61–70 of 163 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, not if you worked on a MacBook using an ungrounded socket in Europe, for example. Forearms are not that strongly insulated
I went to Europe years ago for work. And the adapter for my macbook work gave me wasn't grounded. Whenever I plugged my computer in I could feel a buzz when i touched the aluminum body. Others thought I was crazy. But it freaked me out and only charged when I wasn't touching it. You make me feel like I wasn't making it all up. haha!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being properly prepared for a once-in-15k-years storm would likely require such a cost over such a long time for the expected benefit that it's not worth it. Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs. Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or…
> Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs. Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar event has to be understood as meaning able to cause havoc because that's what matters over the specific strength.
> because that's what matters over the specific strength ... but the specific strength does come into play when discussing the costs of hardening and mitigation. This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event.
This should not surprise us, by the way. I'd expect major solar storms to follow a Zipf's law distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc.
So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was.
All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.
Google says we can have 1-4 days of warning for this kind of thing. Is there any approach to circuit breaking that can help appliances against such an event?
The Carrington Event followed the magnetic field lines of a previous flare and the particle flux reached Earth much faster than expected.
>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.
In the UK, the National Grid Operator maintains "black start" plans[0] for rebooting the entire national electrical grid from a zero power situation, and they pay individual plants to conduct annual drills. However, for obvious reasons, these plans have never been tried in anything close to real-world conditions, and it's something of an open question whether it would work. [0] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/202…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar event has to be understood as meaning able to cause havoc because that's what matters over the specific strength.
> because that's what matters over the specific strength ... but the specific strength does come into play when discussing the costs of hardening and mitigation. This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event.
>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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
"telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks"
No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even a Carrington-level event, which refers to a solar coronal mass ejection (CME) observed in 1859, is indeed a concern for modern electrical infrastructure. During such an event, geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) could flow through electrical grids, potentially overheating transformers and causing them to fail. These GICs are particularly harmful to transformers because they can lead to half-cycle saturation,…
> geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) could flow through electrical grids, potentially overheating transformers and causing them to fail. yes, but such currents are typically measured in milliamps or, during the biggest storms, amps. Most utility scale transformers would be needing DC currents of the order of thousands or tens of thousands of amperes before failure. Even then, overheat sensors would detect such a…
Said that third world countries would fare pretty well though.