How would home installation solar panels be affected by this? Would they be ruined as well?
What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#12I wish no one would link to anything from Gawker
It's because Reddit is leaking.
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#13The pictures of the flares are really something when you consider how incredibly bright the sun is normally.
This one sentence irked me a bit though: "We don’t have a great way of forecasting solar flares, and they hit the Earth too quickly for NOAA to provide airline companies with advance notice (it takes about eight minutes for sunlight to reach us)."
Those are two true statements, but they aren't really related. Regardless of how many light minutes away the sun was, it wouldn't make any difference, because even if we had a satellite right near the sun watching for flares, there would be no way to get a signal back to earth _faster_ than the light.
I'm assuming what the scientist meant was that after any warning signs of a flare, the flare itself comes too quickly to have useful warning. (Which is completely unrelated to the time it takes the light (either from the warning signs or from the flare itself) to reach the Earth.)
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#14I hate it that so little is being done to prevent the damage that will be caused by a CME. I think it's very likely that a CME will hit the earth within the next 100 years. If that will happen, western society will probably collapse. The only reason we can feed everyone right now is because we automated lots of things. The whole food chain is ran by machines, none of which will still be working after a CME. We won't…
Well, we'll have months to prepare, and at worst case, all we need to do is to cut our power supply for a couple of days. Yes, we need watch systems. Luckily we do have them, and they are getting even more precise with time. We got very luck that it didn't strike us sooner. Also, yes, the entire planet disconnecting for a few days is indeed a tragedy. But not at the dimension you (and the article) are describing.
> Also, yes, the entire planet disconnecting for a few days is indeed a tragedy. But not at the dimension you (and the article) are describing.
Disconnecting for a few days is different from "our major electrical infrastructure will take months to repair."
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really know the physics of this, but it seems CMEs only really effect power supply, not electronics in general. So we are taking massive damage to power infrastructure, but that can be repaired, and there are already mitigation plans in place. I'm probably missing something?
No, I think Avalaxy is confusing CMEs and EMPs (he's concerned about tractors, trucks, sundry battery-powered computers, and hugely inductive industrial machinery) and he's extrapolating wildly from his own inability to think outside the box (e.g. how checks / offline card processing work, how computer experts might be useful in a world where a good chunk of computing infrastructure suddenly gets fried, etc). A big C…
> CMEs and EMPs
I'm confused how an EMP and a CME differ. Aren't they both magnetic disturbances that affect electronics due to the fact that electromagnetism is one and the same?
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#16I hate it that so little is being done to prevent the damage that will be caused by a CME. I think it's very likely that a CME will hit the earth within the next 100 years. If that will happen, western society will probably collapse. The only reason we can feed everyone right now is because we automated lots of things. The whole food chain is ran by machines, none of which will still be working after a CME. We won't…
What do you guys think?
It depends on if you believe the following (from the article):
Regions with high percentages of at-risk
capacity could experience long-duration
outages extending for several years.
Take a big city like NYC. Without electricity there is no water, no sewage treatment. Within a few days, at-risk people start dying. By the thousands.
And let's say that power can't be restored for years (see quote above). Then what exactly do you do with those people? They can't live in NYC without electricity. Period.
So do you try to move them to refugee camps in the country? Really? Eight million plus people? How do you feed them? How do they get water? And if the problem is happening in NYC it's probably happening all over the country, so it's not like all of the USA's resources can be devoted to just the NYC metro area.
There are farms and houses in the country that have outhouses and have water wells that can be pumped by hand. They have stored food. But that's such a small portion of the country. 90% of the country would have a hard time surviving an extended period without electricity.
Fortunately this is truly a first world problem. There are so many people in other countries that live a day-to-day subsistence life, without electricity. They grow their own food (or trade locally for it), they don't depend on it being delivered every few days to within a few miles of them. Those people will be fine.
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#17I hate it that so little is being done to prevent the damage that will be caused by a CME. I think it's very likely that a CME will hit the earth within the next 100 years. If that will happen, western society will probably collapse. The only reason we can feed everyone right now is because we automated lots of things. The whole food chain is ran by machines, none of which will still be working after a CME. We won't…
The article is unspecific about the short-term vs long-term effects.
Assuming a perfect world where there's a 12hrs notice and everyone is informed, we unplug all devices and shut down the power grid. We plug them back a day later, whenever we notice the ground current isn't steong anymore. Would we still have a lot of damage?
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#18I hate it that so little is being done to prevent the damage that will be caused by a CME. I think it's very likely that a CME will hit the earth within the next 100 years. If that will happen, western society will probably collapse. The only reason we can feed everyone right now is because we automated lots of things. The whole food chain is ran by machines, none of which will still be working after a CME. We won't…
> Fixing all of that would probably take years, and in the mean time we would see looting, famine (and huge starvation), violence, etc.
Things get fixed much faster than you think. The tramway in Hiroshima was running again within a week after the bomb destroyed the whole center, for example. Scientists said that trees would not grow there in 100 years, yet the city ended up looking like a normal city within 30 years after the bomb.
So, "society collapse", meh.
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#19I hate it that so little is being done to prevent the damage that will be caused by a CME. I think it's very likely that a CME will hit the earth within the next 100 years. If that will happen, western society will probably collapse. The only reason we can feed everyone right now is because we automated lots of things. The whole food chain is ran by machines, none of which will still be working after a CME. We won't…
> Fixing all of that would probably take years, and in the mean time we would see looting, famine (and huge starvation), violence, etc. Things get fixed much faster than you think. The tramway in Hiroshima was running again within a week after the bomb destroyed the whole center, for example. Scientists said that trees would not grow there in 100 years, yet the city ended up looking like a normal city within 30 years…
It doesn't take that long for people to become frustrated at a lack of services they depend day to day on thoughtlessly. Also energy delivery systems that traverse state lines are not a city tramway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977
Re: What would happen if a massive solar storm hit the earth?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I think Avalaxy is confusing CMEs and EMPs (he's concerned about tractors, trucks, sundry battery-powered computers, and hugely inductive industrial machinery) and he's extrapolating wildly from his own inability to think outside the box (e.g. how checks / offline card processing work, how computer experts might be useful in a world where a good chunk of computing infrastructure suddenly gets fried, etc). A big C…
> CMEs and EMPs I'm confused how an EMP and a CME differ. Aren't they both magnetic disturbances that affect electronics due to the fact that electromagnetism is one and the same?
Perhaps there's a difference in intensity and duration.
Wikipedia indicates[0] that an EMP could generate 50kV/m electric fields lasting ~1μs, a second component similar to lightning lasting ~1s (electric field intensity not listed), and a third, long-term component that lasts hundreds of seconds.
CMEs, it appears, only generate the third, long-lasting type of electric disturbance. According to NASA[1], these have electric fields up to 26V/km, which is a much lower intensity, but for a significantly longer duration.
[someone please check my numbers; they seem wrong but I'm posting them anyway; my guess is misinterpreting electric field potential as actual induced voltage]
To estimate how much power would be dissipated in transmission lines, let's consider a disconnected 1km wire with a DC resistance of 30 milliohms per kilometer (based on [2]) and ignore all other losses. The so-called E1 pulse at 50kV/m would generate a voltage of 50MV across the wire. Let's assume that lasts 200ns. Power is V^2/R, or (50MV)^2/30mohms=83.33petawatts [3].
That sounds enormous, but it's for a short time. Energy is Pt, or 83.33PW200ns=16.7GJ. To find out how much the wire heats up, let's assume a perfectly straight copper conductor 2cm in diameter. That's a volume of 1kmpi(1cm)^2=1.257m^3 or a mass of 2815kg[4]. Taking energy/(specific heat * mass), we get a temperature rise of 15410K[5]. Copper melts at 1357K, so if the math is right that transmission line would be toast. These numbers seem way too large.
An E3-type pulse from a CME lasting 1000 seconds would generate up to 26kV across the length of wire. That's (26kV)^2/30mohms=22.5GW. Over 1000 seconds that generates 22.5terajoules[6]. I'm not even going to bother calculating a temperature rise for that (okay, it's 20.8 million K[7]). Again, this seems several orders of magnitude off.
I've ignored capacitance, inductance, increased resistance with temperature (up to 170milliohms if I used [8] correctly), and no doubt a lot of other things that would significantly affect the current flow, so keep in mind that these numbers are probably way off. I've also ignored heat dissipation to the air, which would mitigate the energy input a bit but also keep the resistance lower. I welcome any corrections.
Assuming these numbers are completely bogus, it seems to me that an EMP would be more damaging to small electronics, while the CME would be more dangerous for transmission infrastructure.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#...
[1] http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4189
[2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/
[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2850MV%29^2%2F30mohms
[4] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1km*pi*%281cm%29^2+*+de...
[5] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16.67GJ+%2F+%28specific...
[6] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2826kV%29^2%2F30mohms
[7] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2826kV%29^2%2F30mohms+...
[8] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/restmp.h...