A Warning from History: The Carrington Event Was Not Unique(spaceweatherarchive.com)
spaceweatherarchive.com
A Warning from History: The Carrington Event Was Not Unique
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2020/08/30/a-warning-from-history-the-carrington-event-was-not-unique/
19 comments
Really disturbing thinking about how quickly society would devolve if there weren't power and internet for more than a few days.
A friend of mine used to go around saying "At any given point, we're only 72 hours away from complete chaos and anarchy and people don't realize it."
I used to think that too, but we accidentally ran an unplanned social experiment down here in Texas a couple of months ago when a freak weather event took out the entire state's power grid at a time when we needed it to keep from freezing to death. It lasted a week, and just about everything was out, everywhere. We didn't devolve into chaos and anarchy then - if we can collectively last a week without power in subzero temperatures, I have more hope for civilization than some.
There are 2 things that made that less severe.
Firstly, it started with an understanding that it would be extremely temporary. There wasn't much concern (at least among the people I know) that life couldn't go back to largely normal when things warmed up. There was damage, but in the scale of natural disasters, it was fairly tame.
Secondly, those temperatures aren't particularly dangerous. They're not pleasant, but it's not "oh shit, we're all going to die" territory. The death counts for that range from ~100-~200, including deaths from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning from attempting to heat homes, and wrecks resulting from unsafe roads. That is a tragedy, but a relatively minor one in the scale of human tragedy. Hurricane Maria killed 3,000 people. Katrina killed 1,800. Crashes of large planes into uninhabited areas kill more people than that.
I don't mean to minimize the personal tragedy or hardships anyone faced, but "not having power during cold weather" isn't a terribly hard test of society's resilience. If you can manage to not freeze to death for a week, everything goes back to normal. Anarchy largely spawns from uncertainty; will they ever get the power back? Will I be able to eat? Will things get worse? If I do something drastic now, will I be able to save myself if/when things do get worse?
Firstly, it started with an understanding that it would be extremely temporary. There wasn't much concern (at least among the people I know) that life couldn't go back to largely normal when things warmed up. There was damage, but in the scale of natural disasters, it was fairly tame.
Secondly, those temperatures aren't particularly dangerous. They're not pleasant, but it's not "oh shit, we're all going to die" territory. The death counts for that range from ~100-~200, including deaths from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning from attempting to heat homes, and wrecks resulting from unsafe roads. That is a tragedy, but a relatively minor one in the scale of human tragedy. Hurricane Maria killed 3,000 people. Katrina killed 1,800. Crashes of large planes into uninhabited areas kill more people than that.
I don't mean to minimize the personal tragedy or hardships anyone faced, but "not having power during cold weather" isn't a terribly hard test of society's resilience. If you can manage to not freeze to death for a week, everything goes back to normal. Anarchy largely spawns from uncertainty; will they ever get the power back? Will I be able to eat? Will things get worse? If I do something drastic now, will I be able to save myself if/when things do get worse?
And they're not wrong. Without regular shipments of food into population centers the shelves will quickly empty out. Once that happens, people will start doing whatever might be required to feed their kids.
The zombie apocalypse would happen in some societies. But somehow I think countries like Japan would handle it well (no evidence for that).
Japan has several advantages, including relative independence from the internet (they keep pushing paper like it was the 1990s in business settings), disaster planning and well-trained civil protection policies and being an island nation. You might not be off too far.
Countries like Japan and Taiwan have cultures of cooperation and listening to authorities during normal times that serve to protect the entire society in times of crisis. Americans' individuality doesn't work as well as we thought even for protecting individuals.
American individuality works well for inventing vaccines though. Any covid vaccines that have come out of Japan or Taiwan? Japan has a substantial pharmaceutical industry.
Given that the majority of vaccines were invented in less-individualistic countries (including not one, but two that were developed in China, the first one from nonindividualistic Russia, and the more innovative ones coming from non-quite-as-individualistic Europe with Germany's Biontech-Pfizer or the british-swedish Astrazeneca), that is not a good argument.
The Chinese and Russian vaccine use well established technologies, nothing particularly new. There's no mRNA vaccines developed in China or Russia or Japan or Taiwan. There's also quite a bit of questioning the effectiveness of Russian and Chinese vaccines.
Japan especially coldly treated vaccine development, due to historical and ongoing misunderstood issue.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Japan-depends-...
HPV vaccine case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-hpv-vaccine-study-i...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Japan-depends-...
HPV vaccine case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-hpv-vaccine-study-i...
Definitely. I'm not sure how you'd expect anything at all to function without power, water, food, messaging, etc would all be gone. I'm not sure how it'd be possible to survive if you're in a city.
> While the Carrington Event has long been considered a once‐in‐a‐century catastrophe
That seems dismissive of "once‐in‐a‐century" risks. We can't ignore "once‐in‐a‐century" risks? We're currently suffering though COVID-19, a "once‐in‐a‐century" pandemic.
"once‐in‐a‐century" is not the same as "unique" either. They cite several examples ... across several centuries. So what are they saying is the re-appraised frequency - once every 75 years?
That seems dismissive of "once‐in‐a‐century" risks. We can't ignore "once‐in‐a‐century" risks? We're currently suffering though COVID-19, a "once‐in‐a‐century" pandemic.
"once‐in‐a‐century" is not the same as "unique" either. They cite several examples ... across several centuries. So what are they saying is the re-appraised frequency - once every 75 years?
Agreed! Once in a century is disturbingly frequent when it comes to disasters like this. If it's even higher than that, then you start approaching a point where it's almost certain to be experienced during any given lifetime.
What kinds of preparations would mitigate the worst effects of this?
Are contemporary surge protectors enough to protect home/office equipment? How about the power grid? Would the kinds of changes we're talking about making to enable the grid to handle renewable energy protect against this? What about the Internet? Is data center surge protection strong enough?
Should power and networking companies keep a stockpile of equipment offline so we can have minimal connectivity after one of these events? With COVID and the shipping delays we're seeing, keeping stockpiles seems like a really good idea anyway.
Are contemporary surge protectors enough to protect home/office equipment? How about the power grid? Would the kinds of changes we're talking about making to enable the grid to handle renewable energy protect against this? What about the Internet? Is data center surge protection strong enough?
Should power and networking companies keep a stockpile of equipment offline so we can have minimal connectivity after one of these events? With COVID and the shipping delays we're seeing, keeping stockpiles seems like a really good idea anyway.
The main thing to worry about is induced DC currents causing transformer cores to saturate, which instantly makes them into heaters, dissipating all incoming power.
DC blocking capacitors can be installed, or circuits to detect the saturation or DC current, or... cheapest of all in terms of equipment.... Shut down the grid before the storm hits, turn it back on when it is over.
No equipment required, but lots of political courage. A "black start" event isn't easy, but plans exist for them.
DC blocking capacitors can be installed, or circuits to detect the saturation or DC current, or... cheapest of all in terms of equipment.... Shut down the grid before the storm hits, turn it back on when it is over.
No equipment required, but lots of political courage. A "black start" event isn't easy, but plans exist for them.