When I saw nightmare in the title, I expected something like humanity will be wiped out, or maybe just 90% of us.
Can somebody clarify?
Consider grocery shopping: what fraction of sales are online? What fraction in-store are card-based? Do the tills work offline, and if not, how fast can the cashiers work by hand? Does the store request resupply either automatically or via a manager looking at a spreadsheet, and if so, can the manager manage that without computer assistance? Do the freezers and refrigerators still work? Do the gas pumps used by the delivery trucks? Can current distribution warehouses function if there is no electric lighting? What are the power requirements of modern factories that turn ingredients into food products?
These questions probably have multiple answers, one for each different business, but the chain breaks on the weakest link.
Im not a ludite but I would say thats better to have a plan B in such case.
In any event, it is the kind of scale that only governments (and possibly Foxconn, Apple, Amazon, and Google) can really engage with.
How about shelter from the elements?
What's the plan B for that? These are foundational capabilities of 'civilization'. We can protect them, and take actions to be able to quickly restore, but 'plan B' isn't really in the cards.
I don't know if the same extends to other places, but once distribution and sanitation systems break down, which are heavily dependent on electricity, it'll become pretty clear very quickly just how ill-equipped we are for a world without reliable electricity.
I don't see how you can say with confidence "That doesn't happen with a solar storm". We have only had the electric grid for a short period of time & have not been keeping detailed records for very long either.
Many people depend on medical devices that will no longer work. All those people would die immediately.
Many people depend on lifesaving drugs. They will die in the short term (e.g. insulin).
Within a few months People will die from untreated water and starvation.
I doubt 90% of the population will die. You can look at the siege of leningrad and see that people survived years of a siege and I think 25% died.
People will find a way to survive even if it means eating bugs.
The currents induced by the grid burn out these transformers and they have to be replaced before power can flow again. But these are very large, long lead time items that we don’t leave just laying around. And now you need hundreds of them, but the supply chain to build them has collapsed.
Thankfully, most of these transformers are connected to grids that automatically detect the high DC currents and shut down. And this assumes everyone missed the massive impending space weather event and grid operators forgot to shut them down.
So it probably wouldn’t be that bad.
Oh you mean energy suppliers off-lined production temporarily and most resumed operation once the storm was over.
Totally the same phenomena.
Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
The doomsday people like to say we are 72 hours away from anarchy, and, if true, it will be the fallout from people instantaneously competing for very scarce resources that will be the real problem.
It'd probably be something like loosing 10 years of world GDP all at once. Probably pretty good for the environment if we used the opportunity to build back greener.
I suppose the immediate challenge would be how to organise food 7 days out if we got hit by something like that. Assuming people put in a desperate effort and sort that out somehow, then the medium term problem would be something like a long period where effective communication is gone and any JIT systems fall apart. COVID shortages times 100 possibly.
People living on an area with rivers and wild animals could do a bit better. Unless they are at reach of people walking out of the cities.
Think about a zombie apocalypse, but with starving people by the hundreds of thousands. Starving and, if in the US, armed.
Keeping food and water at home for at least for a couple of months is a very sensitive thing to do for this kind of events. Think about a new pandemic but this time the virus has 10% or 20% of mortality. Exactly.