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Comment by camkego | Hacker News Reader

Exploring briefly with a binomial probability calculator: If there is a 1 in 1000 chance of one of these per year, and you are curious what the odds of this occurring over a 80 year period is, its a little more than 7%. The chance of a 1 in 1000 event (in a year), over 50 years is ~5%.

Maybe the preppers are onto something here.

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I always find it funny preppers tend to get made fun of for … being loners and preparing for the worst.

Seems kinda similar to what many of us do for work (think of the worst case scenario and mitigate the risk), albeit it in the physical realm.

As an aside, preppers are often some of the most knowledgeable people where I’m at. They also know the odds of a solar flare and I’ve spoken with them about this very topic before. Perhaps they simply know the risks and what they mean better than we do haha.

My neighbor is a prepper, he build his own off grid house, grows his own food, etc. definitely like having him around if I need help any day of the week.

Preppers get made fun of because the stereotypical prepper is actually not preparing properly against realistic threats and instead prepares against perceived threats at the expense of preparing for plausible scenarios. Your neighbor apparently doesn't fit the stereotype.

People who are successful in a system count on its continuation (and often won't invest in a few hundred $/€ worth of emergency food, water, heat and light), people who are not successful in a system count it's failure (and do real, or ceremonial 'prepping', telling themselves and others that they will be relatively more successful when the inevitable disaster strikes).

Based on the community out here, you’re not correct.

I’m surrounded by Ex-military, business owners and people in the medical field. Most of whom “prep” to some degree. They’re all very wealthy by most standards (multi-millionaires in wealth). We also have the amish, which do fit your “out of the system” reasoning. But I’d argue they didn’t fail, nor are they classic “preppers”.

They do this because they think it is a kind of "cheat code" where they are allowed to gain a huge advantage over other people. It is the same kind of thinking as what conspiracy theorists often use. Rich people often do it because they are obsessed with being superior or more successful than others.

Being off-grid is not going to make a difference whenever all electronic devices become paperweights.

Yes, but when you live off-grid most of the systems you use don’t use power (if you can avoid it). You can also build a faraday cage and store replacement electronics in it.

My neighbor does both. I actually also store my emergency solar power source and radios in a faraday cage for this reason. It’s like $100 to build one that can likely survive one of these major events.

Would a broken microwave be good enough?

Depends what you're protecting against. IIRC, most of the energy in solar storms is extremely long wavelengths, and the damage is primarily via continental-scale conductors such as power grids and telegraph lines, and you can defend against that by just not having stuff plugged in. On the other hand, I have no idea what you need to protect against the EMP from a high altitude nuke.

TBH I’m more concerned about the nuke, but I need a box to store stuff anyway. May as well just make it a faraday cage lol you can probably just use a grounded steel garbage can

If nukes are falling down, how good is your EMP shielding will probably be your least concern.

One single nuke at high altitude can cause a big EMP without any land damage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

> all electronic devices become paperweights

Isn't this an exceedingly unlikely scenario? In the Carrington event, even extremely long conductors like telegraph lines only carried electricity in the "ouch" range, and as far as I understand the physics behind this, the longer the conductor, the larger the induction effect. So I guess most electronics should be fine even in a much worse event, as long as they're not connected to mains power, I doubt whatever gets induced into tiny electronics circuits would be enough to do damage.

I think you are technically correct, however if the grids (or even just the substations) burn out, the still-functional personal electronics aren't going to get many chances to recharge.

Well, unless your car burns out too, you'll have at least 12V to work with.

The fuel pump is electric, as is the payment mechanism in the station, the transactions between the station and the suppliers of refined fuel, significant parts of the refinery itself, and the international banking system if any of that fuel is from a different country to the one you live in, and automated monitoring of long distance fuel pipelines, and at least some of the equipment used to get the fuel out of the ground, and some of the equipment used to make that equipment.

So a bit of downtime while spare parts are installed, or older tech put back in use... A major disruption, maybe, but not the end of the world.

You should read up on what happens if the grid goes down. It’s not like you can “flip a switch”. If it’s global you’ll have the inability to fix many transformers.

It doesn't even have to be global. Just look at how long it takes to produce and deliver only one today, under normal circumstances. With many long detours. It's a spectacle for rail-, transportation-, and logistics-nerds. Often documented on youtube by all involved parties.

At this scale, there wouldn't be enough spares.

You'd have to wait for replacements to be made, and everywhere in the world is also waiting, but the factories will have to be reworked first so they don't rely on electricity either.

I'm sure there are civil engineers working on making sure none of this is necessary, but I kinda doubt the politicians are giving those engineers the resources needed to preemptively build and deploy solutions.

You mean the stuff we have dismantled, and exported elsewhere as trash for recycling?

Unless your car is old enough to have mechanical spark plugs, it will be just a heavier paperweight.

Exploding a couple nukes in the atmosphere can cause a wide spread emp (high altitude nuclear explosion).

With what seems like WW3 on the horizon, I'm actually worried about this more than not.

If someone were to hit the US with a crippling EMP strike, I just don't see how that could go over without an all-out nuclear exchange, and that's just not really preppable.

Eh, if you down live in an area where nukes will strike directly or downwind of a ones you could survive. Society will be back in the Middle Ages, or worse of nuclear winter happens, but with enough supplies you could ride that out.

> My neighbor is a prepper, he build his own off grid house, grows his own food, etc. definitely like having him around if I need help

Having the reputation as the smart guy who does great research and has things pretty well sorted, I find this to be incredibly annoying when someone from the kept class pops in and asks something along the lines of, "Oh hey, so umm, what do you think about the thing?"

To each their own. Some people love it. I have noticed that people, especially older retired folks, love the interaction that arises from being a subject matter expert.

Why is that? Don't you want to share your hard-earned knowledge with your friends?

> Why is that?

Because there is little to no reciprocity.

then why are you friends with these people?

That's a great point, thank you

The whole thing is a dialectic that makes certain groups look crazy. The main takeaway, in my opinion, is if communities learned to source their food and energy locally, and looked out for each other more, there would not even be need for so-called prepping. It’s an anxiety response to a loss of what used to be more common in traditional societies.

Some supplementary analysis here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spik...

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