Google News: You will see the northern lights tonight!
HN: CME imminent, We're all gonna die!
Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
121–130 of 418 posts
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#122Can you really call yourself a prepper if you don’t have a faraday cage with a spare laptop inside? (The intersection of doomerism and tech is amusingly cyberpunk sometimes.) Actually, what’s the most useful way you’d prepare for a worldwide grid outage? This isn’t that, but sometimes I wonder if a future CME might be as catastrophic as some say.
Ignoring unrealistic preparations for most of us (such as bunkers and whatever else), an adequate supply of food and water to handle disruptions to logistics for a realistic amount of time must surely be the lowest hanging fruit (e.g. a month?). This is fairly trivial if you aim for things like rice and pasta, and if the grid goes down for longer than a month a lot of us are dying regardless of how we prepare.
>the grid goes down for longer than a month a lot of us are dying regardless of how we prepare.
This. When trying to make provisions for even modest disruptions, you quickly realize how herculean a task it is to be truly prepared. Unless you're already a self-sustaining farmer with a well/water source and other resources or (ideally) billionare-bunker capable, you can see how prepper-ism becomes a lifestyle beyond prepping for a relatively short period.
Making a choice between living life as it currently is and being prepared to survive indefinitely is a hard fork in the road.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to be a logistics officer for an Infantry battalion. Most of the comments down thread underestimate water consumption. Depending on the climate, you'll want the following daily quantities [1]: - 2-3 gallons for drinking - 1.5 gallons for hygiene (can skip for a while) - 0.5 gallons for food prep The planning factor for military operations was 8 gallons per person per day. Water is heavy—8 pounds per gallon—and…
> 8 pounds per gallon It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.
I don't think you can blame inch-pounds for this one- even though we rationally know it is heavier than most materials we don't "think of" water as heavy because modern society gives us the luxury of seldom having to handle more than a thirty minute or so supply of it at once.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anyone else was looking for the source of this, it's here: https://emergencyprocedures.pjm.com/ep/pages/dashboard.jsf
Fascinating, if anyone has info on other grids that share these types of alerts, pease link!
ercot (texas): https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/notices
miso (midcontinent): https://www.misoenergy.org/markets-and-operations/notificati...
ieso (canada/ontario): https://www.ieso.ca/Sector-Participants/RSS-Feeds/Day-0-Advi...
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Actually, what’s the most useful way you’d prepare for a worldwide grid outage? Be on a government payroll and have the skills necessary to repair the damage.
Or load on ammunition, and be ready for your neighbor to go cannibalistic within 3 months...
Days.
After the soviet union fell in Armenia there was no supply of food the first days. Also no gasoline nothing.
The first day people were normal. Second day people started stealing. Third day all birds and rats were shot for food. Luckely soon food became a normal thing again. But chaos is quickly there. I believe even quicker in rich western countries. Most men and women cant survive on their own for a week.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The water seems like the hard part. Are there any tricks for cheap, safe hydration for a family? I guess we could just start building walls of unopened water bottles in our basement… (In my teens I saw a family friend had a bag full of food supplies. I asked someone if that was a prep bag, and they said yes. I thought they were a bit weird. Now I’ve come full circle browsing Amazon for cheap doomsday food.)
Backpacking water filters aren’t all that expensive and work fine with most water sources. Wouldn’t produce enough to shower in but certainly enough that you could survive in a disaster.
I wouldn't think backpacking water filters would help much in for getting water from rivers / ponds in an urban/suburban environment? They'd take care of particulate matter and microbes but I doubt they'd do much for chemical contaminants.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walmart sells 5 gallon water totes for $15. that is essentially 5 days for one person. We have a few on hand (family of 4 plus dog) and every six months or so, I empty them, clean them, and re-fill them. Also, there are gravity filters that work great if you have things like creeks near you.. Berkey Filters are pretty good for filtering out contaminants, as well as 2-bag gravity filters that are really popular with b…
If there is no AC, and you are exerting yourself a lot (no car or transportation is down, more work to prepare food, even having to take a dump outside), 5 gallons is barely enough for one person to drink per day. You'll be sweating a lot more in those conditions. Another example is food in winter months. During a disaster, even with winter gear, your houee may not be heated. If it is -20C inside, your body will need…
> 5 gallons is barely enough for one person to drink per day.
OK, no. If you're running a marathon, in hot weather, you're at maybe a liter per hour. Unless you plan to run 20h marathons and the sun never sets, 5 gallon is well beyond drinking needs.
And unless you're able to exert yourself at that level at all, this isn't the "worst case", this is pure fantasy.
And if you're preparing for -20C in your house, I recommend investing in insulation, not more calories stored away. (I also question 3x, the figures I've seen point to 2x, with exertion somewhat counteracting cold)
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Oregon, after some severe forest fires, ice storms that shut down whole towns, and the possibility of a Cascadia Subduction Zone event (ie, ~9.0 earthquake) They recommend keeping supplies for 2 weeks to allow time for local areas to get regular supplies of food, water, etc. https://www.oregon.gov/oem/hazardsprep/pages/2-weeks-ready.a...
The problem with that advice is that anyone who could bring you supplies is also suffering from the same problems you are.
Nothing is perfect,but 2 weeks is better than 0 weeks, and enough for a wide array of circumstances
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of what makes me take prepping seriously is that the majority of payments are electronic now and there is no failover as far as I'm aware. In ~2015 I saw a power outage briefly take down the payment processsor at a grocery store. despite having cash I could not check out. If something like that happens but sustained long enough to cause a mob to loot the store (which the media would of course amplify), it wouldn…
It's really too bad we didn't have a major CME in the 90's. That was the perfect time for a good lesson in redundancy and why you can't and shouldn't jettison "the old ways" so quickly. Perhaps its not too late now, but the pain will be considerably higher. Earth lucked out in so many ways, but a CME spanking in the 1990's is asking for too much I guess.
I would like to think that the servers that run ACH networks, IBM mainframes that actually store your account balance, etc are shielded from CME and even an EMP.
But the vulnerable side then becomes the power grid and Internet backbone. Part of a resilient disaster plan would be to allow ACH and other payment traffic to take priority if we were relegated to a low bandwidth connection. If we cannot transfer money, we will collapse, plain as that, once panic over food security sets in.
An EE friend said that we do not have enough transformers to replace if a critical number of them fried. Substation level components could be a huge bottleneck if we had another Carrington event.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The water seems like the hard part. Are there any tricks for cheap, safe hydration for a family? I guess we could just start building walls of unopened water bottles in our basement… (In my teens I saw a family friend had a bag full of food supplies. I asked someone if that was a prep bag, and they said yes. I thought they were a bit weird. Now I’ve come full circle browsing Amazon for cheap doomsday food.)
Walmart sells 5 gallon water totes for $15. that is essentially 5 days for one person. We have a few on hand (family of 4 plus dog) and every six months or so, I empty them, clean them, and re-fill them. Also, there are gravity filters that work great if you have things like creeks near you.. Berkey Filters are pretty good for filtering out contaminants, as well as 2-bag gravity filters that are really popular with b…
I've got one of these in my garage. It provides a lot of piece of mind knowing water is solved for. I not a "prepper" by any means, but, realistically I need water every day or I will die. Spending a few hundred to ensure I don't die from dehydration during a natural disaster seems worth it.
https://www.surewatertanks.com/collections/products/products...