'Sunspot archipelago' 15 times wider than Earth could soon bombard us | Hacker News Reader

'Sunspot archipelago' 15 times wider than Earth could soon bombard us

livescience.com

58 pointsalex_young48 comments

This sort of thing has been weighing on my mind of late. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this is why the stars aren’t full of spaceships.

And I’m an optimist. But bear with me.

We are at the point where we, as a society/species, are utterly dependent on technology. I live in the centre of Canberra, the capital of Australia, and if the power went out tomorrow, I’m not sure how long the food supplies would last.

Because when I say power, I mean all the power, everywhere, forever. This is what happens if a ginormous solar storm hits us for more than a few minutes.

Everything is gone forever. All transformers are blown. All electronics are fried. All satellites are gone. All terrestrial communications is gone. People can’t start engines. We can’t pump petrol. We can’t pump water.

And crucially, we can’t fix anything. Because without transformers, nobody knows how to build new transformers.

So we’ve built this society that can’t function without these things. I mean we got a bad flu and people lost their shit looting toilet paper. Imagine what happens when there’s no power.

If your family is more than 200 miles away you never, ever see them again.

This only has to happen at some point in the next 200 years and humanity is back in the Victorian era. Except we all kill each other and we’ve lost all the basic skills, so it’s worse than that.

And we’re not special. We’re just a bunch of genes on an ordinary planet. I don’t see why this wouldn’t happen to every species everywhere.

Anyway. Speculation of course. But if I was a cosmic gambler, I’d go all-in on this sort of thing. It just seems obvious.

"... All transformers are blown. ..."

Sure, that's possible. Long powerlines are affected.

"... All electronics are fried."

What? All? How could that happen due to solar activity? My guess is that even the worst event would leave a ton of working electronics. I don't think mostly anything happens to our cars or laptops, for example.

It depends on the severity of the event and how the electronics are designed.

Any time you have a magnetic field cross a conductor you induce a voltage.

The concern is that small electronics have very sensitive components that operate at low voltages. If there's a voltage spike generated on an internal bus, it could damage components.

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

”A Miyake event occurring in modern conditions might have significant impacts on global technological infrastructure such as satellites, telecommunications, and power grids.”

No word about small disconnected devices. I’m guessing they’re going to be fine.

It doesn't matter if you can't use them for a year. Which is the possible duration of these events, in addition to being several orders of magnitude stronger than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

It's hard being truly prepared to events that happen so rarely people may live their life without ever witnessing one, and it's true most modern survival is entirely dependent on those things, but that's a seriously excessive dramatization. Grids and infrastructure in general is being hardened to reduce risks in cases of geomagnetic disturbances, it's just a slow process, the risks are very well known to operators (but still not as dramatic) and so are the solutions for it.

That anxiety is because you're living in a country which did not see bad stuff happening in it for a long time.

Other places (from Europe downhill to places such as Syria and Iraq) had really bad stuff happening, and it is known that people are quite resilient. Not only the humanity does not "kill each other", the cities mostly stay intact.

Yeah, I think people have this assumption because it’s been portrayed that way in fictional media so many times. In actual real-world disaster situations, people don’t instantly revert to murderous zombies—they tend to band together and act altruistically.

If you told me 5 years ago a virus would ravage Earth to the point all restaurants and normal businesses close their doors for months, all non-essential flights are cancelled and hospitals get overwhelmed everywhere I would assume the world would completely fall apart.

Yet here we are, with mostly "that sucked for a year" stories.

I don't think you're an optimist.

Book recommendation (a novel that plays out your thought experiment):

One Second After is a 2009 novel by American writer William R. Forstchen. The novel deals with an unexpected electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States as it affects the people living in and around the small American town of Black Mountain, North Carolina.

> without transformers, nobody knows how to build new transformers

I feel like you've forgotten that books exist. Literally anywhere with a university is going to have a heap of books documenting how to rebuild modern technological society from scratch.

Do you know how long it would take to do this? You'd also have to be doing it while educating people "the old way". Schools don't even teach handwriting now.

Sorry, I should have been clearer:

Without transformers, we can’t build new transformers.

Think of the supply chain involved. It all runs on electricity. We’ve built ourselves in to a corner where basically nothing is possible without power.

So yeah, go get that book from the library. Good luck smelting steel.

"Complete Metal Working Shop From Scrap Series Set (7 INDIVIDUAL BOOKS)"

Here is the description of the series:

ISBN 1-878087-00-2 The Charcoal Foundry

ISBN 1-878087-01-0 The Metal Lathe

ISBN 1-878087-02-9 The Metal Shaper

ISBN 1-878087-03-7 The Milling Machine

ISBN 1-878087-04-5 The Drill Press

ISBN 1-878087-05-3 The Dividing Head & Deluxe Accessories

ISBN 1-878087-06-1 The Sheet Metal Brake

Quote from the site:

Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap is a progressive series of seven projects including, The Charcoal Foundry, The Metal Lathe, The Metal Shaper, The Milling Machine, The Drill Press, The Dividing Head and The Sheet Metal Brake. Beginning with a simple charcoal fired foundry, you produce the castings for building the machine tools to equip your shop. Initially the castings are finished by simple hand methods, but it isn’t long before the developing machines are doing much of the work to produce their own parts. It does not take long to learn the simple craft of pattern-making and sand molding. Each phase of the projects increase your knowledge and skill. There is no need to look for outside help. You can do it all in your own shop. No complicated math----No exotic equipment required----No large cash outlay. Lots of work to be sure, and some of it can be downright tedious, but the reward will be a practical small scale machine shop that you might never give yourself permission to buy, assuming you could afford it.

https://gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrapSeries...

Well that’s handy, but I just checked my local library and the next closest library, and they don’t have copies.

By the way, the ‘next closest library’ to where I live is the National Library of Australia.

Let’s assume they had it. Both buildings are locked and all electronic catalogues are down. How do I know about such a series, and how do I find it once I’ve broken in to the building?

And now how, without the food supply normal to a major city, do I go about building these materials and creating a grid-spec transformer? I’m hungry. All I’m concerned about is people not looting my house.

And once I do build it, what’s this individual transformer going to connect to? The rest of the grid is down.

All of the people who would be repairing the grid in normal circumstances are starving and at home protecting their family. None of them are out in a van fixing transformers.

So, cool books. I’m glad they exist. I can’t see how they help.

I'd assume the National Library of Australia also maintains a few traditional indices and maybe there are even one or two librarians around to help those who never had to find a book (or books on topics) in a library before computers. I'm lucky enough to have been forced to do this for school 30 years ago.

People are going to be using these books for firewood in this situation.

You’re going to be fighting for survival and learning how to hunt and farm and keep warm. You’re not going to be sitting around learning how to build transformers or metal workshops.

I doubt it. Go read about the seed bank in Leningrad during the siege. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-tragedy-...

It is scary to think what is the actual lead time on grid scale components... When you are in multiple megawatt range. It is pretty long and pretty specialised.

It is not just transformers, but switches, relays and even fuses. Much of that will have surviving spares, but still building up the capacity to build those components is not entirely trivial.

Given that a lot of modern electronics are shielded as a matter of regulation and operational necessity, a solar event strong enough to fry all of our electronics would also kill a lot of people directly. It would be an Armageddon-level event.

People can’t start engines.

An event strong enough to disable an ICE vehicle's ignition system will likely have killed anyone who could have used the vehicle.

We can’t pump water.

Most water pumps generally operate on gasoline or other fuel. Electric-powered water pumps is a very recent development.

I mean we got a bad flu and people lost their shit looting toilet paper. Imagine what happens when there’s no power.

Parts of California and most of Texas experience that every year... Most people in India experience multiple power outages each day. No mass looting yet...

Solar flares don't destroy electronics. They induce current in long conductors like power lines. I think the confusion comes from nearby nuclear EMP, which destroys electronics, and high-altitude EMP, which induces currents. Solar flares are basically larger-scale high-altitude EMP.

It is relatively easy to protect the electrical grid, grounding everything and putting surge protectors in front of transformers. The problem is that we aren't doing those protections. Also, the grid is not vulnerable when disconnected; it is possible to turn off the grid for predicted flare and then restart it.

Being lazy about protection is not a universal. Any aliens with more active star would have done the protection from the beginning. Aliens from more quiet stars don't need it.

It doesn't just cause radio blackouts as they say in the article. For us hams it's actually great because the charged atmosphere acts like a mirror and we can bounce signals all over the earth.

But for satellites this is really bad news.

I wonder what the insurance policy on starlink satellites looks like.

Hint: not cheap.

Looks like it’s not unique case at least. The space infrastructure insurance has history of decades: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_insurance

They already lost a few dozen satellites in a previous incident in february 2022.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

I doubt they'd insure them for this kind of mishap. They'll just launch new ones.

They probably do have third party insurance though for debris hitting earth I guess.

This is alarming. Does anyone know what the current state of space weather protection/mitigation is for electricity grids in the west?

IIRC in 2012 the Earth missed a giant CME by one week, and had it hit Earth there would have been 80% casualties in the US (according to a US government committee), due to the fallout of failing electrical transformers. I'm not aware that this issue has been rectified - probably due to the magnitude of the task.

Edit: This suggests the issue is being addressed but not to what extent: https://www.space.com/space-weather-impacts-electric-grid-pr...

It's not like predicting the weather, if that's what you're asking. The solar observatories watch the sun constantly, so we see when elections occur, but there is little to no warning before they happen.

“IIRC in 2012 the Earth missed a giant CME by one week, and had it hit Earth there would have been 80% casualties in the US...”

By casualties do you mean injuries/deaths (to people)? Do you have a source? From what I could find, it would be really bad for infrastructure, but not something that would outright kill or injure most of the population.

The deaths come from lack of food and clean drinking water, caused by damage to infrastructure.

80% sounds too high and arbitrary tho.

If want to check some sunspot images interactively, you can visit helioviewer.org

From the left sidebar menu, select: Observatory: SDO Instrument: HMI Measurement: Continuum

You can play around with the dates on top to see it move to the center of the sun (almost there!)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_25

Relevant article about the current solar cycle, which nears its maximum and is unusually intense, apparently.

Will be interesting to see the effect on global temperatures when this SC is finished, especially if we get a prolonged quiet period afterwards. Might provide a proverbial cold shower for climate scientists.

> Might provide a proverbial cold shower for climate scientists.

Why?

Probably under the mistaken impression climate scientists don't know about solar cycles.

Under the impression that a lot of climate scientists are quick to disregard the effect variations in solar activity has on climate. To be clear, I'm not denying the effects of CO2, but it still seems possible that the role of CO2 has been exaggerated to some extent. The rise in global temperatures in the past century has coincided with increases in both CO2 and solar activity. And it's probably not a coincidence that last time we had a long period with a quiet sun (the Maunder minimum) was also a very cold period here on earth.

The rise in global temperature does not coincide with solar activity:

1) Temperature vs Solar irradiance: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/189/graphic-tempe...

2) Temperature vs Sun activity: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/solact.htm...

3) Number of sunspots over the year: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/couldnt-sun...

Not sure why people think scientists would miss obvious things. If a non-specialist can think of a probable objection, chances are the specialist in that field has already study that objection in their intro classes.

Plus: unlike most other measures, we have 400 years of actual observation of the sun's activity. It takes some effort to translate the many ways it's been recorded, and it's not perfect, but the data is there. Climate scientists know the sun had an extended period of low activity through the late 1600s and early 1700s and can form hypotheses.

If we go through another, it's not a big shocker. It's an opportunity to test those hypotheses and develop a better understanding of the impact of solar cycles on the planet's climate. If they're wrong, it's not some grand indictment of climate science. It's just...science. But if they're right and we don't take measures to prevent the worst heating, then we might not get another chance until we recover from the floods and resource wars and the loss of knowledge.

Well, 'just science' is easy to say when you're not suffering the direct impact of climate politics. Looks more and more to me like they're trying to hold back the economic development of many of the poorer countries in the world. The models they base this on at least better be correct.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

The risk if you're wrong: conflicts over shrinking arable land, resources, and climate refugees fleeing disasters could escalate into a world-ending war. Or regional wars that completely erase all that economic development.

The risk if climate scientists are wrong: we make a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable world for nothing.

The risk if climate science is wrong: In the west, we only make a bunch of imaginary problems for ourselves that waste the time and money of the average citizen on a daily basis. But in the global south, billions of people are forced to live in perpetual and worsening poverty with no chance of economic improvement.

If climate science was right and we still allowed carbon to burn, yes the world would heat but if we used our minds I'm sure we could solve a lot of the challenges as they appear.

The solar irradiance varies by less than two parts in thousand throughout the cycles, see [1], it goes up and down by about 0.5 W/m2 around it's mean value.

On the other hand, if we hit 500 ppm CO2, that'll contribute about 3.7 W/m2. The Wikipedia page on Radiative Forcing has quantitative data, including the effect of the solar cycle...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#/media/File%3ASo...

That's some impressive artillery that archipelago has.

What's the premier service for tracking these sort of events? Where can I find out the likelihood of getting "hit", and other such projections?

https://www.spaceweatheralerts.com/

It reports all CMEs. You’ll have to do some parsing to work out if we’re going to get hit.

Thinking about it this might be a good saas project.

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