Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings • Hacker News Board

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#161

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:18 PM UTC

eddtries wrote: post #149

ForHackernews wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very interesting hobby project that involves thinking about technology in a different way. It's not any more useless than Haskell.

I’ve written production Haskell that dealt with billions of USD transactions per day, fwiw

[deleted]

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#162

Post by 31carmichael » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 4:49 AM UTC

ryanblakeley wrote: post #42

dakial1 wrote: post #2

>A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society—potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds. I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.

I interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage. [1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare

I work in power grids, and I can also confirm that number 3 is not true. If a large number of high-capacity power transformers are required, we are in trouble.

Re: Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

#163

Post by 31carmichael » Fri, Oct 27, 2023, 6:51 AM UTC

danwee wrote: post #45

Pardon my ignorance, but a solar storm would wipe out offline harddrives/ssds/laptops?

No.