Why was Earth bombarded with high-energy particles in the year 774? | Hacker News Reader

Why was Earth bombarded with high-energy particles in the year 774?

arstechnica.com

88 pointsevo_917 comments

The article mentions the 1859's "Great Auroral Storm"[1]. I had never heard of it, it's a fascinating read.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/1859s-great-auroral-s...

> My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the Aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets

Fascinating indeed. I wonder exactly what kind of impact a similar storm would have today.

This should give you a starting point for speculation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

What would it take to turn my house into a Faraday cage? :)

I know you are joking, but if you really wanted to do that a Faraday cage wouldn't work.

Faraday cages only work for high frequency fields, the frequency in those storms is too low for Faraday cages to work.

Instead you need Mu-Metal - and lots of it, several layers probably.

Trust me in a situation of that order, you must be worried about converting your home into a food and water facility rather than worrying about electronics.

I would expect a Carrington sized event to fry all the satellites in orbit. The damage from no GPS for several years would probably be in the hundreds of billions. There is a good chance that anything attached to an antenna or power lines would also be fried. I doubt if surge protectors would do any good. Personally I would pack my computers in metal boxes, unplug all my appliances and maybe even turn off my house at the entrance box. Then I would go outside and watch the display.

The saving grace is that we would have several days warning.

The bummer is that, depending where you live, there is a good chance that even if you preserved your electronics, you wouldn't have any mains current to run them for a long, long time. I would be more worried about rushing to Walmart and stocking up on canned goods and bottled water before anyone else figured out what was about to happen.

Very correct.I think in case of a mass electricity failure across the world. Without water supply, fuel and other energy resources to transport food, medicine and other essential supplies.

More than protecting your electronic gear, the struggle is likely to be for food and other emergency resources.

I am sure there will mass riots and mafia scale entities controlling resources critical to survival. Besides 2/3rd will be dead in quick time anyway. Nobody has every survived without water or food.

This has actually been discussed in great detail by scientists and engineers at a conference. The resulting PDF is here:

http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/low...

The TLDR is that it'd be really bad, but I encourage you to read it -- it's pretty fascinating, given that geomagnetic storms of an intensity great enough to take the first world off the electrical grid for a few years isn't just geologically common, it's historically common.

The whole practice of combing through old documents searching for confused accounts of astronomical phenomena is fascinating to me. I wonder if there is any chance of crowd-sourcing that kind of searching. Language issues would probably prevent that from working too well though.

There's a pretty interesting study of Homer's The Odyssey from that perspective.

Pop-science story about it: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=homers-odys...

Original article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/06/23/0803317105.abst...

My favorite reconstruction of an ancient astronomical phenomena is http://www.mysterium.com/chinese.html.

The same conjunction is apparently also referred to in the Illiad.

Previous discussion from another source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090668 (1 day ago, 23 comments)

Two black holes merging in our galaxy.

Ming the Merciless was testing us?

..and did it give anyone superpowers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com