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Powerful solar eruption is heading for Earth and could supercharge the northern lights over the US this week (www.space.com)
submitted 18 hours ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 28 points 17 hours ago* (5 children)

Modern infrastructure is surprisingly resilient so it wouldn't really have the effects that you're imagining, but even if it did, it wouldn't help a bit.

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  • [–] 8 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

    This. Keep in mind the Carrington event happened at a time in history when electricity wasn't even fully understood. The little electrical infrastructure that existed at the time was primarily telegraph lines. All of these lines were bare copper wire and the system was powered by battery (generators didn't exist yet) so you'd have a battery room/shack, a telegraph key and register and then miles of exposed copper wiring.

    The most protection these systems had were very crude lightning arrestors going into the telegraph building to prevent a lightning strike from killing the operator. But its no wonder the exposed wires were sparking when the Carrington event hit. It wasn't uncommon to run these wires pretty close to one another (for alarm/fire telegraph systems) because under normal conditions a 1" air gap was more than enough protection for these low voltage systems.

    Modern electrical infrastructure is significantly more robust, not to mention we understand solar flares and EMP fields much better than we did back in 1859. Even a flare more powerful than Carrington, or even an EMP from a nuclear blast, wouldn't be as bad as the doomers claim.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

    That's not really the point. A Carrington-sized event wouldn't need to take down every single bit of electronics to cause society to collapse. All it would need is a significant disruption. Yes, there's more defense to it, but it's far more complex than it was then. You apparently don't remember a good chunk of Texas going down due to ice. It would only need to take out a handful of places to make the whole grid fail. Hell, just 14 years ago a power outage hit over half a billion people in India due to severe heat. And you're talking just about western countries and modern transfers, but that was only 14 years ago. Many rural areas havent been upgraded like that because they haven't grown in generations. In 2003 a power outage took out 50 million people in the US. Our grid isn't even close to as resilient as you think it is.

    Vehicles. Modern vehicles are not going to survive an event like that, or an emp. As society is completely based on vehicles, it would collapse. Europe and japan may be better suited to nominally function because electric trains are better shielded because of the amount of electricity it takes. But it wouldn't be enough to transport the amount of food and people to take them to continue the economy.

    Satellites. Only military satellites are shielded, as the cost to launch satellites with lead in them is enormous. Instant communication is key to our world economy. The world economy is key to society.

    Aging infrastructure. Old powerplants keep getting extended longer and longer because despite more power being available, the demands keep going up.

    Hell even if all the lightbulbs blew, it would take down the economy. Can't work indoors until billions of lightbulbs are made. Work stops, society stops.

    My point with this, isn't to spread doomerism. My point is waving your hand at something is just as bad at doomerism. Basically calling a Carrington event a nothing burger is absurd and a potentially dangerous mindset, especially spreading it. However most people live their lives as if nothing will ever change in any meaningful way anyways, so it's about the same. Which is why we are where we are with climate change.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    Youre both right. We do have a lot of hardening against such things, but getting hit with a sizable flare could really really disrupt things. It would take a really hard hit for the doom to happen. After a hit, it would be a hard question of what gets fixed first. Would society collapse? i dont think anyone can really know until it happens. Do those people in Indiana have power yet?

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