Wouldn’t such an event likewise knock out most automobiles, appliances, electrical systems, etc almost immediately leading to the collapse of urban food security and so on? Loss of internet seems like a minor inconvenience if you’re trapped in a city with a couple million hungry people and there’s no way to flee but foot or bicycle.
No, there is no fast (short wavelength) component to the variation of the geomagnetic field associated with coronal mass ejections caused by solar storms. Generally CME distortions of the Earth's magnetic field are large scale and slowish and only couple to and induce currents in very long conductors like the power grid or pipelines. Nothing human scale and disconnected from the grid will get damaged (like cars or phones). And most stuff connected to the grid will be fine, it's just the transformers infrastructure that will get damaged (not that that is just a "just" it's nasty with 2 month production wait times).
There are solar storm events which can induce faster timescale geomagnetic distances. Primarily the x-ray and EUV light from the solar flares themselves ionizing the upper atmosphere and the currents resulting from that. But to have a bright enough flare to do that in a damaging way would require an exceptionally large active region. So large you'd be seeing it with the naked eye on Earth before things went down.
Another fast timescale solar caused geomagnetic disturbance can happen from relativistic "sudden energetic particles" sometimes directed at Earth. But generally the amount of energy in these particles is minor compared to the component in the flare light (~2/3 on average) versus the CME if one happens (~1/3).
So, no. It wouldn't immediately knock out society. Especially with solar panels everywhere. But it would knock out the power grid for at least 2 months before new transformers could be built and installed. That might take down society.
Transformers themselves are pretty robust and it's believed that even high levels of GIC would not generate enough heat to cause widespread, permanent physical damage to modern equipment[1]
A more realistic scenario is that GIC would result in grid instability by causing protective relays to "trip" offline. Enough grid infrastructure tripping in succession could produce a cascading failure and widespread blackouts on a large grid. As seen in the 2003 Northeast blackout[2], it can take days to recover from such an event.
The more I have looked into this over the years, the less concern I have in these events being a major issue.
There is two things that puts my mind at ease.
1. Our electrical infrastructure, while flimsy in some ways is a lot more resilient than we take for granted. It is said the power grid fails in theory but works in practice. But given forward warning, it is possible to shut off or limit the energy flow prior to the event - it will mean voluntary blackouts for a few hours but it is better than a forced blackout for a few months.
2. The forward warning is actually really good now even being up to 2-3 days in advance, just look to any Aurora prediction site, we are all over tracking this stuff. For all the fear of a repeat Carrington event, we would know it is coming and deal with it.
We know when CME are coming but we lack any reliable ways to predict how geoeffective they will be. That's mostly a function of the magnetic handedness of the active region it comes from and if it will arrive at earth with their magnetic field in the right orientation (downwards out of the ecliptic plane, -Bz) to efficiently reconnect with the Earth's magnetic field.
There's been many a time when some large sequence of strong CME come and everyone expects intense geomagnetic activity but there's no -Bz so it just buffets things for a bit and causes auroral oval effects. Whereas other times some small lone barely CME will arrive with 7 hours of -20nT Bz and causes 45N aurora.
What I'm saying is that the people in charge of chosing to shut down parts of the grid are not ever going to get a confident assertion that damage will happen if they don't. There will be enough uncertainty that this kind of pre-emptive action days in advance will not happen.
At best we'll get a few hours of time to mitigate when the events arrive at L1 and the solar monitoring spacecraft there like ACE give actual warning.
> But given forward warning, it is possible to shut off or limit the energy flow prior to the event - it will mean voluntary blackouts for a few hours but it is better than a forced blackout for a few months.
The last few years have shown that leadership in certain areas has Cluster B personality traits, and will do the opposite of good advice just because it feels good to be contrarian.
The 2 month wait period for transformers both assumes that 1) there isn't a sudden huge spike in demand and 2) there isn't anything unusual getting in the way of building them, such as the grid being down literally everywhere.
Given how reliant we are on electricity and the internet I don't think it's actually a stretch to say it would be a society ending event.
I had the experience of my entire states internet going down from around 24 hours. Not only my fibre internet at home but also my mobile data was down, although phone calls still worked.
Contactless payments and other card payments at shops stopped working. Also, most of the ATMs were down.
Luckily I found one ATM that still worked. I think it had some kind of dial up backup mechanism.
In practice all large enough transformers will have protective equipment to disconnect them from the grid in conditions of overcurrent, such as might be caused by exceptionally severe solar storms or nuclear EMPs. This has its own downsides (turning on the grid from scratch is an extremely complex operation as power plants themselves need electricity to operate) but the risk of a substation transformer exploding as a result from incorrect line voltage is minuscule IMO.
It is possible that smaller control equipment might fail as those are usually more fragile electromagnetically speaking, but once again that would be a problem for getting power back online, not in the "transformer explodes" kind of way.
If they're oil cooled transformers then they do have a tendency of catching on fire. It won't take half your street out but I wouldn't want to be 15 feet from one that's on fire.
Oh stop fearmongering. "A tendency of catching on fire" makes it sound like that happens every week. Fires in substation transformers are extremely rare and any given transformer is unlikely to see any significant incident in its rated life.
Of course if one gets hits by a meteorite and catches fire then keep a safe distance. Definitely more than 15 feet. In normal operation they are extremely safe though.
Having been a first responder to a fire in a shopping centre sub station/transformer where a technician lost their life in the incident, I do have a limited amount of experience around transformer fires, and I don't necessarily see my comment as 'fear mongering'.
Particularly when the context is the question the person above me asked (failure modes of large substations). Under normal operation they are safe, and in abnormal circumstances they can catch on fire.
When I was a child, a pole-mounted transformer on my street exploded, making a huge, earth-shaking boom and taking the top of the pole it was mounted on with it. It scattered debris widely.
A hazmat crew in full bunny suits showed up to clean up the mess. The story I remember (this was a long time ago) is that PCBs were present -- I think they stopped using PCBs in these things since then -- and that was why the hazmat team was needed.
It was quite exciting, though, and remains a vivid memory.
I was trying to buy the outrageously overpriced popcorn at my nearby movie theater with a $20.00 and the youngster told me that he can accept cash. I told them that that is not legal . He directed me to the box office to purchase a "rewards card" worth $20.00 so I can use it to buy popcorn.
Turns out in my state there is no requirement for business to accept cash and there is no Federal law requiring business to accept cash.
One key point that a lot of long term preppers make is that prepping with a LITTLE extra canned food is never a bad idea. Having the pantry stocked for a month, not a week.
It isn't about the survivalist fantasy of society crumbling into pieces over night, it is the idea of being prepared for those outlier systemic failures. A power failure for a few days, a flood, short term shipping delays etc.
As an aside, one thing they like to stress the most is, the single best thing you can do to be prepped is to be in as good of health as you can manage. If something goes down and you drop dead from a stress induced heart attack, all the other stuff is pointless.
But don't tell them how much food or other preparations you have in detail. If you have to go a month without the ability to get new food you don't want the entire neighborhood at your door. Better to generally recommend how much food they should have and encourage them to get it themselves.
Depends. When the chain-gang slaves drag the local warlord's battle-bus into your neighbourhood to confiscate everyone's food, can you fight-off his soldiers on your own?
Not likely, too small to be impacted from such a charge.
In general, Solid state drives as long term storage is probably OK on the time frame of a single decade but they degrade with time. Some of the more dense ones even show noticeable degradation in less than a year as the error correction slows transfer speeds.
I have had some USB sticks that have held information from 2006 but it hard to tell what state they were in.
On the one hand, I lived approximately half of my life before the mid 90s, so I should be fine not having the Internet around. But, then I think about how many things I do on the Internet now and wonder how hard it would be to go back to the non-Internet way of doing things. I can remember paying bills, mortgage/rent, taxes, etc. without the use of the Internet, but it is so much easier now that it would be a royal pain to go back to the old way of doing it. I remember the old ways of making doctor appointments, buying movie tickets (finding out when movies were playing!), contacting family and friends, looking up information, buying things, etc. It would suck to have to go back to that world now that I know how much easier things can be. Just today I was reading people’s comments on a forum and they didn’t make much sense until I suddenly realized that they had no conception of buying movie tickets without assigned seats. In the old days you would have to show up at the theater, stand in line to buy tickets (with no way to know how many had already been sold), then go into the theater and hope there were still decent seats left. It would stink to go back to that situation.
I'd say the issue is not just "going back to that situation", it's the world being forcefully thrown back into that situation one random day in an instant, with maybe a couple hours advanced notice, which is the bigger issue. Also the impact on other systems such as potentially long-term significant damage to the electrical grid, it's not just losing the internet. It would have an immediate, out of the blue, devastating social/industrial/economic/civilization impact.
Most stores I shop at are unable to take money if their internet is down. And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change. And I have no way of getting cash with ATMs which seem to be via some sort of network. I don’t think I can even make phone calls or send sms without IP transit available to the phone companies.
> And, to be a grumpy old man, it seems most of their employees lack experience in offline credit cards or cash and making change.
Usually the point of sale system doesn't allow any offline credit.
Similarly for the making change, most point of sale systems track exact change very closely, and trying to do something outside of what eas entered into the PoS causes issues with logging/audits. (Yes, including the "I just found a $coin, can you give me different change" situations) That's before you get to the people who try to fast talk you into giving extra change.
PoS Performance is also usually horribly slow and requires manager overide for anything off the happy path.
Source for the above: worked as a cashier in the late 2010's.
this, movement of discretion from the employees talking to the customer to some central platform with the possible outcomes premapped out, seems to be a general trend for highly cost conscious large stores. so often the people at the desk say i should go online to do stuff their computers won't let them do for me.
> In the old days you would have to show up at the theater, stand in line to buy tickets (with no way to know how many had already been sold), then go into the theater and hope there were still decent seats left. It would stink to go back to that situation.
Don't most theater still work this way? The ability to buy specific seats at a theater isn't an Internet thing.
It is astounding to me that in the US the seats at the movie theater are not tied to the tickets. I learned it a few weeks ago watching that Seinfeld episode and I still can't understand why it works like this..
One theater near me trialed something like that for a while, but they stopped using it very quickly. I can only assume it was confusing people and they lost sales; other than that one instance, I didn't even know this was a thing for movie theaters. They do keep track of number of seats and won't over-sell, but it's not normal to have assigned seating.
Someone is unaware/doesn’t care, so they sit in your seat before you get there.
You arrive and ask them to move, they apologize and say “oh but my friend is here, I see some empty seats up there you could take instead!”
So you go sit in those empty seats, hesitantly. Then someone comes in and tells you that you’re in their seat. You try to explain the situation but…
Etc etc etc.
This has happened to me multiple times on long-distance transit before (bus/train), it ends up being chaos if just a few people don’t perfectly follow the assignments.
I have been in this situation too and tried to do the ‘polite’ thing and sit somewhere else. Then of course another group comes along and I am in their spot. So now when this happens I refuse the suggestion and ask whoever is in my seat to move to their original seat. It’s the only proper solution to this problem.
The time I saw it, it wasn't at the seats like the other comments are suggesting. It was at the ticket line, an old couple who didn't understand why they had to pick a seat, or what the screen in front of them represented, or something like that. I don't remember how that was resolved but they did end up getting a ticket and going in. After seeing that I'm assuming there were people who didn't bother and went somewhere else.
Many people arrive late, while the theater is already dark. It is easier to grab an empty seat than fumble around trying to identify the right number. Some theaters used to have ushers with flashlights, but they wouldn’t want to pay them now.
Well, the solution is simply, don't be late and don't disturb all the others.
I also am quite late in many situations, but in a theather you just go, if you can manage to be seated, before it gets dark. Everything else is just rude.
Humans lived for thousands of years without the internet or WWW. The use of them has only been widespread for about 25 years. I assume we are smart enough to eventually figure out how to go back to how things used to be.
About a year ago, I got nervous and spent some money on some of those survival dried food packs, currently sitting in the basement (and hopefully not rotting).
I have a charcoal grill and a gas grill and probably should stock up on propane and briquettes. I have enough ammo to last a while. Chickens in the backyard, some vegetables growing in the garden. Solar panels but no battery, so, not off grid yet.
But realistically, if such a solar apocalypse happened, the panels and many other electronics will fail, communications will break down, marauding gangs will take over in many places, until the military can impose order. And there’s the issue of potable water.
There’s not much chance of surviving past the first week or so, at this level of prepping. Let’s just hope this flare never happens.
I also think the idea of "there's not much chance of surviving past the first week or so" is probably a bit more pessimistic than I'd offer, but what do I know.
Okay that explains the down votes. But it's naive to assume people will behave in a civilized manner when civil authority breaks down.
Water is a major issue. We have some bottled water in the garage, maybe enough for a couple of weeks or a month if used carefully.
We also have an underground stream that a pump drains about 5 gallons every 10 minutes to keep from flooding the basement. Unfortunately, it relies on the grid electricity. I'm not sure what would happen if it stopped for very long. If I could figure out a way to keep the pump going even during a prolonged outage, it would be an unlimited source of H20.
But for most people, water is going to be a show stopper, if the municipal pumps and filtration systems fail.
The North Texas "once in a century" ice storm from a few years back took out much of the electrical grid for longer than a week. At least where I live, which is spitting distance of Dallas City Hall, not all that remote, we had no Internet for about two days, gas was gone for about a week, electricity was totally out for the first two days, then came back for about two hours a day for the next two weeks due to the rolling blackouts. At no point did we have no water, but we had no hot water. Also, the city never plowed the street where I live, so we had no city services like trash pickup, and no deliveries, from any service at all, for two weeks.
That certainly hurt, but civilization didn't just go down the drain instantly. Most people have enough food and water to survive a couple weeks. You might be uncomfortable, not showering, but it takes a while to get to the point of shooting your neighbors. Unless a formal announcement comes out saying the government has dissolved and laws no longer apply, you better be damn sure services aren't coming back, because it's not like you just get amnesty for murder and theft because you had no running water for a few weeks.
Well I'm glad things were calm. I doubt we'd see a breakdown of civil order all that fast, but if we had a solar event or an EMP event that pretty much took out global communications and transportation, that's going to be one unholy mess for months.
The Amish in Pennsylvania and thereabouts, with their horse-drawn buggies and 18th Century lifestyles, might actually do okay, but from what I've read, they do use electricity for lighting, pumps, clotheswashers etc. So even they would have to adjust.
> Okay that explains the down votes. But it's naive to assume people will behave in a civilized manner when civil authority breaks down.
I truly think it would take longer than a week for society to realize and accept that civil authority is actually gone, and running water would likely be among the last things to go.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html
The biggest recorded (X 28-45; Nov 4 2003) took out 12 transformers in South Africa. (It's been compared to 1859 Carrington.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms
Lloyd's did a 2013 report for North America, looks like that's kept updated.
https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...