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Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

chris-said.io

21–30 of 69 posts

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#21
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a great starting point for the repo. The goal would be to have this layman-level knowledge like this and then flesh out the extreme technical details by crowdsourcing verified experts. I'm especially interested in how to organize traumatized people in a productive way, since that will likely be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.

Like a wikipedia, but condensed, useful, and navigable. Preferably able to store offline / locally or decentralized. Would have to identify what basis is necessary for rebuild and what is luxury. A large majority of things today are simply luxury. I love the idea of it though and would def try and contribute somehow even though my skill and knowledge base isnt comparable to others.

An offline dump of Wikipedia would be a valuable addition to such a library. I've been thinking of storing something like this on a durable laptop stored in a Faraday cage, along with solar chargers and so on.

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#22
post #2

This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?

Wikipedia is a quite good repository of all sorts of information. You can always clone that at put it on your computer for offline viewing.

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#23
post #2

This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?

If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either.

Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback books.

Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#24
post #2

This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?

If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either. Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback book…

Imagine that scene from Planet of the Apes where Gary Oldman powers up an old broken iPad. But instead of looking at pictures of his family he opens up a digital copy of "how to rebuild society after the end of the world".

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#25
post #7
post #6

> EMP attacks... For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...

An EMP attack would destroy the power grid, your modern electronics may survive but without anything to power them.

If it's just the grid that's gone, generators are available - hell I have a mobile one sat in my driveway.

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#26
post #6

> EMP attacks... For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...

An EMP attack is of course a plausible and realistic, but a rather costly, dare I say, somewhat of a science fiction formulation of an attack.

Any attacker is unlikely to choose the most costliest and fanciful form of attack. Wouldn't it be much more cost efficient to send multiple groups of people to drive around and snipe or blow up equipment of transformer stations at key places?

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#27
post #6

> EMP attacks... For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...

No. Optimal altitude for an EMP attack is actually a few hundred kilometers up. The "base case" usually considered in these scenarios is a nuke going off about 400 km over Omaha. At that altitude, the ionosphere helps you create a "slow" E3 pulse which induces a field in the tens of volts per kilometer at ground level; and since you can see most of the continental US, you have plenty of kilometers to work with.

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#29
post #2

This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?

If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either. Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback book…

But although github is centralized, git is distributed.

and tcp/ip was literally built for nuclear war.

This would be like tech prepper paradise.

We could sync our tech trees and rebuild!

Re: Solar storm risk and EMP attacks

#30
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tldr: Nope.

I think the answer is not "nope" but "probably nope". That video is perhaps overconfident in our ability to detect these storms. From the article: > One-third of major storms arrive unexpectedly, according to the SWPC’s own 2010 analysis. And that’s not just the small storms. According to a news article in Science, the SWPC might be also be poor at identifying the characteristics of severe storms, since they are so r…

Sometimes you get close enough to zero that for any reasonable application, the answer can be rounded to zero.
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