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nefitty

My list:

1. Solar flares

2. Rogue AI

3. World war

3. Water scarcity (tied to war above)

5. Pandemic

6. Climate disasters

My naive perception heavily weighs future possible technological progress. Solar flare collapse is basically unmitigable due to a combination of unpredictability and deep systemic interdependence and dependence on susceptible technologies. Some governments paid lip service to this risk in the past, allegedly pushing to plan for this risk. Ultimately, only some organizations will have the resources to sustain the acute impact of a solar flare, but what good is Google if they're the only ones with working computers?

With climate, I'm very optimistic about the innovation that will result from economic and social pressures. I think 10 years ago I would have rated it at #2.

Edit: What are the chances. As I wrote this, JET started live-streaming an announcement about fusion energy...

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Solar flares should be a lot lower on the list, as the bulk of the risk can actually be mitigated in the electric grid. Every few years the IEEE publishes an article on the risk solar flares pose to the electric grid, and how it can be mitigated by installing capacitors on the multi-ground neutral. Remember: solar flares induce current in long wires, not short ones, so the risk is not so great to individual electric devices were the electric grid protected.

Of course we're human and have a tendency to ignore large scale risks that haven't occurred in recent history as evidenced by the fact that no major electric grids have implemented this kind of protection. If we do get an 1894 level solar flare, many of the high voltage transformers will be fried. Some of them take months to build, so it would take years to recover from that kind of damage.

I'm a big proponent of the DOE's suggestion for a national strategic transformer reserve. They estimate $500mil (2017) would cover buying enough redundant transformers to resuscitate the power grid after a nationwide failure. Pre-covid, the typical lead time for a full scale transformer was ~2 years. I'm assuming it would take even longer now. I can't imagine how long it would take to replace our transformers if ~1/4 of the world also needed to do the same.

In my opinion, the reserve is cheap at 3x the price. $500mil is 7 F35 raptors, and we are buying ~130/year at this point. There are plenty of defense spending justifications for establishing the reserve - it would protect against EMPs and small targeted attacks. We are already seeing small arms attacks on high energy transformers, and last year someone tried to use a drone to take out a substation.

Not surprisingly, the biggest hurdles identified in the report were the needed land acquisitions and the logistics of transporting the large transformers.

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/04/f34/Strategic%20...

https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R43604.html

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43015/likely-drone-att...

THIS!!

Having a full set of spares requires zero re-engineering of the existing grid, and will turn a multi-year grid failure catastrophe into a few days to restore critical components and some weeks of restoring full function.

Since our solid solar observation capabilities now give several days notice before arrival of such storms, some could even be pre-positioned at critical substations.

And you are absolutely correct that the DOD would have very good reason to do this - losing the grid nationwide would be an insane level national security risk.

Why not just disconnect the working ones at the same time and then they don't get fried

That could definitely help. However, while I don't have the numbers, I'd expect that the required labor to disconnect them all would vastly exceed the 24-72 hour warning time.

Also, this would mean proactively shutting down the entire grid for days, at the first warning, then requiring days to restore power. So one warning would require a full week of zero power for the continent, and (I expect) saving only part of the grid.

But yeah, putting in some planning to do that would be a smart idea.

Part of the challenge is that transformers for individual homes are at risk. Throw a significant DC voltage across a transformer designed to handle 60 Hz AC, and the results are not going to be pretty.

Climate disasters should get a boost because it can lead to war and water scarcity. Consider India and Pakistan. Both of them greatly depend on water from Himalayan glaciers, a source that is rapidly declining due to climate change.

They could end up at war over this, and they both have nukes. They have relatively small stockpiles with relatively small nukes so you might not think this would be a big deal globally--a terrible tragedy still but just a regional tragedy.

Not so. Here is an article [1] and a paper [2] that looks at global consequences of India and Pakistan exchanging 100 nukes (about 1/3 of what they have) each the size of what the US used on Hiroshima at the end of WW II and directed at major population centers in the two countries.

Based on the amount of combustable material in those areas, they estimate that the resulting firestorms would put 1.8 Tg of soot aerosol into the upper atmosphere.

Climate models say the effect of that would be a 1.8℃ temperature reduction and an 8% precipitation reduction lasting for many years.

They then apply state of the art crop models to predict the effect on agriculture. The result would be a serious reduction in yield which would be largest in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10-15 years.

There would be food shortages and famine in rich countries that normally do not see famine. That can be pretty destabilizing and it is not a stretch to imagine some first world countries might go to war over food--including countries that have a lot more than small stockpiles of Hiroshima-sized nukes.

[1] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-...

[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7071

IMO, climate change needs to be higher on the list since it is a major cause of water scarcity (and hence war).

this is it! water scarcity --> war will surely become a very large component of inter-country diplomacy in the near-ish future.

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