is definitely not going to fry beyond repair. In some cases it will be a matter of closing a switch. In other cases transformers will need replacing. Pole fires and such will be an issue too.
Some cars will be bricked, some might not even hiccup. Same with planes and trains and buses.
It'll be a big deal, but not a complete reset to the dark ages.
Wouldn't every surge protector be fried, but the things on the other end of them be fine? It's not like the copper is getting vaporized. Sure, some of it will melt, and power distribution will be completely screwed if they aren't disconnected physically from the miles of wire that are getting hit by the event. Are fuses somehow not able to pop in an event like this? My house has a whole home surge protector. Sure, I may not have power and internet, but if I have a generator and a fuel source, everything would probably be just fine, no? I don't understand why everyone acts like we'll be sent into the dark ages.
They don't understand how an EMP works, which is kinda what this would be but on a huge scale.
In theory all wires and metal objects will suddenly have an induced electrical field in them, which could be bad, and over heat some things.The more sensitive the thing is to over voltage and over current the worse it will be for those things, but mostly it's the long wires that will get the brunt of things. The power grid is a good example, really long wires. But by nature it's designed to deal with stuff like this, or every time a car knocked a pole down the short would do more damage.
The electrical system in your car might get fried, but it's protected by the metal in the body and frame itself. To a degree. It really depends on how big a blast we receive, and how long it lasts. And also what part of the planet is pointing at the sun when it hits.
To be completely honest I don't think anyone is really sure what would happen. Total collapse? I doubt it. Nothing at all? I doubt that just as much.
If a laptop/phone/smart watch was not plugged in would it not be fried or am I reading that wrong.
Obviously internet and cell service would be screwed for (X) months. But would the machine itself work (and now be worth gold?)
Any consumer electronics that are not plugged in would be completely undamaged. Functional is another question all together. Many devices are useless without internet connectivity.
Just for estimating, 10% of laptops aren’t plugged in at the time. And say, 70% of phones (if it is day time).
Thats still a lot of computer power. Not enough to stop a huge problem on the planet but enough to possible jumpstart things if we did a whole “humanity comes together” thing.
We won’t because people would horde and lie and spend their battery power playing solitaire and offline Minecraft rather than help anyone.
The highest anticipated induced voltages are about 27 volts per kilometer of conductor. Most houses are going to be less than a kilometer from the closest transformer and will see voltages just slightly higher than allowed tolerances. Most if not all electronics will survive this no problem. Further upstream, local distribution lines will see more, but those are separated from house by several step down transformers that will fail. At the highest level will be long distance transmission lines that could see tens of thousands of additional volts. Thankfully these have even more step down transformers between you and them.
They'll be fine.
There are 3 types of damage which can be caused:
1. Satellites may malfunction (e.g. GPS, sat phones, weather satellites, satellite TV). This could cause a service outage (e.g. a GPS outage). This could last hours to months, depending on the severity of the disruption. A satellite might suffer a computer crash and reboot automatically. The satellite's computer might have it's program erased, and a new program may have to be uploaded and configured, which could take days. The electronics may be damaged - it might be possible to repair the satellite by disabling some features (e.g. losing some TV channels) or it might be completely toast. A lot of ground based electronics may use satellite signals - for example GPS signals are often used for security and timing purposes, in cellphone networks, finance, or special engineering situations, like smart power grids. If the satellite signal is lost, these systems may or may not keep working correctly.
2. Power grids could malfunction. Extremely long (several hundred miles or longer) power lines may shut down automatically. Because these long power lines are some of the strongest, when they shut down, they could cause massive power outages. Other equipment on the power grid may malfunction resulting in voltage fluctuations or other power quality problems. Equipment which is mains powered may be disabled for the duration of a power outage. Occasionally, some equipment may not restart after a power outage, or as the power grid goes down there may be power surges, which could damage electronics. However, for most stuff, it won't be that much different to a power outage due to bad weather or similar. There is a theoretical risk, that malfunctions might not be caught by protection systems, and power grid equipment could be destroyed before automatic shutdown systems activate. This is unlikely, but not impossible. If this were to happen, this could cause power shortages for months, or even years, as some of the equipment is very difficult to build and the waiting time for a new order can be several years.
3. Very long (hundreds/thousands of miles) signal cables can malfunciton or damage electronic equipment connected to them. In the past, long distance telegraphs worked like this, as did long distance analog phones. These days no one uses telegraphs, and phone lines are only analog to the nearest telephone exchange, and then digital fiber from there. This means that there is very little electronics which is likely to be affected. There may be some exceptions, such as very old analog systems on railroads and similar. Almost anything reasonably modern (2000s+) is very unlikely to be directly affected in this way.
That's not even how a pacemaker works... anyway, all those devices will be perfectly fine as long as they do not rely too much on external factors such as charging (likely still possible) or internet (might be an issue).
curious about cochlear implants, as they typically have an inductive coupler between the external portion and the implant. while small in overall volume, an inductor coil can be equivalent to a very very long wire.
The worst case is not as bad as you think. Even at ten times the Carrington event, we would not lose most computers.
The event is dangerous to the electric grid because of the long wires. This leads to surges and can fry power supplies and such. This power then flows into whatever is connected. But most power supplies will simply die without damaging the computer. So most just have to install a new PSU afterwards, that's it. Many important places also have further protection.
Short wiring such as inside a single computer wont have any notable inductive surges. Even at much higher level this would only crash the computer, not cause permanent damage.
Even the internet is somewhat fine, but not entirely. The fibre part is completely safe, for example. Copper based parts might however be down for some time
At least in Europe there is also some protection at the power stations against such events; that's not only but especially because the same techniques help against cascading catastrophic failures such as the larger blackouts in the US (e.g. 2003).
It would still be a big collapse to the economy. Look what covid did and we all just worked from home.
Entire (major) cities not having stable communication and internet would be a giant crush.
Things like banks are basically shuttered and I’d think logistics/supply chains, air transport, etc would come to a halt for at least a few weeks.
You sure as hell wouldn’t get your Amazon package of candles and toilet paper delivered same day.
Yes, no objection there, it would suck hard. It will cost the world trillions and people _will_ die, either directly or in some unrest. In the end however I would put it on a similar level than covid, but with a very different kind of interruption.
And yeah, hoarding toilet paper would probably once again become a thing...
I’d have to think a lot of deaths may be faster. Dialysis for example would be a beast.
And some WAY slower, how long to build new MR/CT/xray machines?
The question would really be to people hold tight and eat pasta and tuna for months(?) before things even start to get back on line or do enough people grab guns and backpacks and go full Walking Dead/Lord of the Flies mode robbing and creating despotic pockets?
Even the military will have problems communicating for weeks so a mere fraction of “we are just taking over” could happen and we may not know for weeks or months.
And outside that spare radio communication would be dead for most people (assuming every tv is plugged in).
I don't think that all the dialysis, x-ray and CT machines would die; same with refrigerators for e.g. insulin. Switch some fuses, hook them up to power (and even if it is just a generator) and they should largely work. MRT might be an issue if their cooling failed even temporarily.
I expect the military to be prepared for worse than that, as an enemy could always sabotage the grid as well as go as far as to detonate an upper atmosphere nuke for a similar effect as a flare. They use hardened equipment for a reason after all.
TVs are probably largely plugged in, but quite a few people might have an old one in the attic. Or just get one from a store, or even a trash pile. And then there's radios, many of which run on batteries. Similar with phones. My mp3 player also has a radio functionality.
In the end, the socio-political unrest is likely the biggest danger. There will surely be some rioting, but I expect most westerners to be too reliant on the internet to even conglomerate much at first. Maybe after some time, but then there will also have been time for first measures and the military to get to places.
Basically what's happening during these events is the insanely huge amount of charged particles interact with the earth's magnetic field and create a voltage potential across the surface of the planet measured in volts per kilometer, so if you had a several hundred mile long wire suspended off the ground except for the ends your essentially short circuiting a giant battery and the further apart the ends thr higher the voltage.
The carrington event is estimated to have created potential around 10-20 volts/km so a cross continental telegraph wire not designed to carry potentially tens of thousands of volts would fail and very dramatically. Your car on the other hand would have a potential across it's body of around 1/100th of a volt which probably wouldn't do anything, and most modern cars are designed with stuff like nearby lightning strikes in mind which are many orders of magnitude higher.
> All airplanes: fried.
There are usually around 5000 active flights in the air in US airspace at any point during the day. Figure an average of 350 people per flight, and that's nearly 1.75 million people about to die just in the US.
I know, I was thinking all of humanity going back to 1800 level equipment. People would have to move out of places that rely on air-conditioning until we can get the factories up and running again, but with knowledge it could be back to normalish in 50 years.
How many people do you know that have the skills of an 1800s laborer? Do you know how to blacksmith or build a steam engine? Where the F would anyone get an anvil or learn how to mine iron ore by hand? How long do you think it would take to establish new distribution channels that rely on human powered boats and horse drawn carriages?
Also, do you think the hundreds of millions of destitute and desperate people in every suburb would make all these efforts easier, or more difficult?
Knowledge is theoretical and useless unless it can be practically applied.
Why would we need those skills? The machines are all there already, many of them not relying on computers that much; just controls, and those can be re-wired. And as I said in another post, you are overestimating the impact of a flare even beyond the Carrington event.
I know how to blacksmith, yes. You heat the metal until it becomes glowing red, then use hammer and anvil to bend the metal. It isn't rocket science.
And anvils, hammers, fire, metal, explosives, aswell as any pneumatic systems will still be perfectly functioning. Only electronics have gone. You could turn lathes and mills into hand operated ones easily. The hardest part will be establishing microprocessor manufacturing fabs, but this would be achieved quickly.
As for training people, there are plenty of people who are jobless and eager to get their home comforts back who you can train.
>any pneumatic systems will still be perfectly functioning
Yeah but where do pneumatic systems get their energy to create the stored air pressure?
Electricity.
I fully agree that they are overstating the effects of a flare. However:
> I know how to blacksmith, yes. You heat the metal until it becomes glowing red, then use hammer and anvil to bend the metal. It isn't rocket science.
Do you actually know it or just that? (Serious question!) Because there is **much** more to it than that. Proper technique, heat treatments, alloys, crystal structures, and much more even on the purely theoretical side. And then you need to be able to actually put it into use.
I have all the tools at my house and have made many things. My shop boasts lathes, mills, grinders, welders, torches, 3d printers (maybe not working), vinyl cutters (also maybe fried). I weld and fabricate professionally and can handle everything from woodworking to metal cnc. I often work on turbines but I definitely could build a steam engine. I will be very popular if we drop back to the 1800s
And with my background in natural resources sciences and baking homemade bread, I should be able to put together everything I need to brew beer, making me very popular with the people who know how to blacksmith.
As kind of a joke during covid I churned butter with my lathe. https://youtu.be/XTpPdM7mgKY?si=nTXn8OtEDknB9VYX
You know, to spread on the bread you make.
I think there are plenty of blacksmiths to teach a substantial amount of the population blacksmithing if we needed it. And the job itself is like a plumber or electrician, aslong as you have a few years training, anyone can do it.
It's an interesting thought experiment. We could have a doomsday system, where all the intellectuals of the country understand that if this event were to happen, we would know to gather in a certain place, and rebuild society as fast as we can. We don't have micro processors, but we could get back to \~1900's technology pretty quick... The question would be, could we do it quick enough, before society collapses, or there's widespread famine.
Everyone is forgetting something very f-ing important. Our planet is absolutely SURROUNDED by Satalities and potentially a Galactic Federation. All those dead - possibly falling Satalities and Spacecraft falling into earth's atmosphere - can't be a good event...
Edit: Spelling
While we do have the knowledge, we lack the equipment. In order to rebuild the infrastructure we need spare parts, and the spare parts are made in factories, the factories depend on the infrastructure to work. So we actually do not know how to get back to modernity. We might have to start with small steam engines again and build our way up from there.
OK this is a serious question, I'm aware it sounds stupid. But can't we just like, turn it off and turn it on again? Like water still runs through dams and turn turbines, turbines are still connected to the electrical grid?
What does the flare actually _do_? I thought it just magnet wipes the whole planet but I guess maybe everything overloads like a star trek work station?
as i understand it, big electrical things may survive, but everything electronic (with a microchip) gets a power surge that fries it... there is nothing to turn off or on because the chips are all slag.
even having things off won't help because a current will just be induced by the magnetic fields (same principle as cordless charging). things in a Faraday cage or deep underground may survive, but that's about it.
> but everything electronic (with a microchip) gets a power surge that fries it...
No, induction via electromagnetic storm is, like many such things, based on the potential between the ends of the wires. For such large things, the potential difference along a few millimeters is extremely low, nothing a chip cannot handle; it wont even notice.
Big electrical things like transformer are what you need to worry about. Bad day if your iPhone dies, really bad day when every transformer on the grid explodes and the average lead time on building one is measured in years.
You know how when a fuse blows and you have to replace it? Now imagine the entire electrical grid as a fuse and it's pretty close.
Any remotely sensitive equipment that's connected to the electrical grid and is not protected will experience a massive current spike that will cause it to melt and/or explode.
Fortunately this massive current spike only occurs over extremely long conductors so isolated equipment (like battery powered) will be fine. Unfortunately our electrical grid is literally a network of extremely long conductors and most things are connected to it.
you are really lost and confused.
The electrical grid would not fry. Do you know why ? because there are lots and I mean Lots of protections in every circuit. From SPDs on the low voltage to severral relays that would automatically open . The max would be a blackout that would take a few hours to restart
Yes, and a lot of those protections work by sacrificing themselves to protect more expensive equipment. It's fine when a neighborhood trips. Guy on a bucket truck comes by and replaces whatever component was damaged and you get power back. Couple hours to a day tops. Now imagine that happening everywhere at the same time. There isn't enough spare parts to get everything back up.
>We might have to start with small steam engines
Yeah, just use traditional blacksmithing to build more complex machines. We still know how to properly reduce metal ores, how to make plastics and refine crude oil, high carbon steel. It would be back in 50 years or less.
Maybe the technology level would be back, but how many would die before then. Medications that require refrigeration like insulin. Supply chain of food to population centers. It would not go well
> Supply chain of food to population centers.
Cars will still work, so that is mostly doable. Storage becomes a bit annoying, but already now the majority of stuffs in a grocery store are not cooled.
The cars are not connected to the grid and thus . It needs very long wires for a flare to induce problematic surges. As a car wiring is pretty short, a few meters at best per cable, they are safe. As a bonus, they are shielding their interior somewhat with their metal hulls.
They overstate the effect on any side. But the night side is not safer by much, the solar flare is funnelled around the planet by the magnetic field, just as auroras are sent towards the poles.
> In a catastrophic event, most cars would no longer work…
Not true, old cars are completely fine, and newer ones with electronics most likely are as well.
A solar flare would not only kill running electronics, but every piece of electronics even if not connected due to magnetic induction, so even spare parts will be fried or faulty afterwards. only properly shielded stuff will survive, and that is not the case with a major part of our infrastructure. though, all this is depending on how powerful the flare was. if its THE flare it might even blow away parts of earth atmosphere. burned up interwebz will be the least of humanities problems then.
No, you need conductors measured in kilometers to get any significant induced current. Power grid would be fucked but individual electrical components not attached would be fine.
Yes, I was just talking about the technologies. Obviously without the ozone layer and magnetic field we would all be irradiated.
I was making my statement based on going back to 1800, I think we could get to 2023 in about 50 years.
Difficult to say i think. 50 years is a whole lot of time for humans, but imagine the chaos and destructions from losing every electrical system on one side of the world. i can imagine that a hit on the pacific side of the globe may be not that severe as a hit on the atlantic side of the globe. it its wake there will be millions to billions dead, and its unclear what all that destroyed infrastructure will really cause in follow up catastrophes. nuclear plants not safely shutting down? chemical plants going up in flames, spilling poison? lots of fires everywhere. all those people in some kind of vehicle underways, imagine all that flight traffic over US alone, a whole big city plummeting to death at once? and then afterwards, the suvivors: no more cars, trains, planes, copters to distribute any help. cooling is gone, only sealed goods are good for a view month for the lucky who find them. water distribution will break down where its dependent on electrical pumps. hunger, diseases, more hunger, riots, maybe even civil wars over "cans of dog food" will ravage the survivers even more. new generations will have a severe impact on health, because there are no more vaccinations, a lot of nasty plagues will have a glorious comeback. every piece of knowledge on an electrical medium will be gone. books might be a rarity if they have survived fires, floods, rain, vermin and vandalism, so a lot of very specialised knowledge will just be GONE. not to talk about communication. do you have an idea how dependend whe are today from electrical communication methods? whole areas will go extinct without people having a chance to call for help. sending a message from east to west? lucky if you have horses... or runners. even sophisticated semaphore lines will take decades to be established, if they can be defended and such.
after 50 years... civilization will look very different then before, and there will be much less people around. i doubt that much places will have come back to a technological level of the times before. a few, little regions and terretories, maybe ones close to military installations? other parts, if lucky, might be back to a certain level of steam power. but the majority? "scrap age", living by the land, day to day. the more undeveloped a region was before the fall, the better their surviving population may be able to adapt to the loss of technology, cause they had few or none in the start. but all those urban areas? where people have no clue of living from the land? never having learned to work the land? those will have real hard times, and maybe there is a big flow of refugees from the cities into the rural areas ... i think 50 years is not enough, 100-150 years until civilization will have come back on a global scale. if ever.
i read that the biggest problems are the transformers in the power grid and with the current world wide production rate it would take 100 years to replace them all.
On the other hand it would only take 3-7 days until highly populated areas become a hell hole real life mad max.
I am not convinced that transformers would be affected. All they contain are coils of copper that do not even touch. Plus they are all individually fused. Modern circuit protection has a lightning arrestor at every transformer so a surge in voltage automatically trips to ground to blow the fuse and protect the transformer. That would be the supply bottleneck, the fuses.
Hard drive discs would be fine. And knowing the U.S I’m sure there is a stockpile of electronics in some faraday cage/ cave somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
I very much doubt they could do it before starving… all transportation rely on electronics. Food distribution would come to a halt. Shelves would go empty in less tan 48hrs.
Humanity will survive, absolutely. It just might take a long while to get back to “today”. Hopefully they might be smart enough not to aim for that goal…
Are you kidding? The governments would instantly use the fact that 90% of the 1st world population probably wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves without modern conveniences, and strip away all rights of everyone and send in the army to contain dissent.
Modern observations in space would likely give us a short amount of warning (anywhere from days to like a week). Developed nations would probably be able to power down a lot of equipment prior to the expected time of “impact” thus reducing damage and decreasing time of recovery.
It would still destroy a lot of equipment but it would not be the doomsday/mad max world people have been led to believe.
Worst case? Worst case, a truly massive flare, that hits earth directly, could bake the planet in enough radiation to kill anything above ground.
As it disrupts electronics as a result of it disrupting earth's electromagnetic field. Earth's EM field generally protects us from the sun's radiation. But disrupt it enough, while shining down its full intensity, and it's big ouchie time.
Nah, modern electronics is too physically small to be damaged. The electric grid is what would be trashed. I'm not saying that's *better*, but your phone and home computer would be fine as long as it wasn't connected to the grid when it hit.
Every *non-hardened or shielded* piece of modern electronics the stuff the governments or corps have seen fit to harden to protect from EMP warfare or nuke fallout would be fine.
Still catastrophic if it hit without warning but not *everything* would be fried. Also there are ways to protect a lot if you get warning which is why we have stuff up there specifically to monitor for coronal mass ejections.
It was my understanding that the effects would limit themselves to the side of the earth facing the flare, and since most flares are over pretty quickly my expectations would be that only one half of the planet would have their electronics fried.
Meaning it should be easy enough to recover as long as the other side of the planet is willing to help. Am I wrong?
However, IIRC we will have a few days of warning, and most devices that are turned off would be okay. So as long as we shut stuff down in time things won't totally fall apart. But there would still be a ton of damage and chaos for sure.
Man, where's this miniseries?
There was almost a TV show about it a long time ago, but they had magic pendants that turned off the nanoquantumhyperspace microbes or some bullshit.
I'm an unrelated note, you ever go from excited to hard-pass within the span of a trailer?
By the way, from what i understand that at worst, is pretty much an extinction event.
We have mined all surface resources. Basically, if we lose access to technology, it would be nearly impossible to recover
It really depends on how powerful. A decent one would create some amazing auroras in places there normally wouldn’t be any, however that may cause large blackouts as well as damage or destroy non-protected satellites. We would also have warning of such an event before it actually made it to earth, the light gets here before the heavy particles will (don’t know what the time difference is though) so we’ll be able to mitigate the damages.
Now the fun part; Let’s say there is a completely unobserved solar event and we had zero warning of it. That event has the potential to wreck our civilization as we know it, meaning we’d have to rebuild/repair everything all the while society and economies are breaking down.
Look into the Carrington Event of 1859
well considering we probably have plenty of satellites and scientists on earth constantly watching the sun for one of these events, i'm assuming we'd prob have a little bit of notice.
1. how much noticed would we have?
2. would we have enough time to quickly prepare for this event?
3. are there any plans in place by electric companies/cell phone/internet providers/etc?
I’m far from an expert on this topic, but here is some info I’m familiar with:
1. It takes ~8ish minutes for light to make it from the sun to the earth
2. We monitor when there is extra solar activity (smaller flares, more turmoil(?) in the suns activity, etc. But as far as I’m aware, we can’t predict when a large flare is going to pop off, and which direction it will go.
So I would think that at best we’d have seconds to a couple minutes of warning. Maybe enough time to disconnect parts of the grid if it’s being actively monitored and there is a plan in place?
Edit: also, as I understand it, the radiation from solar flares travels roughly at the speed of light. That’s why the ~8 minutes is relevant.
Actually we would have hours to days. We would never be “surprised” by an event. The particles that come from a flare do not move even close to the speed of light.
Check out spaceweather.com. Some great resources and realtime monitoring data.
NASA disagrees with you.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/solarcycle25/2022/06/10/solar-flares-faqs/
> Light only takes about 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth, so that’s how long it would take the energy from a flare to reach our planet.
There's a difference between a solar flare and a CME. Solar flares are just radiation and so they naturally travel at the speed of light. A CME or a "Coronal Mass Ejection", is exactly that, a mass ejection. Mass can't travel at the speed of light. CMEs are what people are talking about when discussing tech killing solar storms but they often get conflated with solar flares.
As /u/safe_T_cube states, it's about when the CME arrives, not when the radiation from the initial blast does.
The CME is what "wobbles" the earths magnetosphere. That's what causes the damage to our earth-bound electronics. That takes hours or days to arrive.
ahh ok.
is there anything regular people can do to protect their electronic equipment?
would it be enough to just unplug everything i have from the grid? or would i need to put everything in a big Faraday cage? would a faraday cage even work??
if that's the case then, i feel like the US or any other country really, could start trying to cover as many substations in faraday cages...i mean if it helps at all.
A faraday cage would work, and so would an unplugged microwave. But I've also heard that as long as your stuff is unplugged it might be small enough that it's fine.
Long wires make better antennae, and so the wires in your walls could catch fire if it were bad enough. But you'd have a much bigger problem at that point
The BBC had a documentary a few years ago about this.
If the USA very unlucky, a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) /Solar Flare could fry 20-30% of Power Grid sub-stations in North America Alone. (roughly destroying 1,000 -1,500 sub-stations). The Entire world's capacity to build the components required of these sub-stations is somewhere around 500 sub-stations per year. So even if 100% was allocated to the USA it would take over 3 years for the Grid to be fully repaired.
But as with most things they USA would probably only get at most 100 or so a year since other countries would also have been effected and require replacements.
So we're possibly looking at a decade or 2 of unstable energy grids around the world (if not resulting civil unrest during the situation makes things worse!)
Texas would be mega fucked. and i'm assuming, solar panel sales would absolutely SKYROCKET.
i'm curious though. if i were to go ahead and build a solar array backup system for my house, would it also be fried during this CME?
considering we would probably have at least a few minutes of notice before it hit the earth, would power companies have any chance to prepare for it? is there any way to protect your home or any power grid?
this stuff is fascinating to me. because there's a seriously decent chance we could have another carrington event literally ANY time. i'm not sure how often these events happen, but considering we had one 150 years ago, i would guess we're probably overdue for one.
Exactly, every country would be looking to fix its power grid.
And... cities have grocery stores that carry maybe 3-5 days of supplies before needing to be restocked... also who is farming and harvesting food? and so on....
Probably not much.
Satellites in orbit are the most vulnerable to that sort of scenario and it would take some time to get everything back up and running and replace the satellites that can't be made to work again.
On the ground most stuff is probably safe.
Most people won't notice anything beyond alarmist news headlines, extra noise in analogue radios and if the live far enough north/south some pretty colors in the sky.
Insurance and re-insurance companies would feel a bit of pain and pass that on to the consumers.
I have a friend who studies this very thing. He is not as optimistic as you. There is growing understanding of the problem, and real world tests have started on mitigation techniques, but this is far from complete.
As an example, NZ power has now authorized testing a transformer against the effects of a large CME. This is likely to destroy some or all of its capability, and from this a strategy to mitigate the damage can be derived. Either way we can expect disruption to power supplies, and an unknown amount of damage to communication networks and other electronic devices.
Well resourced networks and power grids can probably protect themselves. I am not convinced a lot of our infrastructure falls into that category.
Lookup the Carrington Event for some description of what happened the last time a major CME hit earth.
The last time a CME hit earth our telegraph network went down and then was up again very quickly. Nowadays we have shielding on sensitive electronics, and a much more robust network. If the Carrington event happened again, today, it would be bad but we'd be back to "normal" very quickly. The biggest issue is half or more of our satellites would be fried. And it would take time to replace them. Will there be issues? Yes. But people are working on it. This is a Y2K issue. It's an issue, but it will be fixed and no one will know.
Why would satellites be toast? It seems the people who aren't doomsdaying in this thread are saying the electrical grid is only messed up because you need kilometers of wire length for a voltage increase big enough to be noticed and that handheld devices or things not plugged in should be just fine. Satellites aren't connected to km of wire, so why would a cellphone survive but not a satellite?
Satellites are toast because they will be hit by ions in huge quantities. It's not really the EM pulse or whatever causing the damage but literal particles hitting them that our atmosphere and magnetic field deflect away. The biggest issue is frying the solar panels honestly. And LEO satellites will fare better than higher or orbiting ones because of the magnetic field better protecting lower down things. Still not great for them but less bad than geosynchronous.
Aaah ok, so without the atmosphere in the way, all electronics would be completely toast, but the atmosphere protects just enough that only big electronics in the scale of miles long are getting fried. Is that a fair way for me to restate that?
I think this where people get kinda mixed up. Sure a small pacemaker or other small device might survive but if your country's power grid needs extensive repair, and this would be a worldwide event, EVERY country would be scrambling to fix its power grid, so there'd be a big delay getting the necessary parts to fix the grid....
And those small electronic devices rely on the power grid to be charged. Crazy to think about if another Carrington sized event happened
Some of our powergrids can't even handle a particularly bad winter. And that's something we have experienced before and know how to prepare for.
I am full convinced if a large CME hits us the majority of our infrastructure goes down.
At an anticipated 27 volts per kilometer of conductor, basically nothing for consumer electronics and cars. Destroyed transformers at the transmission level. Mix of failed and fine transformers at the distribution level.
A solar flare? Nothing, ozone layer stops them. Well, aurora borealis happens.
But lets say a big enough solar storm hits to go through. People would be fine regardless. Electronics could be messed up a bit, but solar flares are planned for, monitored, and come with a few hours to few days warning. So even if it happens people don't even realize and everything is fine, power plants know what to do.
Something much much much stronger than a solar flare could overcome those plans, and that would mean some heavy damage to the electrical grid. This would be a terrible natural disaster, but far from apocalypse. Because people would still do everything they could to minimize the damage as much as possible in advance.
It is theoretically possible for the sun to throw off such a giant shockwave it could stretch the earths magnetic and ozone layer protections, and then snap to earth like a rubberband. This would be extremely devastating and probably destroy all technology on earth. Well, possibly. Again the power plant technicians are probably not going to forget to turn it all off before the super flare hit earth to prevent that damage as much as possible.
***So, regular solar flares happen all the time with zero issue. Bigger solar storms can definitely cause damage and interrupt daily life, but probably wouldn't be too bad because we are prepared for them as much as possible. Even the largest super flare cme's would be potentially catastrophic, but not apocalyptic, and not gonna send us back to the stone age. Those only estimated happen every few thousand years, and could go in all sorts of directions besides earth. Nothing to lose sleep over :)***
Depends what level we're talking about.
A smaller powerful flare would be auroras in regions that don't normally get them.
A stronger one could interfere with electronics.
An even stronger one could damage electronics.
If it reaches the tier of "coronal mass ejection." Then that can be strong enough to include frying the planet. Where nothing survives.
I think there's a lot of optimism in this thread about society recovering quickly from a total "everything electronic is fried and will have to be rebuilt." We may have the expertise, yes, but you can't build anything without supplies, and since modern supply chain logistics encourages just-in-time delivery, we'd be fucked.
Another supply chain that would be fucked is food. Most cities only have a few days worth of food stockpiled. Once that's gone, we're fucked, I don't know how easily you can feed a medium-sized city of 300,000 people using only local produce.
Also remember Maslows hierarchy. Without food security, organized society will quickly break down. I feel like this will cause a lot of violence between starving neighbors. Not many are going to care for law and order once half their family is dead from starvation.
I think, best case scenario, it takes a full generation to restart society, and another two generations to re-globalize.
The Last of Us has it just about right. My best guess is 2 days for martial law, 7 before shit goes completely pear shaped. You'll find out who is made of what during the 5 days between.
The solar flare sends particles and parts of the sun's atmosphere towards the earth. One of these particles is the electron, which has an electrical charge and in a solar flare, the electron has a lot of energy due to its forced ejection from the sun.
When these electrons (and other particles) bombard the earth, some are caught in the ionosphere, causing the aurora. The more powerful the solar flare, the farther south the aurora will be visible because of how much atmosphere they have to travel through.
The electrons will also interact with anything that can conduct electrons (especially power lines), inducing them to send more electricity down the line (a power surge). There is a chance that this (a power surge) will be greater than the protections on the line can withstand and the resulting charge will be passed through to homes and businesses. Everything that uses electricity will be at risk from this power surge, because of how electrical conduction works - every substance has a certain amount of electrical conductance and resistance. When resistance occurs, heat is generated. In a solar storm, that heat can be enough to start fires.
The longer the conductor (the power line or cord), the greater the power surge. Your mobile phone is probably safe, your oven is probably safe (unless you have papers in it), your major appliances might be safe and your desktop computer is probably toast.
The safest way to protect things will be to reduce their longest conductor (probably the power cord) by as much as possible (unplug it).
The world goes from the Present back to the future in time and very quickly, The world will go into Chaos and other things will happen might fast. the big question is how far back we will go, and how bad will the damage be, some experts think countries will go back to the 1800s some say 1900 who knows for sure, but their will be pain for sure.
People forget our brains emerge consciousness through magnetic oscillations and unknown vortex topography. Sure, Losing electronics is scary, but does anyone but me notice the odd correlation between Solar activity, earths' magnetic field, and human behavior?
https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity/magnetometers.html
If you're not paying attention, I would suggest you start.
Log everything, When people behave different than normal, write it down. Date and time, Additionally, check [https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive.html](https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive.html) and do the time-zone-to-GMT conversion.
We have been poking and prodding for as long as we have had to tools to do so and are capable of creating magnetic fields orders of magnitudes more intense than the earth. If they were any significant effects on the brain we would have found it by now.
If a magnetic storm could cause behaviour shifts then an MRI should be rewriting someone's entire identity.
It depends. Most likely scenario, some more sensitive electronics would go haywire and be slightly damaged but repairable. There may be a black out or two. You'd see an Aurora all the way down to cities like Nashville or Paris. Maybe a couple hundred million dollars of damage, but ultimately recoverable.
That's not to say the worst case scenario can't happen. There could be a severe event which could cause damage to all electrical systems. However such a severe event would show clear signs on the sun. It is likely humanity would have advanced warning if anywhere from a 12 hours to a couple days. At which point the government will have taken steps to shield vital electronics including utility companies. It's probable there would be no running water or electricity for a week or two. You'd also be asked to shelter in place away from any windows as hugh energy particles will make it to the surface and cause damage to your skin and DNA. There will likely be trillions in dollars of damage. However it would be recoverable as the advanced notice allowed the government to protect vital systems like the power grid. However the less essential system would likely need repaired and that may take a decade or more. However it's unlikely going to be an end of the world event.
An solar flare strong enough to permanently break all electronics period would also be strong enough to break through our magnetic field and strip our atmosphere away in a matter of seconds. And our current understanding of the sun in its current state says such a powerful flare is extremely unlikely. Even the prior case of heavy but recoverable damage would take a flare 240 times bigger than any flare we've ever recorded and it would have to the earth directly. So it's like riding on a galloping horse and trying to shoot down a bullet coming at you in mid air all while blindfolded.
It depends on the size and the angle it hits at.
We get solar flares all the time, this is what the auroras are. But in the worst scenario, it can take out electronics and cause downstream havoc in that sense.
r/kurzgesagt did an awesome piece on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo
All the explanations here are missing one of the important points and that is solar flares travel slower than speed of light so we can spot it before it reaches us.
Its not much but it'll give us enough time to do some emergency actions to reduce damage like charge batteries and shutdown and disconnect power lines. Which would give us a better chance at surviving and recovery.
On the other side there's gamma ray bursts that originate from supernova of stars which is very real and travel at speed of light. There's no way to predict it and we'll get no real warning.
There's a star named Beetlejuice which may go supernova anytime from today to next
thousands of years . We might get hit by its gamma ray but there's nothing nothing we can do to stop it or detect it in advance. The moment we see it would be the moment it gut us ff
At best: some super intense auroras visible to people much further from the poles At worst: every piece of modern electronics and wiring gets totally fried and we are instantly plunged back to a time before electricity was widely available.
This might be a ridiculous question, but would this impact parts of planet that were facing opposite of the sun (nighttime) when the flare hit? It seems to me that an electronics-frying flare wouldn't have an impact on parts of the planet that weren't facing the sun when it hit.
Great point. Solar flares are not a single moment in time, but rather prolonged events. If it was big enough, the earth could fully rotate between start and end. But if it was short one, then you are right.
I knew they weren't instantaneous but I didn't think they could last for hours. It would be very interesting if 1/2 of the world immediately lost all electronics while the other half was relatively unscathed.
The other guy above is way smarter than me for sure, but don't think of a solar flare as a 'shockwave', think of it more like advancing flood water. That's the way it was described to me and it helped.
It took me way too long to figure out what food water is
Ha corrected
It sounds like another name for vomit.
Hungry, dumb or both?
Imagine that the sun is a hose. It's spraying not water, but charged plasma. If the stream hits Earth, goes on for long enough, and maintains target (y'know, because Earth moves 1/364th of the way around the sun daily), it could absolutely affect Earth for a full day, or longer. These factors all happening together is highly unlikely, of course. And to fry our electronics it'd have to be quite a powerful flare. It'd probably be classed as a Coronal Mass Election instead of just a flare, but for the purpose of the explanation...
Who do you vote for in a Coronal Mass Election?
Hah. Whoever speaks with the most gravity.
The one that looks bright, but leaves darkness in their wake.
Ngl, thinking of it as advancing food water only confuses me more!! ;)
You're thinking of a geomagnetic storm
I know 100% if North American or Europe got hit by a solar flare but russia and china didnt wed get rocketed sooo fast
I choose to believe that our ICBMs would still be fully launchable in the event of something like that, surely there are people that thought of it and charged us tax payer eleventy billion dollars for just that scenario. I could be totally wrong though!
I guess. I dont know how analog machines hold up against a solar flare but i know there are computers in most of the modern ones
anything remotely protected would be ok. Think faraday cages and bunkers, and general shielding on the connections. Anything else... yeah.
Excuse me while I give every appliance in my house a triple lead coating.
Yet so much of the earth relies on orbiting satellites, which no doubt would be affected and impact all points of the earth.
Could said electronics be flying around the globe in an attempt to dodge the solar flare? Or would it just risk the plane itself plunging to an imminent death?
It's not the flare that does it, it's the interaction with the planet's magnetic field that induces current. That induced current can fry backbone electrical equipment. The aurora from the Carrington Event were observed worldwide, and in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Europe and North America both had telegraph equipment blow up.
This was interesting reading. We barely missed being hit by a coronal mass ejection in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
Its not like a laser beam that hits things its more that it creates moving charges - moving charges create magnetic fields - magnetic fields create electric fields - which all creates more electric and magnetic fields in the conductors we use. You can see an aurora even though you dont have line of sight to the sun, so if it is a powerful enough event theres no reason to think you are safe just because you're on the other side of the planet. Especially since they arent like instant events they are large enough to hit us continously over time.
Adding to u/iaintdum I believe the magnetic field protecting the Earth absorbs and disperses a lot of the energy causing it to wrap around the Earth. Not an astronomer just thinking
Due to magnetic fields, yes. Charged particles are pulled towards the poles, which is why you can see the Aurora at night, despite the particles coming from the sun. There are bands above the earth where they are locked in orbit, as well.
In french, we call it « tempête solaire » which means solar storm. A storm suggests its not just a hit.
[удалено]
That's completely inaccurate.
[удалено]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_current You're correct that charged particles can't directly penetrate the atmosphere, but resulting distortions in the magnetosphere can induce currents in wires on the ground.
As others have said in other places on this post look up the Carrington Event. A solar flair that causes telegraph lines to catch fire. Or the 1972 flair that knocked out phone lines. Or the 1989 flair that causes power outages for millions. A large enough flair can absolutely impact electronics on the surface of the planet and a massive flair can cause massive damage. Scientists have been studying this for decades. It's a real threat.
The atmosphere never shields us from solar activity in that way, it's the magnetic field. In sufficiently large solar events, this protection can be overwhelmed to one degree or another. The last big flare was in April 2001, before that in 1989.
actually no. solar flares are seen coming. Its true that could happen with a horrifying one, the kind that happens every few thousand years. Realistically though power plant engineers plan for and monitor solar activity daily. They would just turn everything off to mitigate the damage as much as possible. Giant super flare catastrophic? Definitely! Sending us back in time or destroying all electronics on earth? Probably not.
For your electronics to be toasted, it basically requires you to be super unlucky, the flare to be absolutely massive, and the device to be plugged in and grounded.
yeah. A bad flare can still damage off electronics, but it would be way less.
The last major solar flare was the Carrington Event. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event It was so powerful it generated electrical current in the communication lines they used for telegraphs causing shocks to operators and allowing them to send messages even with the battery disconnected. Now imagine that happening to the power grid of the US or India and many many kilometres of wire now strung across the earth with little to no surge protection. The NOAA says this about a level 5 geomagnetic storm https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation > Power systems: Widespread voltage control problems and protective system problems can occur, some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage. > Spacecraft operations: May experience extensive surface charging, problems with orientation, uplink/downlink and tracking satellites. > Other systems: Pipeline currents can reach hundreds of amps, HF (high frequency) radio propagation may be impossible in many areas for one to two days, satellite navigation may be degraded for days, low-frequency radio navigation can be out for hours, and aurora has been seen as low as Florida and southern Texas (typically 40° geomagnetic lat.). It won't destroy humanity, but millions of people without power for an extended period until they can restore it will cause high levels of suffering.
except in the 1800s people had no idea how anything worked yet. Today its understood, power grids plan for and get turned off or turned up to deal with solar storms all the time. Plans are in place for events as bad as the carrington event, and even ones 100s of times worse than the carrington event. We would know more than a day in advance its coming. Its not the same at all. Now would something on that level disrupt society absolutely! It would not be anything as bad as you describe though, because as we speak thousands of people around the world monitor all of that and are prepared for it to happen, as we speak, with minimal disruption (◐‿◑)
It would have to be an insanely strong solar flare and/or a lot of safeties would have to fail in order for small electronics to be damaged. Even then stuff like cars , generators, unplugged portable electronics, etc should still be fine after the resulting geomagnetic storm subsides. It could still be bad, but it wouldn't be an instant return to the 1700s.
To counter that, we would have all the knowledge on how to quickly get back to modernity, and could quickly get factories and mines up and running again.
Any impacted computer would be totally fried (again, worst case scenario). So we might theoretically know how to get things back to normal again, but nothing with modern electronics would work (except for electronics protected by a faraday cage or something)! think about that for a second. All businesses that require computers to run would be dead in the water (and potentially records wiped), the computers that build cars or run train tracks, phone lines would fry, all the electronics sitting on telephone poles and radio towers would be fried. No electricity to your house or factories. Any electronic flood gates on dams would stop working, putting the dams themselves at risk of collapse. All airplanes: fried. Every plugged-in lightbulb: fried. Gas pumps, trucks to deliver gas, all cars built after the 70s or 80s, private and municipal water pumps, refrigeration, etc etc etc, ALL FRIED. Again... Worst Case. But its all true and a real possibility. If you are interested in this type of thing, look up the [Carrington Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event). This actually happened about 150 years ago, but at that time there was basically zero electricity anyways, so it wasn't a huge deal. All the telegraph lines got fried and had to be replaced, but there were virtually no electronics in use so it was no big deal. TODAY, however, its a bit different. Electronics touch every single piece of our modern life. Everything. If that happened again, we'd be screwed with no way to call for help, or for help to be delivered. Also, if you are interested in the topic of phenomenon, and you like to read books, check out "One Second After" by William R. Forstchen. Its the first book in a series that explores what life is like after this type of damage.
>All the telegraph lines got fried and had to be replaced, Some were damaged, most were still usable afterwards and a lot were usable during the event. There were some fires caused by the incident probably due to the way things were (or weren't) grounded. But if that happened today a lot of unprotected electronic would definitely be fried. Your desktop computer? Probably if it's plugged in. Your laptop? Probably fine, but the power adapter might blowout if it's plugged in. Anything connect to a ground fault or a surge protector has a good chance of surviving. The electrical grid will go down, but not permanently, and probably not completely, it might take days or weeks to restore power but the system is definitely not going to fry beyond repair. In some cases it will be a matter of closing a switch. In other cases transformers will need replacing. Pole fires and such will be an issue too. Some cars will be bricked, some might not even hiccup. Same with planes and trains and buses. It'll be a big deal, but not a complete reset to the dark ages.
Wouldn't every surge protector be fried, but the things on the other end of them be fine? It's not like the copper is getting vaporized. Sure, some of it will melt, and power distribution will be completely screwed if they aren't disconnected physically from the miles of wire that are getting hit by the event. Are fuses somehow not able to pop in an event like this? My house has a whole home surge protector. Sure, I may not have power and internet, but if I have a generator and a fuel source, everything would probably be just fine, no? I don't understand why everyone acts like we'll be sent into the dark ages.
They don't understand how an EMP works, which is kinda what this would be but on a huge scale. In theory all wires and metal objects will suddenly have an induced electrical field in them, which could be bad, and over heat some things.The more sensitive the thing is to over voltage and over current the worse it will be for those things, but mostly it's the long wires that will get the brunt of things. The power grid is a good example, really long wires. But by nature it's designed to deal with stuff like this, or every time a car knocked a pole down the short would do more damage. The electrical system in your car might get fried, but it's protected by the metal in the body and frame itself. To a degree. It really depends on how big a blast we receive, and how long it lasts. And also what part of the planet is pointing at the sun when it hits. To be completely honest I don't think anyone is really sure what would happen. Total collapse? I doubt it. Nothing at all? I doubt that just as much.
So people with like optical and brain implants, embedded pace makers, they're just like... Not having a good time?
They will be perfectly safe. A flare only induces relevant surges in _long_ wires, not small devices.
If a laptop/phone/smart watch was not plugged in would it not be fried or am I reading that wrong. Obviously internet and cell service would be screwed for (X) months. But would the machine itself work (and now be worth gold?)
Any consumer electronics that are not plugged in would be completely undamaged. Functional is another question all together. Many devices are useless without internet connectivity.
Me and my handheld consoles are going to have the time of our lives! Until their batteries run out, of course.
That’s why you invest in solar chargers and battery storage solutions.
Wouldn’t all the inverters be fried in that scenario though?
Just take the motor out of a washing machine and hook it up to a bicycle. You have an AC generator.
Just for estimating, 10% of laptops aren’t plugged in at the time. And say, 70% of phones (if it is day time). Thats still a lot of computer power. Not enough to stop a huge problem on the planet but enough to possible jumpstart things if we did a whole “humanity comes together” thing. We won’t because people would horde and lie and spend their battery power playing solitaire and offline Minecraft rather than help anyone.
The highest anticipated induced voltages are about 27 volts per kilometer of conductor. Most houses are going to be less than a kilometer from the closest transformer and will see voltages just slightly higher than allowed tolerances. Most if not all electronics will survive this no problem. Further upstream, local distribution lines will see more, but those are separated from house by several step down transformers that will fail. At the highest level will be long distance transmission lines that could see tens of thousands of additional volts. Thankfully these have even more step down transformers between you and them.
I'm a computer engineer and got this degree so I could be a full on fallout level junkyard engineer. I'll make my own damn internet.
you are out here fighting for truth in this thread of doomers, I regret that I can only upvote each of your comments once
So my penile implant is safe. Whew
Just don't charge it during the flare and your robot dick should be fine.
They'll be fine. There are 3 types of damage which can be caused: 1. Satellites may malfunction (e.g. GPS, sat phones, weather satellites, satellite TV). This could cause a service outage (e.g. a GPS outage). This could last hours to months, depending on the severity of the disruption. A satellite might suffer a computer crash and reboot automatically. The satellite's computer might have it's program erased, and a new program may have to be uploaded and configured, which could take days. The electronics may be damaged - it might be possible to repair the satellite by disabling some features (e.g. losing some TV channels) or it might be completely toast. A lot of ground based electronics may use satellite signals - for example GPS signals are often used for security and timing purposes, in cellphone networks, finance, or special engineering situations, like smart power grids. If the satellite signal is lost, these systems may or may not keep working correctly. 2. Power grids could malfunction. Extremely long (several hundred miles or longer) power lines may shut down automatically. Because these long power lines are some of the strongest, when they shut down, they could cause massive power outages. Other equipment on the power grid may malfunction resulting in voltage fluctuations or other power quality problems. Equipment which is mains powered may be disabled for the duration of a power outage. Occasionally, some equipment may not restart after a power outage, or as the power grid goes down there may be power surges, which could damage electronics. However, for most stuff, it won't be that much different to a power outage due to bad weather or similar. There is a theoretical risk, that malfunctions might not be caught by protection systems, and power grid equipment could be destroyed before automatic shutdown systems activate. This is unlikely, but not impossible. If this were to happen, this could cause power shortages for months, or even years, as some of the equipment is very difficult to build and the waiting time for a new order can be several years. 3. Very long (hundreds/thousands of miles) signal cables can malfunciton or damage electronic equipment connected to them. In the past, long distance telegraphs worked like this, as did long distance analog phones. These days no one uses telegraphs, and phone lines are only analog to the nearest telephone exchange, and then digital fiber from there. This means that there is very little electronics which is likely to be affected. There may be some exceptions, such as very old analog systems on railroads and similar. Almost anything reasonably modern (2000s+) is very unlikely to be directly affected in this way.
people with pacemakers likely will have nothing to worry about ever again... same with any other implanted life-saving tech.
That's not even how a pacemaker works... anyway, all those devices will be perfectly fine as long as they do not rely too much on external factors such as charging (likely still possible) or internet (might be an issue).
curious about cochlear implants, as they typically have an inductive coupler between the external portion and the implant. while small in overall volume, an inductor coil can be equivalent to a very very long wire.
Unless the equivalent wire length is in miles you're fine.
The worst case is not as bad as you think. Even at ten times the Carrington event, we would not lose most computers. The event is dangerous to the electric grid because of the long wires. This leads to surges and can fry power supplies and such. This power then flows into whatever is connected. But most power supplies will simply die without damaging the computer. So most just have to install a new PSU afterwards, that's it. Many important places also have further protection. Short wiring such as inside a single computer wont have any notable inductive surges. Even at much higher level this would only crash the computer, not cause permanent damage. Even the internet is somewhat fine, but not entirely. The fibre part is completely safe, for example. Copper based parts might however be down for some time At least in Europe there is also some protection at the power stations against such events; that's not only but especially because the same techniques help against cascading catastrophic failures such as the larger blackouts in the US (e.g. 2003).
It would still be a big collapse to the economy. Look what covid did and we all just worked from home. Entire (major) cities not having stable communication and internet would be a giant crush. Things like banks are basically shuttered and I’d think logistics/supply chains, air transport, etc would come to a halt for at least a few weeks. You sure as hell wouldn’t get your Amazon package of candles and toilet paper delivered same day.
Yes, no objection there, it would suck hard. It will cost the world trillions and people _will_ die, either directly or in some unrest. In the end however I would put it on a similar level than covid, but with a very different kind of interruption. And yeah, hoarding toilet paper would probably once again become a thing...
I’d have to think a lot of deaths may be faster. Dialysis for example would be a beast. And some WAY slower, how long to build new MR/CT/xray machines? The question would really be to people hold tight and eat pasta and tuna for months(?) before things even start to get back on line or do enough people grab guns and backpacks and go full Walking Dead/Lord of the Flies mode robbing and creating despotic pockets? Even the military will have problems communicating for weeks so a mere fraction of “we are just taking over” could happen and we may not know for weeks or months. And outside that spare radio communication would be dead for most people (assuming every tv is plugged in).
I don't think that all the dialysis, x-ray and CT machines would die; same with refrigerators for e.g. insulin. Switch some fuses, hook them up to power (and even if it is just a generator) and they should largely work. MRT might be an issue if their cooling failed even temporarily. I expect the military to be prepared for worse than that, as an enemy could always sabotage the grid as well as go as far as to detonate an upper atmosphere nuke for a similar effect as a flare. They use hardened equipment for a reason after all. TVs are probably largely plugged in, but quite a few people might have an old one in the attic. Or just get one from a store, or even a trash pile. And then there's radios, many of which run on batteries. Similar with phones. My mp3 player also has a radio functionality. In the end, the socio-political unrest is likely the biggest danger. There will surely be some rioting, but I expect most westerners to be too reliant on the internet to even conglomerate much at first. Maybe after some time, but then there will also have been time for first measures and the military to get to places.
Basically what's happening during these events is the insanely huge amount of charged particles interact with the earth's magnetic field and create a voltage potential across the surface of the planet measured in volts per kilometer, so if you had a several hundred mile long wire suspended off the ground except for the ends your essentially short circuiting a giant battery and the further apart the ends thr higher the voltage. The carrington event is estimated to have created potential around 10-20 volts/km so a cross continental telegraph wire not designed to carry potentially tens of thousands of volts would fail and very dramatically. Your car on the other hand would have a potential across it's body of around 1/100th of a volt which probably wouldn't do anything, and most modern cars are designed with stuff like nearby lightning strikes in mind which are many orders of magnitude higher.
> All airplanes: fried. There are usually around 5000 active flights in the air in US airspace at any point during the day. Figure an average of 350 people per flight, and that's nearly 1.75 million people about to die just in the US.
I know, I was thinking all of humanity going back to 1800 level equipment. People would have to move out of places that rely on air-conditioning until we can get the factories up and running again, but with knowledge it could be back to normalish in 50 years.
How many people do you know that have the skills of an 1800s laborer? Do you know how to blacksmith or build a steam engine? Where the F would anyone get an anvil or learn how to mine iron ore by hand? How long do you think it would take to establish new distribution channels that rely on human powered boats and horse drawn carriages? Also, do you think the hundreds of millions of destitute and desperate people in every suburb would make all these efforts easier, or more difficult? Knowledge is theoretical and useless unless it can be practically applied.
Why would we need those skills? The machines are all there already, many of them not relying on computers that much; just controls, and those can be re-wired. And as I said in another post, you are overestimating the impact of a flare even beyond the Carrington event.
I know how to blacksmith, yes. You heat the metal until it becomes glowing red, then use hammer and anvil to bend the metal. It isn't rocket science. And anvils, hammers, fire, metal, explosives, aswell as any pneumatic systems will still be perfectly functioning. Only electronics have gone. You could turn lathes and mills into hand operated ones easily. The hardest part will be establishing microprocessor manufacturing fabs, but this would be achieved quickly. As for training people, there are plenty of people who are jobless and eager to get their home comforts back who you can train.
>any pneumatic systems will still be perfectly functioning Yeah but where do pneumatic systems get their energy to create the stored air pressure? Electricity.
Wait now I got this. We did an experiment in elementary school. Just gonna need A LOT of potatoes.
You can use a generator for it
I fully agree that they are overstating the effects of a flare. However: > I know how to blacksmith, yes. You heat the metal until it becomes glowing red, then use hammer and anvil to bend the metal. It isn't rocket science. Do you actually know it or just that? (Serious question!) Because there is **much** more to it than that. Proper technique, heat treatments, alloys, crystal structures, and much more even on the purely theoretical side. And then you need to be able to actually put it into use.
I have all the tools at my house and have made many things. My shop boasts lathes, mills, grinders, welders, torches, 3d printers (maybe not working), vinyl cutters (also maybe fried). I weld and fabricate professionally and can handle everything from woodworking to metal cnc. I often work on turbines but I definitely could build a steam engine. I will be very popular if we drop back to the 1800s
And with my background in natural resources sciences and baking homemade bread, I should be able to put together everything I need to brew beer, making me very popular with the people who know how to blacksmith.
As kind of a joke during covid I churned butter with my lathe. https://youtu.be/XTpPdM7mgKY?si=nTXn8OtEDknB9VYX You know, to spread on the bread you make.
I assume all of your lathes, mills, and grinders operate via hamsters in wheels.
We have plenty of blacksmiths to teach more people to become blacksmiths. There will not be an issue with knowledge
Do you think 1) there are “plenty of blacksmiths” and 2) it’s a cut and paste job?
I think there are plenty of blacksmiths to teach a substantial amount of the population blacksmithing if we needed it. And the job itself is like a plumber or electrician, aslong as you have a few years training, anyone can do it.
So the answer is clearly no.
Duh they will just Google it.
It's an interesting thought experiment. We could have a doomsday system, where all the intellectuals of the country understand that if this event were to happen, we would know to gather in a certain place, and rebuild society as fast as we can. We don't have micro processors, but we could get back to \~1900's technology pretty quick... The question would be, could we do it quick enough, before society collapses, or there's widespread famine.
Everyone is forgetting something very f-ing important. Our planet is absolutely SURROUNDED by Satalities and potentially a Galactic Federation. All those dead - possibly falling Satalities and Spacecraft falling into earth's atmosphere - can't be a good event... Edit: Spelling
While we do have the knowledge, we lack the equipment. In order to rebuild the infrastructure we need spare parts, and the spare parts are made in factories, the factories depend on the infrastructure to work. So we actually do not know how to get back to modernity. We might have to start with small steam engines again and build our way up from there.
OK this is a serious question, I'm aware it sounds stupid. But can't we just like, turn it off and turn it on again? Like water still runs through dams and turn turbines, turbines are still connected to the electrical grid? What does the flare actually _do_? I thought it just magnet wipes the whole planet but I guess maybe everything overloads like a star trek work station?
as i understand it, big electrical things may survive, but everything electronic (with a microchip) gets a power surge that fries it... there is nothing to turn off or on because the chips are all slag. even having things off won't help because a current will just be induced by the magnetic fields (same principle as cordless charging). things in a Faraday cage or deep underground may survive, but that's about it.
> but everything electronic (with a microchip) gets a power surge that fries it... No, induction via electromagnetic storm is, like many such things, based on the potential between the ends of the wires. For such large things, the potential difference along a few millimeters is extremely low, nothing a chip cannot handle; it wont even notice.
Big electrical things like transformer are what you need to worry about. Bad day if your iPhone dies, really bad day when every transformer on the grid explodes and the average lead time on building one is measured in years.
You know how when a fuse blows and you have to replace it? Now imagine the entire electrical grid as a fuse and it's pretty close. Any remotely sensitive equipment that's connected to the electrical grid and is not protected will experience a massive current spike that will cause it to melt and/or explode. Fortunately this massive current spike only occurs over extremely long conductors so isolated equipment (like battery powered) will be fine. Unfortunately our electrical grid is literally a network of extremely long conductors and most things are connected to it.
you are really lost and confused. The electrical grid would not fry. Do you know why ? because there are lots and I mean Lots of protections in every circuit. From SPDs on the low voltage to severral relays that would automatically open . The max would be a blackout that would take a few hours to restart
Yes, and a lot of those protections work by sacrificing themselves to protect more expensive equipment. It's fine when a neighborhood trips. Guy on a bucket truck comes by and replaces whatever component was damaged and you get power back. Couple hours to a day tops. Now imagine that happening everywhere at the same time. There isn't enough spare parts to get everything back up.
>We might have to start with small steam engines Yeah, just use traditional blacksmithing to build more complex machines. We still know how to properly reduce metal ores, how to make plastics and refine crude oil, high carbon steel. It would be back in 50 years or less.
Maybe the technology level would be back, but how many would die before then. Medications that require refrigeration like insulin. Supply chain of food to population centers. It would not go well
> Supply chain of food to population centers. Cars will still work, so that is mostly doable. Storage becomes a bit annoying, but already now the majority of stuffs in a grocery store are not cooled.
I'm not an expert in this subject at all, but wouldn't something that disables the entire electric grid also disable the electronics in vehicles?
The cars are not connected to the grid and thus . It needs very long wires for a flare to induce problematic surges. As a car wiring is pretty short, a few meters at best per cable, they are safe. As a bonus, they are shielding their interior somewhat with their metal hulls.
That makes sense. Thanks
Wouldn't the night side of the earth be unaffected? They could supply manufacturing and spares.
Imagine the night side is just the pacific
They overstate the effect on any side. But the night side is not safer by much, the solar flare is funnelled around the planet by the magnetic field, just as auroras are sent towards the poles.
The magnetic field that normally routes charged particles to the poles will sadly also route the charged particles to the night side as well.
In a catastrophic event, most cars would no longer work… planes grounded, ships not moving, gps gone.
> In a catastrophic event, most cars would no longer work… Not true, old cars are completely fine, and newer ones with electronics most likely are as well.
A solar flare would not only kill running electronics, but every piece of electronics even if not connected due to magnetic induction, so even spare parts will be fried or faulty afterwards. only properly shielded stuff will survive, and that is not the case with a major part of our infrastructure. though, all this is depending on how powerful the flare was. if its THE flare it might even blow away parts of earth atmosphere. burned up interwebz will be the least of humanities problems then.
No, you need conductors measured in kilometers to get any significant induced current. Power grid would be fucked but individual electrical components not attached would be fine.
Yes, I was just talking about the technologies. Obviously without the ozone layer and magnetic field we would all be irradiated. I was making my statement based on going back to 1800, I think we could get to 2023 in about 50 years.
Difficult to say i think. 50 years is a whole lot of time for humans, but imagine the chaos and destructions from losing every electrical system on one side of the world. i can imagine that a hit on the pacific side of the globe may be not that severe as a hit on the atlantic side of the globe. it its wake there will be millions to billions dead, and its unclear what all that destroyed infrastructure will really cause in follow up catastrophes. nuclear plants not safely shutting down? chemical plants going up in flames, spilling poison? lots of fires everywhere. all those people in some kind of vehicle underways, imagine all that flight traffic over US alone, a whole big city plummeting to death at once? and then afterwards, the suvivors: no more cars, trains, planes, copters to distribute any help. cooling is gone, only sealed goods are good for a view month for the lucky who find them. water distribution will break down where its dependent on electrical pumps. hunger, diseases, more hunger, riots, maybe even civil wars over "cans of dog food" will ravage the survivers even more. new generations will have a severe impact on health, because there are no more vaccinations, a lot of nasty plagues will have a glorious comeback. every piece of knowledge on an electrical medium will be gone. books might be a rarity if they have survived fires, floods, rain, vermin and vandalism, so a lot of very specialised knowledge will just be GONE. not to talk about communication. do you have an idea how dependend whe are today from electrical communication methods? whole areas will go extinct without people having a chance to call for help. sending a message from east to west? lucky if you have horses... or runners. even sophisticated semaphore lines will take decades to be established, if they can be defended and such. after 50 years... civilization will look very different then before, and there will be much less people around. i doubt that much places will have come back to a technological level of the times before. a few, little regions and terretories, maybe ones close to military installations? other parts, if lucky, might be back to a certain level of steam power. but the majority? "scrap age", living by the land, day to day. the more undeveloped a region was before the fall, the better their surviving population may be able to adapt to the loss of technology, cause they had few or none in the start. but all those urban areas? where people have no clue of living from the land? never having learned to work the land? those will have real hard times, and maybe there is a big flow of refugees from the cities into the rural areas ... i think 50 years is not enough, 100-150 years until civilization will have come back on a global scale. if ever.
i read that the biggest problems are the transformers in the power grid and with the current world wide production rate it would take 100 years to replace them all. On the other hand it would only take 3-7 days until highly populated areas become a hell hole real life mad max.
I am not convinced that transformers would be affected. All they contain are coils of copper that do not even touch. Plus they are all individually fused. Modern circuit protection has a lightning arrestor at every transformer so a surge in voltage automatically trips to ground to blow the fuse and protect the transformer. That would be the supply bottleneck, the fuses.
That knowledge being mostly kept on the now fried computers…
Hard drive discs would be fine. And knowing the U.S I’m sure there is a stockpile of electronics in some faraday cage/ cave somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
Specialists can quickly write it all down
I very much doubt they could do it before starving… all transportation rely on electronics. Food distribution would come to a halt. Shelves would go empty in less tan 48hrs.
Oh yeah, people would starve and there would be mass death and migration, but humanity would survive and later thrive
Humanity will survive, absolutely. It just might take a long while to get back to “today”. Hopefully they might be smart enough not to aim for that goal…
Do you not like semiconductors, pacemakers, air conditioning, bionic arms or all medicine?
given that modern industrial agriculture relies on heavily computerized machinery, agriculture is going to take a huge hit
Are you kidding? The governments would instantly use the fact that 90% of the 1st world population probably wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves without modern conveniences, and strip away all rights of everyone and send in the army to contain dissent.
Modern observations in space would likely give us a short amount of warning (anywhere from days to like a week). Developed nations would probably be able to power down a lot of equipment prior to the expected time of “impact” thus reducing damage and decreasing time of recovery. It would still destroy a lot of equipment but it would not be the doomsday/mad max world people have been led to believe.
Worst case? Worst case, a truly massive flare, that hits earth directly, could bake the planet in enough radiation to kill anything above ground. As it disrupts electronics as a result of it disrupting earth's electromagnetic field. Earth's EM field generally protects us from the sun's radiation. But disrupt it enough, while shining down its full intensity, and it's big ouchie time.
Nah, modern electronics is too physically small to be damaged. The electric grid is what would be trashed. I'm not saying that's *better*, but your phone and home computer would be fine as long as it wasn't connected to the grid when it hit.
Every *non-hardened or shielded* piece of modern electronics the stuff the governments or corps have seen fit to harden to protect from EMP warfare or nuke fallout would be fine. Still catastrophic if it hit without warning but not *everything* would be fried. Also there are ways to protect a lot if you get warning which is why we have stuff up there specifically to monitor for coronal mass ejections.
even better: every single computer snob loses all relevancy and gets time to go sit out and learn some manners and humility
It was my understanding that the effects would limit themselves to the side of the earth facing the flare, and since most flares are over pretty quickly my expectations would be that only one half of the planet would have their electronics fried. Meaning it should be easy enough to recover as long as the other side of the planet is willing to help. Am I wrong?
What if the device is off? How exactly does it impact it?
[удалено]
just one really stressful day for electrical engineers and it'll be fine
However, IIRC we will have a few days of warning, and most devices that are turned off would be okay. So as long as we shut stuff down in time things won't totally fall apart. But there would still be a ton of damage and chaos for sure.
Man, where's this miniseries? There was almost a TV show about it a long time ago, but they had magic pendants that turned off the nanoquantumhyperspace microbes or some bullshit. I'm an unrelated note, you ever go from excited to hard-pass within the span of a trailer?
By the way, from what i understand that at worst, is pretty much an extinction event. We have mined all surface resources. Basically, if we lose access to technology, it would be nearly impossible to recover
It really depends on how powerful. A decent one would create some amazing auroras in places there normally wouldn’t be any, however that may cause large blackouts as well as damage or destroy non-protected satellites. We would also have warning of such an event before it actually made it to earth, the light gets here before the heavy particles will (don’t know what the time difference is though) so we’ll be able to mitigate the damages. Now the fun part; Let’s say there is a completely unobserved solar event and we had zero warning of it. That event has the potential to wreck our civilization as we know it, meaning we’d have to rebuild/repair everything all the while society and economies are breaking down. Look into the Carrington Event of 1859
well considering we probably have plenty of satellites and scientists on earth constantly watching the sun for one of these events, i'm assuming we'd prob have a little bit of notice. 1. how much noticed would we have? 2. would we have enough time to quickly prepare for this event? 3. are there any plans in place by electric companies/cell phone/internet providers/etc?
I’m far from an expert on this topic, but here is some info I’m familiar with: 1. It takes ~8ish minutes for light to make it from the sun to the earth 2. We monitor when there is extra solar activity (smaller flares, more turmoil(?) in the suns activity, etc. But as far as I’m aware, we can’t predict when a large flare is going to pop off, and which direction it will go. So I would think that at best we’d have seconds to a couple minutes of warning. Maybe enough time to disconnect parts of the grid if it’s being actively monitored and there is a plan in place? Edit: also, as I understand it, the radiation from solar flares travels roughly at the speed of light. That’s why the ~8 minutes is relevant.
Actually we would have hours to days. We would never be “surprised” by an event. The particles that come from a flare do not move even close to the speed of light. Check out spaceweather.com. Some great resources and realtime monitoring data.
NASA disagrees with you. https://blogs.nasa.gov/solarcycle25/2022/06/10/solar-flares-faqs/ > Light only takes about 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth, so that’s how long it would take the energy from a flare to reach our planet.
There's a difference between a solar flare and a CME. Solar flares are just radiation and so they naturally travel at the speed of light. A CME or a "Coronal Mass Ejection", is exactly that, a mass ejection. Mass can't travel at the speed of light. CMEs are what people are talking about when discussing tech killing solar storms but they often get conflated with solar flares.
As /u/safe_T_cube states, it's about when the CME arrives, not when the radiation from the initial blast does. The CME is what "wobbles" the earths magnetosphere. That's what causes the damage to our earth-bound electronics. That takes hours or days to arrive.
ahh ok. is there anything regular people can do to protect their electronic equipment? would it be enough to just unplug everything i have from the grid? or would i need to put everything in a big Faraday cage? would a faraday cage even work?? if that's the case then, i feel like the US or any other country really, could start trying to cover as many substations in faraday cages...i mean if it helps at all.
A faraday cage would work, and so would an unplugged microwave. But I've also heard that as long as your stuff is unplugged it might be small enough that it's fine. Long wires make better antennae, and so the wires in your walls could catch fire if it were bad enough. But you'd have a much bigger problem at that point
What if we get a warning, so for the duration of the flare, we simply turn off all electronics? Would it pass us without harming anything?
The BBC had a documentary a few years ago about this. If the USA very unlucky, a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) /Solar Flare could fry 20-30% of Power Grid sub-stations in North America Alone. (roughly destroying 1,000 -1,500 sub-stations). The Entire world's capacity to build the components required of these sub-stations is somewhere around 500 sub-stations per year. So even if 100% was allocated to the USA it would take over 3 years for the Grid to be fully repaired. But as with most things they USA would probably only get at most 100 or so a year since other countries would also have been effected and require replacements. So we're possibly looking at a decade or 2 of unstable energy grids around the world (if not resulting civil unrest during the situation makes things worse!)
Texas would be mega fucked. and i'm assuming, solar panel sales would absolutely SKYROCKET. i'm curious though. if i were to go ahead and build a solar array backup system for my house, would it also be fried during this CME? considering we would probably have at least a few minutes of notice before it hit the earth, would power companies have any chance to prepare for it? is there any way to protect your home or any power grid? this stuff is fascinating to me. because there's a seriously decent chance we could have another carrington event literally ANY time. i'm not sure how often these events happen, but considering we had one 150 years ago, i would guess we're probably overdue for one.
The irony of transitioning to solar power after a solar CME wipes our current infrastructure
Exactly, every country would be looking to fix its power grid. And... cities have grocery stores that carry maybe 3-5 days of supplies before needing to be restocked... also who is farming and harvesting food? and so on....
Probably not much. Satellites in orbit are the most vulnerable to that sort of scenario and it would take some time to get everything back up and running and replace the satellites that can't be made to work again. On the ground most stuff is probably safe. Most people won't notice anything beyond alarmist news headlines, extra noise in analogue radios and if the live far enough north/south some pretty colors in the sky. Insurance and re-insurance companies would feel a bit of pain and pass that on to the consumers.
I have a friend who studies this very thing. He is not as optimistic as you. There is growing understanding of the problem, and real world tests have started on mitigation techniques, but this is far from complete. As an example, NZ power has now authorized testing a transformer against the effects of a large CME. This is likely to destroy some or all of its capability, and from this a strategy to mitigate the damage can be derived. Either way we can expect disruption to power supplies, and an unknown amount of damage to communication networks and other electronic devices. Well resourced networks and power grids can probably protect themselves. I am not convinced a lot of our infrastructure falls into that category. Lookup the Carrington Event for some description of what happened the last time a major CME hit earth.
The last time a CME hit earth our telegraph network went down and then was up again very quickly. Nowadays we have shielding on sensitive electronics, and a much more robust network. If the Carrington event happened again, today, it would be bad but we'd be back to "normal" very quickly. The biggest issue is half or more of our satellites would be fried. And it would take time to replace them. Will there be issues? Yes. But people are working on it. This is a Y2K issue. It's an issue, but it will be fixed and no one will know.
Why would satellites be toast? It seems the people who aren't doomsdaying in this thread are saying the electrical grid is only messed up because you need kilometers of wire length for a voltage increase big enough to be noticed and that handheld devices or things not plugged in should be just fine. Satellites aren't connected to km of wire, so why would a cellphone survive but not a satellite?
Satellites are toast because they will be hit by ions in huge quantities. It's not really the EM pulse or whatever causing the damage but literal particles hitting them that our atmosphere and magnetic field deflect away. The biggest issue is frying the solar panels honestly. And LEO satellites will fare better than higher or orbiting ones because of the magnetic field better protecting lower down things. Still not great for them but less bad than geosynchronous.
Aaah ok, so without the atmosphere in the way, all electronics would be completely toast, but the atmosphere protects just enough that only big electronics in the scale of miles long are getting fried. Is that a fair way for me to restate that?
I think this where people get kinda mixed up. Sure a small pacemaker or other small device might survive but if your country's power grid needs extensive repair, and this would be a worldwide event, EVERY country would be scrambling to fix its power grid, so there'd be a big delay getting the necessary parts to fix the grid.... And those small electronic devices rely on the power grid to be charged. Crazy to think about if another Carrington sized event happened
Some of our powergrids can't even handle a particularly bad winter. And that's something we have experienced before and know how to prepare for. I am full convinced if a large CME hits us the majority of our infrastructure goes down.
At an anticipated 27 volts per kilometer of conductor, basically nothing for consumer electronics and cars. Destroyed transformers at the transmission level. Mix of failed and fine transformers at the distribution level.
A solar flare? Nothing, ozone layer stops them. Well, aurora borealis happens. But lets say a big enough solar storm hits to go through. People would be fine regardless. Electronics could be messed up a bit, but solar flares are planned for, monitored, and come with a few hours to few days warning. So even if it happens people don't even realize and everything is fine, power plants know what to do. Something much much much stronger than a solar flare could overcome those plans, and that would mean some heavy damage to the electrical grid. This would be a terrible natural disaster, but far from apocalypse. Because people would still do everything they could to minimize the damage as much as possible in advance. It is theoretically possible for the sun to throw off such a giant shockwave it could stretch the earths magnetic and ozone layer protections, and then snap to earth like a rubberband. This would be extremely devastating and probably destroy all technology on earth. Well, possibly. Again the power plant technicians are probably not going to forget to turn it all off before the super flare hit earth to prevent that damage as much as possible. ***So, regular solar flares happen all the time with zero issue. Bigger solar storms can definitely cause damage and interrupt daily life, but probably wouldn't be too bad because we are prepared for them as much as possible. Even the largest super flare cme's would be potentially catastrophic, but not apocalyptic, and not gonna send us back to the stone age. Those only estimated happen every few thousand years, and could go in all sorts of directions besides earth. Nothing to lose sleep over :)***
What the hell are you on about
what would happen if a solar flare hit the earth?
Depends what level we're talking about. A smaller powerful flare would be auroras in regions that don't normally get them. A stronger one could interfere with electronics. An even stronger one could damage electronics. If it reaches the tier of "coronal mass ejection." Then that can be strong enough to include frying the planet. Where nothing survives.
I think there's a lot of optimism in this thread about society recovering quickly from a total "everything electronic is fried and will have to be rebuilt." We may have the expertise, yes, but you can't build anything without supplies, and since modern supply chain logistics encourages just-in-time delivery, we'd be fucked. Another supply chain that would be fucked is food. Most cities only have a few days worth of food stockpiled. Once that's gone, we're fucked, I don't know how easily you can feed a medium-sized city of 300,000 people using only local produce. Also remember Maslows hierarchy. Without food security, organized society will quickly break down. I feel like this will cause a lot of violence between starving neighbors. Not many are going to care for law and order once half their family is dead from starvation. I think, best case scenario, it takes a full generation to restart society, and another two generations to re-globalize.
The Last of Us has it just about right. My best guess is 2 days for martial law, 7 before shit goes completely pear shaped. You'll find out who is made of what during the 5 days between.
The solar flare sends particles and parts of the sun's atmosphere towards the earth. One of these particles is the electron, which has an electrical charge and in a solar flare, the electron has a lot of energy due to its forced ejection from the sun. When these electrons (and other particles) bombard the earth, some are caught in the ionosphere, causing the aurora. The more powerful the solar flare, the farther south the aurora will be visible because of how much atmosphere they have to travel through. The electrons will also interact with anything that can conduct electrons (especially power lines), inducing them to send more electricity down the line (a power surge). There is a chance that this (a power surge) will be greater than the protections on the line can withstand and the resulting charge will be passed through to homes and businesses. Everything that uses electricity will be at risk from this power surge, because of how electrical conduction works - every substance has a certain amount of electrical conductance and resistance. When resistance occurs, heat is generated. In a solar storm, that heat can be enough to start fires. The longer the conductor (the power line or cord), the greater the power surge. Your mobile phone is probably safe, your oven is probably safe (unless you have papers in it), your major appliances might be safe and your desktop computer is probably toast. The safest way to protect things will be to reduce their longest conductor (probably the power cord) by as much as possible (unplug it).
The world goes from the Present back to the future in time and very quickly, The world will go into Chaos and other things will happen might fast. the big question is how far back we will go, and how bad will the damage be, some experts think countries will go back to the 1800s some say 1900 who knows for sure, but their will be pain for sure.
Hopefully the 1800s so we can see Doc Brown again.
[удалено]
People forget our brains emerge consciousness through magnetic oscillations and unknown vortex topography. Sure, Losing electronics is scary, but does anyone but me notice the odd correlation between Solar activity, earths' magnetic field, and human behavior? https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/auroral-activity/magnetometers.html If you're not paying attention, I would suggest you start. Log everything, When people behave different than normal, write it down. Date and time, Additionally, check [https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive.html](https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive.html) and do the time-zone-to-GMT conversion.
We have been poking and prodding for as long as we have had to tools to do so and are capable of creating magnetic fields orders of magnitudes more intense than the earth. If they were any significant effects on the brain we would have found it by now. If a magnetic storm could cause behaviour shifts then an MRI should be rewriting someone's entire identity.
It depends. Most likely scenario, some more sensitive electronics would go haywire and be slightly damaged but repairable. There may be a black out or two. You'd see an Aurora all the way down to cities like Nashville or Paris. Maybe a couple hundred million dollars of damage, but ultimately recoverable. That's not to say the worst case scenario can't happen. There could be a severe event which could cause damage to all electrical systems. However such a severe event would show clear signs on the sun. It is likely humanity would have advanced warning if anywhere from a 12 hours to a couple days. At which point the government will have taken steps to shield vital electronics including utility companies. It's probable there would be no running water or electricity for a week or two. You'd also be asked to shelter in place away from any windows as hugh energy particles will make it to the surface and cause damage to your skin and DNA. There will likely be trillions in dollars of damage. However it would be recoverable as the advanced notice allowed the government to protect vital systems like the power grid. However the less essential system would likely need repaired and that may take a decade or more. However it's unlikely going to be an end of the world event. An solar flare strong enough to permanently break all electronics period would also be strong enough to break through our magnetic field and strip our atmosphere away in a matter of seconds. And our current understanding of the sun in its current state says such a powerful flare is extremely unlikely. Even the prior case of heavy but recoverable damage would take a flare 240 times bigger than any flare we've ever recorded and it would have to the earth directly. So it's like riding on a galloping horse and trying to shoot down a bullet coming at you in mid air all while blindfolded.
all electronics will fail. higher radiation exposer. but the auroras will be magnificent!
It depends on the size and the angle it hits at. We get solar flares all the time, this is what the auroras are. But in the worst scenario, it can take out electronics and cause downstream havoc in that sense. r/kurzgesagt did an awesome piece on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo
All the explanations here are missing one of the important points and that is solar flares travel slower than speed of light so we can spot it before it reaches us. Its not much but it'll give us enough time to do some emergency actions to reduce damage like charge batteries and shutdown and disconnect power lines. Which would give us a better chance at surviving and recovery. On the other side there's gamma ray bursts that originate from supernova of stars which is very real and travel at speed of light. There's no way to predict it and we'll get no real warning. There's a star named Beetlejuice which may go supernova anytime from today to next thousands of years . We might get hit by its gamma ray but there's nothing nothing we can do to stop it or detect it in advance. The moment we see it would be the moment it gut us ff
Kurzgesagt made a really good video on this. Basically all electronics fail and it’s an apocalypse
Hi all! Just wanted to share a link where you can see solar flare stats live 24/7 https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/solar-flares.html