Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

spaceweatherlive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 418 posts

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#361

Post by instagib »

hooch wrote: post #191
close04 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 8 gallons per person per day. Water is heavy—8 pounds per gallon The average person needs far less than 65lbs (30kg) of water per day, which is a third of the average male weight in the US. By medical standards humans need more like 8lbs (under 4l) per day for men and 6lbs (under 3l) for women. Less if your rationing and not exerting yourself.

OP’s factoring includes washing, food prep, all that other stuff.

1.28gal for toilet flushing the most efficient toilets. 1.6gal for normal and it can be worse for older ones.

I was on a hike that recommended 1 gallon to complete it for 5 miles round trip.

I’m sure there is a method to the madness of 8 gallons per person that isn’t easy to see. There is a lot of rounding up with the military also.

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#362

Post by 14 »

I have to say wow! I am on Vancouver Island here in Canada and I picked up my daughter last night from a friend and she starts showing me these pictures of the sky and she saw the northern lights display! We never see them down this low. The sky looked amazing with colors of purple and a slight pink color. I always thought they were a green themed color but wow she was lucky to catch that. I of course didn’t see any of it :(

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#363

Post by samatman »

fl0ki wrote: post #111
sa46 wrote: post #84

Earlier 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.

It's just as simple, frankly. A gallon is four quarts, each of which is two pounds of water. A quart is two pints: and a pint's a pound, the world round (Yes, most of us are aware of the irony of that couplet).

These are all things which are generally known to Americans. But HN has an international audience, for whom "gallon" is presumably somewhat vague.

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#364

Post by bongodongobob »

fsloth wrote: post #322
groestl wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s lack of strong enough political consensus But this _is_ the psychological deficiency of our species.

No, the fact people can have different opinions is a richness. The point of political activity is to align these opinions.

Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Climate change is a liberal hoax to steal money from you. Jesus is coming soon and will rapture us into heaven. Antifa wants to burn down your city. Gays are destroying family values. Women should be forced to have children if they got pregnant. Taxes are theft. The US should let Russia take Ukraine. The earth is 2000 years old. Weed should be illegal. More guns will solve crime. Elementary schools are radicalizing children telling them they should be gay and teaching them white people are evil.

As long as these beliefs are allowed to be mainstream we are 100% fucked.

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#365

Post by catlifeonmars »

tithe wrote: post #11

Implications! - Power systems: Possible widespread voltage control problems and some protective systems will mistakenly trip out key assets from the grid. - Spacecraft operations: May experience surface charging and tracking problems, corrections may be needed for orientation problems. - Other systems: Induced pipeline currents affect preventive measures, HF radio propagation sporadic, satellite navigation degraded f…

I wonder if pulsar based navigation is affected (probably not)

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#366

Post by philipwhiuk »

hnlmorg wrote: post #340
fsloth wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also good at response. Ozone situation was fixed and now we actually track the asteroids.

We neither have a plan to fix the existing ozone hole and nor do we have a way for preventing an asteroid collision (assuming we are lucky enough that the theoretical asteroid that hits us is one of the subset of asteroids we can actually track) So no, neither of those problems are even remotely fixed. We’ve just done the bare minimum to check the “we’ve reacted to a crisis” box.

We do have a way of redirecting an asteroid.

The problem is that we won't learn about it early enough for our current level of technology to do anything about it.

We'd need 2 fully-operational Starship launches or 4 SLS launches or 10 Delta IV Heavy launches with 25 years notice to redirect an asteroid like Bennu.

Now obviously 2 is better than 4 is better than 10. But the 25 years notice is a big problem. The momentum change you need to deliver the later it gets is so much larger.

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#367

Post by hanche »

bongodongobob wrote: post #364
fsloth wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the fact people can have different opinions is a richness. The point of political activity is to align these opinions.

Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Climate change is a liberal hoax to steal money from you. Jesus is coming soon and will rapture us into heaven. Antifa wants to burn down your city. Gays are destroying family values. Women should be forced to have children if they got pregnant. Taxes are theft. The US should let Russia take Ukraine. The earth is 2000 years old. Weed should be illegal. More guns will solve crime. E…

Agreed, but: The words “are allowed to be” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Who allows these beliefs to be mainstream? Does anybody have the power to not allow it? The thing, is, we cannot get rid of those beliefs by force – and arguably, we should not even if we could – so where does that leave us? Reason does not seem to help. It is hard to avoid a feeling of despair. But we cannot allow ourselves the luxury.

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#368

Post by beeeeerp »

keepamovin wrote: post #356
beeeeerp wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was really interesting! What about COTS hardware on the ISS? I haven’t heard of major failures with things like their laptops.

Thanks! :) Haha! I think the ISS hull uses classified shielding to provide some kind of advanced protection. But it's expensive and based on materials science activated with electric fields. I think they also have some detection system to detect and correct single-event effects. Just info tho, I don't have an article source for this haha! :) Even then astronnauts may be advised to not use some devices during specific…

I think it’s worth mentioning here COTS hardware is also very resilient (things like ZFS without ECC excluded) to radiation these days.

Here’s a video of a GoPro riding through an electron beam: https://youtu.be/Uf4Ux4SlyT4?si=6z6626hrdXhvZ2x_

There are lots of bad things happening while it’s in the middle of the beam, but it appears to function normally after completing the pass.

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#369

Post by toomanyrichies »

While the photos of the auroras which have been circulating are certainly impressive, this has got me thinking about the Carrington Event [1], as well as a possible future event of equal or greater magnitude.

I'm not an electronics expert, but I'm guessing that the reason we're so vulnerable to such an event today is because our infrastructure was originally built without such an event in mind, and now the upgrade cost is prohibitively expensive. But hypothetically, if a sufficiently-damaging coronal mass ejection occurred, such that we were forced to rebuild Earth's electronics infrastructure and electrical grids from scratch, what design changes would we make the 2nd time around? For example:

-adding built-in shielding to protect against electromagnetic interference

-implementing redundancy in critical systems to maintain functionality

-adding early warning systems so that we can take preventative measures like shutting down vulnerable systems

-building a more decentralized electrical grid with smaller, interconnected systems to limit the extent of disruptions

Would taking these steps be sufficient to protect us from major CMEs, or would it be like throwing pebbles at a giant?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs

#370

Post by dgacmu »

Animats wrote: post #273
icehawk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PJIM is at 'Action' now: ' A Geomagnetic Disturbance Action has been issued as of 22:15 on 05.10.2024 to protect the power system from damage or disruptions due to increased geomagnetic activity.'

Not good. PJM has a plan. Geo-Magnetic Disturbance (GMD) Operating Plan (EOP-010-1)[1] Usage of some specific transmission lines has to be kept below certain values. Right now, this is a low-load period late at night without bad weather, so there are no additional actions ordered. The system load is probably within the more restrictive limits just because it's late night. If problems develop, you'll see more actions…

Weather has been good today in the region - low heating and cooling load, and it's a weekend; demand is comfortably low (currently about 72.5GW with a forecasted peak of 77, vs an actual peak of 85GW yesterday). Should keep things pretty boring across PJM.

It's a good thing this didn't happen in July/August.

(For folks around here, the pjm now app is a nice way to grab current power demand/tie flows/alerts)

Post reply on HN