The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines • Hacker News Board

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#71

Post by rwmj » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

arrowsmith wrote: post #39

rwmj wrote: post #11

> Astronauts would undoubtedly receive lethal doses of radiation, and even people on board airplanes could encounter dangerous levels. It sounds like a more immediate problem would be that all aircraft and spacecraft electronic systems would fail permanently? They wouldn't need to worry about the radiation doses.

Don't modern passenger jets have some kind of failsafe way they could still be controlled and landed safely if the electronics fail? I would assume they do. But then I know nothing whatsoever about aircraft safety and am only speculating.

Even in older jets the engines are controlled by electronic management units which take an electrical input from the throttle and decide how to turn that into valve actuations. There's a question (see sibling answer) about whether such electronics and wires are really vulnerable - maybe it only affects kilometers long runs - but if it is then I couldn't see the jet being flyable.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#72

Post by piva00 » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #67

piva00 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would lead to the collapse of modern society until/if we manage to rebuild it. Nothing in the modern world works without electronics and computers.

Most of the systems of the modern world were built in the pen and pencil days. We can go back to the 1940s if we had to I’d imagine. Especially if the national guard were deployed to maintain order.

The amount of data we processed with pen and pencil was multiple orders of magnitude smaller than what we do in 2023. We might be able to maintain a few systems chugging along with pen and paper but just imagine the sheer magnitude of all industrial control systems that rely on automation, every single one of those won't exist. Processing 2023 taxes manually, that's another hell by itself.

We will regress much further than the 1940s, we don't have living knowledge of how to keep complex systems working that way, we will need to relearn all of that while in the midst of absolute chaos. The main issue won't be technical but social, when civilisation is collapsing it's pretty hard to maintain order to bootstrap these complex systems with pen and paper...

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#73

Post by michaelsbradley » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

xattt wrote: post #3

HerculePoirot wrote: post #2

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3165629_Characteris... I'm reading this critical analysis of it (2013): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292848789_Geometry_... > The interpretation of individual rock art images and related art forms as local perspectives on a single celestial phenomenon requires a determination of scale, perspective, and temporal evolution. Peratt interpreted dotted circles and conce…

I’m trying to understand what kind of phenomenon beams a column of light into the sky from the South Pole. I can understand auroral curtains, but a cylinder beam sounds far-fetched.

Birkeland current

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#74

Post by maxerickson » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 1:28 PM UTC

Tangurena2 wrote: post #66

hparadiz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding it mostly effects large pieces of metal like copper lines but would be unlikely to create a significant charge in small electronics and wouldn't destroy solar panels or the vast majority of components. Any transformer pieces that are in a disassembled state prior to the event would be easy to put together and bootstrap any such event. Some locations like inside concrete buildings or under ground…

After a couple incidents where snipers shot at substations or hackers turned stuff off, there was a burst of worry about the fragility of our electrical grid. Of the large transformers that make up substations, almost all of them are unique. There is no inventory of spare transformers. Each one is custom made and takes months. The small transformers you see on poles are made by the thousand, and stocked at every util…

There's a difference between made to order and bespoke.

Of course, most of the discourse is hand wavy speculation, vs characterization of the existing stock of transformers, like what standards they are built to and the magnitude of an event that would certainly damage them.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#75

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 1:40 PM UTC

Turskarama wrote: post #55

falconinthesun wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's nothing in the article to suggest that these events actually affected the entire world. Most of the analysis seems to have been carried out in the northern hemisphere. If one of these events happened, perhaps it'd affect only one hemisphere or we'd have portions of the world unaffected or partially unaffected and able to provide assistance.

Half the world is still very different to one country. In fact, if the "once country" was _China_ (or Taiwan) it could be a civilisation ending event. We've built a house of cards, and while it does have some redundancy it's not all that resilient. Keep in mind the modern world as it is now hasn't even existed 50 years, it has never really been tested with a truly international disaster.

We’re just coming out of an international disaster.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#76

Post by namlem » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

bigyax wrote: post #43

A 1 percent chance of happening in the next decade. It's the inevitability of it that's most terrifying, society will fundamentally collapse, there's no way we could prepare for how rapidly our lives would be changed, and absolutely nothing we can do to to stop it. Only hope is that for when it happens it's far enough down the road for technology to have adapted to bring enough resiliency and/or redundancy into the g…

We could decouple transformers to stop them from being destroyed. Wiring is easy to repair, it's the transformers that are vulnerable.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#77

Post by tomjakubowski » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

b800h wrote: post #22

If these Miyake events were so spectacular, why do they not appear in the historical record? I appreciate that 774 was in the "dark ages" but something as impressive as the Carrington event would appear in some chronicles, surely? EDIT: Sorry, checked Wikipedia: "Annus Domini (the year of the Lord) 774. This year the Northumbrians banished their king, Alred, from York at Easter-tide; and chose Ethelred, the son of Mu…

Some random Australian gold prospector wrote about his experience (quoting Wikipedia):

Lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith, but always becoming a rich purple when reaching there, and always curling round, leaving a clear strip of sky, which may be described as four fingers held at arm's length.

The northern side from the zenith was also illuminated with beautiful colors, always curling round at the zenith, but were considered to be merely a reproduction of the southern display, as all colors south and north always corresponded.

It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded [...].

The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution.

Maybe it's just survivor bias but: crikey! People could really write back then!

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#78

Post by sulam » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

LeonB wrote: post #49

dwighttk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are uninstalled transformers even safe?

Provided they’re not connected to lengths of conducting material, they ought to be ok. Hard to be certain though, as transformers are more than meets the eye.

Right, you have to avoid the Decepticons.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#79

Post by forgetfreeman » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

dividedbyzero wrote: post #24

Turskarama wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big risk is a bunch of transformers blow up, essentially taking the grid down. Since we would have to bootstrap the grid again without the advantage of the grid... this would likely set civilization back pretty far, a new dark age is far from impossible.

Aren't transformers protected from this sort of thing nowadays?

No.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#80

Post by jakeinspace » Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

tree_enjoyer wrote: post #65

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a new dark age is far from impossible. Nah, it's just transformers and the power grid, that can be fixed pretty quickly - see the response after natural disasters, Ukraine's power grid being directly attacked, etc. The only limiting factor would be the availability of spare parts and personnel.

It's vastly different when it's a local outage and there's functioning equipment outside the effected area. How will communicate the needs of grid stations with no electronics, satellites, internet? How will this be coordinated? How will the trucks moving the equipment be able to refuel when the grid is down everywhere, and everyone is rushing to gas stations and clogging the freeways? How can even emergency services…

I wonder whether ships (nuclear and diesel) and diesel-electric trains might be an essential resource in slowly restarting the grid. If that equipment survives, it would be invaluable to have a few mobile GW of power to hook up to gas plants.