Earth Barely Dodged Solar Blast In 2012 202
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Coronal mass ejections, with severity comparable to the 1859 Carrington event, missed Earth by only 9 days in 2012, according to researchers. The Carrington event caused widespread damage to the telegraph system in the U.S., and a similar occurrence would be devastating to modern electronics, it is thought. From the Reuters article, 'Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous.' The potential global cost for such damage is pegged at $2.6 trillion."
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
"Coronal mass ejections, with in 2012, according to researchers."
What..
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Looks like part of a sentence got eaten. I've updated the post to fix it.
ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:2, Insightful)
We had no control over this, and there's no means to mitigate it, and it didn't happen. So lets panic and blog and post video submissions to nerdy websites!
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Maybe I should put a couple of fresh '70s-era ECUs into the safe, just to electrically isolate them, so I'll have more than one functional car...
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Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not so much end-user equipment, although that alone would be pretty devastating to most people. The real problem is the destruction of the electrical grid that would result. Most of the large transformers and relays are custom-made one-off pieces, and backorder time for them under normal circumstances is 3 months to 2 years. There are no procedures available to collapse the grid in preparation to a CME to protect that equipment, it's really not doable at this point. Imagine most of North America without electricity for a series of months. Electricity is used to pump natural gas around the country, so most of that's unavailable. Electricity is used in gas pumps, so even if your car still works you have no fuel for it. Farmers have the fuel in their tanks, but after that their tractors are going to be parked for the duration. Many railroad switches can no longer be thrown by hand and schedules are all computerized, so big chunks of the rail network are going to be down. Most hospitals have 3 days of fuel for their generators, beyond that they're back to doing surgery by candlelight.
The repercussions are enormous.
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Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:5, Informative)
Probably because the electrical grid is controlled by for-profit corporations run by executives hyper-focused on short-term revenue to get their next bonus.
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Where do you live? Wherever it is, your situation is unusual.
Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:4, Interesting)
Surgery by candlelight? (Score:3)
Does this mean they will extend the ACA deadline?
Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:4)
Um, also satellites, which power much of our communications and have also caused most of us to throw away paper maps.
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Most hospitals have 3 days of fuel for their generators, beyond that they're back to doing surgery by candlelight.
Unlike Fukushima, the roads will be open for trucks to deliver fuel for backup generators to hospitals, pumping stations, and other vital infrastructure.
People will get by in the short run, but I'd be very scared of the global economic impact.
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Since a gas station would have gas, all they would need is a generator to keep the station running. Tanker trucks shouldn't be affected by CMEs, so with generators being readily available I don't foresee this as being a significant problem.
What I do foresee is an economic melt down since electronic transactions would grind to a halt. There would be a run on the banks since there is not enough cash reserves on hand, only $1.22 trillion dollars in Federal Reserve notes are in circulation. Businesses would not
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Uh. . . . . don't nuclear power plants GENERATE electricity? All you would need to do is cut them loose from the transmission lines and put in the control rods until the event is over.
Someone should probably generate contigency plans to safely cut transmission lines at as many key points as possible and they could mitigate the effects of this kind of disaster.
Also helps that a lot of our long distance communication infrastructure is fber optic now and immune to this kind of event.
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Nuclear power plants melting down will not be a problem. All of them have generators that can run all of the equipment for over a week. Most plants are design in such a way that the control rods will fall into place in the event of a power loss. However, if the grid got fried they would have to take the plant offline, they would damage the equipment if they ran it without a load attached to discharge the power.
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Basically, I would have to unplug the Tesla from the charger, and turn off the circuit breaker to the house in the basement. I'd be pretty safe then.
That is until you try to turn your circuits back on and any residual power surges.
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Crank away on that points-equipped car -- the ignition coil will be fried, and so will the copper windings in the starter and altern/generator.
There were no solid-state chips then, and, still, unconnected telegraph receivers were tapping away receiving imaginary messages from the ZOMG to earth.
Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:5, Informative)
Think. I know it's hard, but try it. We're not talking about magic here. The car does not have an antenna hundreds of km to over a thousand km long. Electric fields are measured in volts per meter, not volts per fairy tale.
Inducing a 20 mA current in a telegraph line hundreds of km long (which is all it takes to "tap away") is slightly different from inducing tens to hundreds of thousands of amps for tens of seconds to minutes. That's what it would take to "fry" the windings in a starter or alternator. And the antenna length of the wiring attached to the starter or alternator is no more than a couple of meters, INSIDE a faraday cage.
An ignition coil would take less current to burn out than a starter or alternator, but still a whole hell of a lot more current than it would ever see inside the faraday cage of the car body.
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Electric fields are measured in volts per meter, not volts per fairy tale.
Damn. I knew I was doing something wrong in my E&M class.
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Think. I know it's hard, but try it. We're not talking about magic here. The car does not have an antenna hundreds of km to over a thousand km long.
Finally, the smartest person on th internet. Explain how hundreds of Kilometers is needed to induce a current.
What is the resonant frequency of your hundreds of kilometers? What is the resonant frequency of a smaller antenna. What is the frequency of the EM event. Is it only Seriously dude, you really need to stop calling people stupid while you spout completely wrong and stupid incorrect stuff.
Come back after a little study. You might start by going ot Wikipedia and finding out why we stopped doing space based nuc blasts. It's not just the hundred plus kilometer systems that are affected.
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Maybe the smartest person on the Internet can explain how to close <quote> tags properly, too...
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Nope, all the wiring in the stator and rotor of the starter or alternator serves as an antenna as well. As is the metal case of either. As is the adjacent engine block.
That's what makes high levels of EMP so difficult to shield against in the real world - literally everything conductive serves as an "antenna" (even if it's not "antenna shaped"). Even stuff adjacent but not
Re:A faraday cage has to be grounded to earth. (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to think that the damage comes from stuffing too many electrons into a box. That's not how it works at all.
A Faraday cage shields its contents, period. A magical tether to Mother Earth might make you feel better, but it makes no difference to Maxwell's equations.
To put it in simpler and more specific terms, cars (and airplanes) frequently survive direct lightning strikes with no damage to their electrical systems. The energy from even a Carrington-level event, over the area of a car, is miniscule compared to the energy of a lightning strike. I'm not even sure it would exceed the energy of the static you build up scooting across the seat and then touching the door handle.
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Oh my, AC has absolutely no idea about how electricity works.
Electricity always flows in a loop, every time, without exception, period. No loop, no current. No current, no energy. Sometimes the loop includes the capacitance of one disconnected piece of metal next to another, but that also limits the current, and therefore, energy. Sometimes the insulation breaks down, or the field is strong enough to cause an arc to jump the gap.
If welding on your vehicle caused a problem it is because you put the ground c
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Old and Modern cars will be unaffected by a CME.
Shhh. You'll ruin the fun - it makes a great urban legend. However, even survivalists don't think it will be a problem [survivalblog.com] (that link also has links to serious studies).
However, if the CME trashes the power grid (a likely effect) you'll have a problem pumping gas for the car because the gas station pumps are electric. I experienced that problem first hand after Hurricane Sandy. IIRC there was talk of a law requiring at least some gas stations to have backup generators, but I don't know what happened to it. You
Optimism is not called for (Score:4, Insightful)
Think for a moment.
If the power grid goes down across the country for months or years -- the most likely serious direct consequence -- for any reason -- even if *nothing* else is damaged by the CME (or other form of EMP-related problem), then the consequences of the following avalanching issues in the affected area must be considered:
o No fuel pumped for transport; none delivered -- so no troops, no relief forces unless from the other side of the planet
o No heating fuel, no cooling power -- people will die just from this; if winter, water systems can freeze, more consequences
o No food production -- uh oh
o No food transport -- guess it doesn't matter there won't be any produced -- starving, desperate people everywhere, then dead ones
o No power in hospitals -- more dead people
o Manufacturing stops -- Everything you consume regularly will run out very quickly. Meds. Food. Soap. Clothing.
o Drugs run out -- more people die, others suffer
o Sanitation loses power -- ok, now everyone begins to die -- sanitation failure in our society would be catastrophic
o Starvation
o Disease
o Violence
o Desperation
o Die-off
All these things are inevitable, given just that one simple, scientifically 100% possible consequence. Amidst all that, you know what will work? Almost every weapon in civilian hands, at least until the bullets run out, which could take a while. Then there are knives, hammers, cobbled together spears and pikes, makeshift swords (and a few real ones), you know, the usual stuff of mayhem. Death. Likely the carnage would begin within 24 hours of the food running out, and I think it's pretty obvious what our society would look like a week later. And do you think for a *moment* that a nation-sized relief effort could be successfully mounted by an ally (or an enemy) soon enough and comprehensively enough to preclude that week of madness? If you do, you are far more of an optimist than I am.
It won't mean a thing that you have a car that can run. You're almost certainly going to die. Probably the first time you drive it in front of people who don't have something and think you just might have some of it in your car. Like, you know, food.
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It won't mean a thing that you have a car that can run.
Where did I say it did? I simply pointed out that "CME will fry your car" is a myth. CME will fry the electric grid is not a myth, and that's a monster of a problem. Many of the things you mention follow from that.
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No fuel pumped for transport; none delivered -- so no troops, no relief forces unless from the other side of the planet
It doesn't take a very big generator to power a fuel pump capable of filling a tanker truck, and the fuel to power the generator is right there. If his car is running, tractor-trailers still are too, so fuel will still be delivered. Gas stations can rig up the same hack to keep pumping fuel. Not conveniently, but there's about a million rednecks in the country who could do it with nothing but the tools lying loose in their trucks. The generators will still work for the same reasons the vehicles will sti
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Re: ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:2)
Bull shit.
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Back to electric fields for you. Twisted pairs are good. Coax is good.
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I don't think you'r home electronics are really at risk though. Not enough antenna. You need something with a long cable to pick up the effects of a CME.
The power surges created on those long wires will travel to their endpoints. Anything plugged in may be fried, depending on just how good your surge protection is. How good is your surge protection on your cable and phone lines?
Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:5, Insightful)
Really good.
And many supplies have MOVs and LC networks that would help mitigate the problem. In the old days, telegraph wires weren't earthed, and so became enormous antennas that could readily be charged by ionization.
Satellites are less protected, and there, sensitive low-power (especially CMOS) products might easily fry. However, they're already shielded and exposed to the elements in a way unlike us on the ground.
We're smart enough to tie most neutrals to earth in home wiring boxes. OTOH, the skin effect could fry stuff. Your car's ECM might be just fine because it's under a metal hood, albeit insulated from the earth by the tires. As such, it's not really a capacitor or joule/coulomb tank.
Major electrical grid problems would ensue, but recovery might not be as tough as you think.
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I have surge protection, but it's wimpy on my phone lines - a lighting strike to the phone lines would end in tears. If I were actually worried about this I'd do something to prevent that (if you live in lightning country, a lighting protector at the main breaker box is a wise move in general).
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If I used phone lines, I'd have MOVs on them. Many telcos over-earth where necessary, just to ensure low damage. I ground together my cable box with my other earths, but hey-- I'm an engineer.
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My DSL modem, which my PCs are wired to. Better a lighting strike than sending money to a cable company!
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I've reluctantly accepted that wireless exists, but don't yet trust it. :) None of my PCs have wireless cards, and I do like file transfers at GBE speed.
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Last time I got a major power surge on my phone line it knocked out a desktop computer, 2 switches, 2 voip phones, and an XBox. It somehow left the modem and router unharmed.
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Exactly. Full range power supplies should be able to handle a surge if you have it properly connected to a point of use surge suppressor. I have a whole building surge suppressor on the main panel that clamps at 360 volts. Additionally I have point of use surge suppressors that are properly grounded. Typically I'll also run a separate ground, from the breaker panel and connect it to the server rack, then I'll ground the server chassis to the rack, this will let everything float at the same reference voltage
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Oh, sure, lord it over us data peasants why don't you? Shall we knuckle under when you ride by on your mighty data horse?
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Incredibly good if I unplug everything, and considering it typically takes 1-5 days for a CME to reach Earth I should have plenty of warning. The danger is more to infrastructure (power, phone, and cable lines) which may overload from the induced current, and stuff that can't readily be disconnected from the grid. But even then I suspect with a day or two warning of a dangerous CME it wouldn't be a huge deal to simply have the whole country go dark until it passed, if the logistics were in place to do so.
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Oh, sure, if people take the warning seriously and take appropriate preventive measures we're fine! Meanwhile, here in America, after Katrina predictably trashed the levees in Louisiana, we rebuilt them just as before so the next major storm to hit would trash them again. But maybe this will be different, and we'll all act like smart people?
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if the logistics were in place to do so.
They aren't. The national electric grid is quite delicately balanced and there is no central coordinating authority. Remember when New England went dark a few years ago because of issues in Ohio? The reason that it took two days for some areas to have power restored is because they could only add one small link at a time in order to keep supply and demand balanced. Dropping the entire grid without damaging portions of it would take days, and bringing it back up
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A car ignition system does not have an antenna hundreds of km to over a thousand km long. Neither does a cellphone or laptop or your brain for that matter.
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I bask in the glory that is you manly internet post full of testosterone and scary words.
You give me such hope for humanity. Bless you good sir!
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Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:5, Insightful)
2. We can't mitigate it? Turn in your nerd card right this instant
3. Who is panicking?
4. You'd rather this get submitted to some non-nerd website? I agree that seeing grandmothers starting to wear tinfoil hats to avoid solar flare problems might be really really funny, but this is exactly the type of submission for slashdot and vice versa.
5. I find your sig ironic in this context.
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1. Knowing something is possible is better than not knowing
spoken like a man who's never managed to get his balls sucked into a dustbuster
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Re:ZOMG a bad thing didn't happen! (Score:4, Insightful)
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But that requires a number of satellites in orbit around the Sun (not Earth)...and that backs up you're money point...sigh
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Does it require that? Can't we just point a telescope at it? They saw this coming in 1859, even if they didn't know what it was.
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It does not require satellites around the sun. You get days of notice, because light travels faster than matter. We see CME's before they do any damage.
What we need is a way to actually disconnect the transformers. I don't think that was built into the grid and would require too many man-hours to do manually in time.
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You also need one directly between us and the Sun because we need to know the polarity of the CME. I forgot which way it is but it's either if it's opposite our magnetic field then it's harmless or if it's the same it's harmless. So we need to know that before shutting down the entire power grid...a telescope (light) isn't going to tell you that.
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Yes, we can actually physically disconnect the transformers- that's what circuit breakers do- and pretty much, they're automated- given the warnings that the satellites give, I suspect that a Carrington event sized CME, at least for modern systems (like in the US) won't be a surprise and can be accommodated- maybe taking significant time to switch everything back on, but without major damage to the infrastructure.
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With satellite's monitoring the Sun we can see when these things are coming hours ahead of time - they don't travel at light speed. That gives us plenty of warning to set things into protected mode.
Same goes fo
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There are several ways to mitigate it, but we haven't implemented them because they mighjt cost money.
We need to bolster our electrical grid and better distribute generation. Ideally it should be feasible to split it into smaller regional and local grids whenever there is a threat so the long lines don't cause problems.
There are a number of very large transformers involved. We have no backups and it would take months to get even a single new one built. We would have to order from somewhere else since we don
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Induction thresholds (Score:2)
No. You don't. Refer back to the Carrington event; the telegraph lines in use at the time were not anywhere near that long; they were (electrically and conduction wise) broken up by repeater stations and relay stations at typical intervals of ten miles or so. Even so, enough energy was induced in those lines to set them, and the telegraph offices they were connected to, on fire.
Our modern power grid is similar in most places; broken up by transformers quit
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Installations like the major interties will likely fail catastrophically, and without power, where do you think replacement parts will come from?
A warehouse in Topeka?
The major utilities are indeed run by greedy bastards, but even greedy bastards keep spare parts on hand, especially of cheap things that are basically just big hunks of wood or metal. My local power company has at least a dozen house transformers sitting in the neighborhood depot that I've seen with my own eyes, so even slightly complicated spare parts are on hand. Now my local power company is an award-winning co-op, so maybe they're better run than some. Still, there are spares l
Considering... (Score:2)
However, there will always be this threat It is just the nature of the universe. Perhaps it would be wise to consider ways to mitigate or minimumize damage done if such an event happened again. Yeah, it'd be costly to do. However, it certainly would beat the lives lost and damage done if doing the usual "Wait till it happens and then run around like a chicken with their head cut off while pointing
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The problem is that the electrical grid is run by for-profit corporations lead by executives hyper-focused on short-term profits. I unfortunately don't see any likelihood of remediation efforts ever being put into place.
Dodged? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I know, I'm being a bit picky here, but... dodged?
The CME barely missed; Earth didn't do anything, the lazy git.
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I saw that move.
It will be harder to put the earth back into it's orbit. When we dodged, we had the sun's gravity helping us.
wait, what? (Score:2)
Er, what? (Score:3)
Quoth the intro:
Someone screwed up copying the text there.
Saw the same thing (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like the CME didn't quite miss EVERYONE...
Editing? Verbs? (Score:4, Funny)
"Coronal mass ejections, with in 2012, according to researchers.
Yea, researchers for the win. According to grammar researchers (with in 2014), no verbs in this sentence either!
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Yea, researchers for the win. According to grammar researchers (with in 2014), no verbs in this sentence either!
Yeah, but you violated another well-known of grammer's rules: Don't use commas, which aren't needed.
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Never in a million years, even if your life depended on it engage in exaggerations.
Don't be tautologically repetitive by repeating the same thing again and again.
Forswear grandiloquence.
What does this mean? (Score:2)
I'm sure this is very naive. I'm not doubting, or even skeptical, I just want further understanding.
These claims are always made but never really expand on what the repercussions are. What exactly does it mean that things would be devastating to our modern electronics? Cell phones blowing up in our pants pocket? Computers catching on fire? I doubt those things mainly because something damaging enough to cause a gadget to self-immolate likely would be just as damaging to our biology. Is it stuff as (comparat
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I was iffy on this myself, so I read slashdot comments. Now it is crystal clear.
In the event of a major CME, just mains power, or possibly anything connected to mains power, would or would not be inoperable. Modern cars, and or, old cars would or would not work; as they may or may not be effected by EMPs which may or may not have similar eff
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Think of the Untied States trying to exist with 19th century technology for a couple of months. That's how bad it could be. The big equipment that runs the electrical grid is all custom made by a very few manufacturers with very long (as much as two years) backorder times in the best of conditions. End-user equipment may or may not be affected, but without power it's pretty much useless. Your car may run, but since the gasoline pumps are electric, as is all the equipment that runs the holding tanks, the
"From the Reuters article" - What Reuters article? (Score:2)
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The link was broken and not separated from the Nature link. I've updated it with different anchor text to make it more distinct.
Hungarian/English phrase book (Score:2)
"Coronal mass ejections, with in 2012, according to researchers."
My hovercraft is full of eels.
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Turn left at the next set of lights, then pull over and replace your scratched tobbacconist.
Efficiency = lack of margin for safety (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime back some small solar wind even knocked out a satellite. Normally it would not even be a blip in the radar. But that satellite was the link to credit card processing in the pay-at-the pump gas stations. Almost all these gas stations have cut down their employee down to one guy who sells chips and soda. Almost all the bays are self service. When the pay at the pump payment system got knocked out, people had to fill the car and walk in to pay that lone guy. Lines started forming, then the lines stretched, and reached the exit ramps of highways, and the highway started getting blocked. But at the end, after the mess cleared, still there is no incentive to create alternate routing or redundancy in the system.
It costs money to make things secure. To make things robust. But if some company does it the right way and it competes with another company that does not, it is not going to be competitive. Yes, in the long run, catastrophe will strike and the chickens will come home to roost and the corner cutters would find themselves getting the short end of the stick. But, the non-corner-cutter could have been driven out of business before the catastrophe strikes.
So it all depends on the frequency of the odd ball event. If the odd ball event is less frequent than once in a decade, there is no structural incentive for any manager to do the right thing. Most people change jobs once a decade and they will not be there to face the music. This is a systemic structural thing. The race to the bottom is the only race there is.
It might not be a solar storm, or a terrestrial storm. It could be some fiber optic cable being accidentally severed. Or sabotaged. Or an oil spill blocks rail traffic somewhere. So don't think it is mere fear mongering or rationalize it saying solar storms are rare. Systematically our infrastructure has become very vulnerable without redundancy without factors of safety.
EMP (Score:2)
Duh...
I harden all my electronics against electromagnetic radiation using tinfoil!
For extra sensitive systems I use the heavy duty stuff,,, It also works better in the BBQ!
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No, he went the other way. I understand that Richard Nixon has already named Phelps as Shadow Secretary of State.
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I'm pretty sure the people on both sides are fixated at the grade-school level, and our political leaders aren't much further along. I half expect Obama and Putin to "double-dog dare" eachother at some point.
Re:Proofread (Score:5, Funny)
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Proof. Read: "You r shit."
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Works on contingency? No, money down!
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