If you want to lie awake at night worrying about the future of mankind, go check out the probability we have a CME that fries all of our satellites and electronics, up to and including your digital savings within the next fifteen years and get back to me about which problem we should prioritize as a nation and as a planet.
Hint, it’s almost a certainty.
The point is, it doesn’t matter if their most dire predictions are true or not true. CME is a much more grave and immediate threat to mankind. And we aren’t doing squat about it.
Kind of analogous to a wooden ship heading for an iceberg and the crew worrying about termites. Peer reviewed science says, civilization will most likely end before fifteen years pass, Nobody cares, ho hum.
Continuing Medical Education ?
Is it? I just went to wiki and didn’t see that, can you provide a link?
Wiki? Seriously? You can do better.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.26464/epp2018012
Think peer reviewed.
Near miss 2012.
If that had hit us, game over.
It’s some serious ■■■■■
And the thing is we have the capability to shield most critical electronics from EMP.
But outside of certain military items (like ICBMs) we typically don’t do so out of cost.
One day that will bite us in the ass.
We have 150 years of magnetic data from the royal observatory that all but guarantees we are screwed. And another in Australia but I forgot it’s name. It has hit the planet over and over, it just didn’t matter before but I think we can agree, it does now. The Egyptians or Victorians wealth wasn’t digital, it was just a light show to them. A civilization ending event for us.
Ah the why shower when you’ll just get dirty again argument.
No, the we have limited resources and should prioritize the highest threat argument. What do you imagine the cost would be to harden our critical electronic infrastructure? Iceberg, termites.
Hey Tommy, how you going to do when the lights go out?
I am getting into passive solar aquaponics myself.
First off, it would have been nice had you provided a link in your OP. I didn’t even know what a CME was.
Second, the wiki article uses references from well qualified sources including NASA, NOAA and numerous peer reviewed scientific journals.
Third, your link above only provides me an abstract which doesn’t cover potential harm. Perhaps it is in the body of the paper.
Here we go. Thanks! So he calculates the odds at 12% over a ten year span. Interesting. Let’s explore that a bit. I’m not sure what timespan we have for our electronics being susceptible to CME events, let’s say 60 years. If the probability is 12%, then the inverse probability of us not being hit in 10 years is 88%. To have 6 decades in a row where the event in question does not take place is 0.88^6, or about 50%. Seems consistent.
Yes, perhaps we should be spending money on this.
It needs to be a world wide priority.
Modern civilization and our ability to support the world population would end overnight.
What’s really bad is that we have had the capabilities to defend against it for decades. ICBMs and their associated control tech are completely shielded from EMP. Most military electronics are well shielded since during a nuclear war you are essentially detonating EMPs all over the place.
We should use that knowledge and at the very least shield our power generating stations and key parts of our economic base tech.
Banks especially. And not sure it’s a good thing that nuclear arsenals are protected. When all the sats go dark, someone is likely to think ww3 started and launch.
A massive CME is hypothesized as being one of the events that melted the ice caps around the time of the Younger Dryas.
An event like that now would be catastrophic to our electrical grid and the billions of transformers that sit atop the telephone poles. We don’t have some giant warehouse filled with spare parts. It would take years.
And during that time certain sectors of society would most likely turn into Gastown from Mad Max. So that would be a serious problem to deal with.
Katrina on steroids.
From How likely is another Carrington Event? | Earth | EarthSky
Using annual averages of the top few percent of the aa index the researchers found that a ‘severe’ super-storm occurred in 42 years out of 150 (28%), while a ‘great’ super-storm occurred in 6 years out of 150 (4%) or once in every 25 years.
On average, once every 25 years. Not good.
