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The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

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Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#61

Post by bee_rider »

verve_rat wrote: post #54
lxgr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can common rooftop solar setups actually deliver power locally with the grid being down? I would imagine them taking at least frequency synchronization from the grid, and probably also not faring too well without the grid to compensate for variable output when a cloud passes over them etc.

Batteries and inverters would be common in most installations, surly?

Batteries can cost more than the solar cells themselves. Plus, the older lead-acid batteries required some maintenance. The easy path is to just stay grid tied and not bother with a battery.

If all the power lines on earth went down, I bet communities would connect people with panels to people with batteries, though, somehow or another.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#62

Post by Aardwolf »

dash2 wrote: post #57
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.

Japan after WWII recovered pretty fast even though the entire world had been set back a lot. Human knowledge is the key resource and electrical surges don't wipe that.

Unless it manages to kill enough hard disks in data centers to truly lose a lot of knowledge...

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#63

Post by blacksqr »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27
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.

> 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.

That's like saying the only limiting factor for the Titanic reaching New York is the big hole in the side of the boat.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#64

Post by kjkjadksj »

dskrepps wrote: post #9

I've wondered for a while. Lots of people seem to think a Carrington Event will simply fry all small electronics and make everything stop working, but from my understanding all it'll actually do is cause power surges in long transmission lines and disrupt wireless signals. Apparently telegraph lines sparked and shocked people. So what effect will that actually have now? Will a massive power surge go through my house…

I had lightning hit the pole near my house. Anything with a circuit board that was not on a surge protector died.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#65

Post by tree_enjoyer »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27
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.

> 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 coordinate responses?

If transformers do blow, the big ones at substations and stations... We don't tend do keep spares of those on hand. They're very often made to order, with a multi-week lead time, and that's with a functioning power grid to produce and coordinate them, again.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#66

Post by Tangurena2 »

hparadiz wrote: post #17
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.

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 utility. The small ones are not the problem. The big ones - that are the size of SUVs and houses - are the ones that the grid depends on.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#67

Post by kjkjadksj »

piva00 wrote: post #19
graemep wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also lead to the collapse of vital systems: transport, utilities, payments.... > Hoaxes will spread without rapid fact checking. They already do. I think you have found the silver lining: hoaxes will spread a lot slower.

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.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#68

Post by Turskarama »

dash2 wrote: post #57
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.

Japan after WWII recovered pretty fast even though the entire world had been set back a lot. Human knowledge is the key resource and electrical surges don't wipe that.

That's a very different circumstance though. For one thing, the majority (about 3/4) of Japans manufacturing was actually still intact, it just wasn't up to the task of keeping up with Americas war machine (which it frankly wasn't even at its peak).

They also, as a key point, imported a lot during this period. That's something you can't do if everyone else has also collapsed.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#69

Post by api »

jron wrote: post #42
api wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are many times larger it sounds like they could be more like an EMP from a thermonuclear bomb. Looks like they happen on average every few thousand years. We really should be looking at how we recover from such an event, and whether we can do things in the design of power grids to minimize damage. If there were humans living on the Moon or Mars these seem like they could be even more fatal unless they were li…

I think this is the key takeaway for me at least. If we don't blow ourselves up first, the sun will basically blast us into the stone-age every 6000 years at best or 200 years at worst.

You can also add this to the Fermi paradox list. If intelligent life is rare, solar systems where intelligent life can develop the type of technology capable of space flight might be rarer still.

For all we know the Sun is actually quite friendly to this. Most stars might behave this way more often. If that's true then intelligent life able to harness electricity and all it entails would be very rare. If our Sun did this every, say, 25 years there would never be an industrial/technological civilization here... or at least not a sophisticated one able to build things like spacecraft.

In any case this is something we should be studying a lot more than we are. It is a far more tangible and realistic existential threat than very hypothetical AI apocalypse scenarios.

Re: The Carrington Event of 1859 disrupted telegraph lines

#70

Post by JohnClark1337 »

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…

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