Thanks for all the fish, etc.
This same headline is like…every fucking year it feels like.
Timescale.
It’s been less than 200 years since something like this would have been noticable, and we’ve already had one huge one since. The 1859 event could wipe out the electrical grids of anything in daylight when it hits, and we already have a massive transformer shortage, and all the online ones will have exploded.
When we find out about this stuff, the first step is trying to find out how frequent it is by over viewing historical records. You start with the biggest events and then look for smaller.
So at first it’s rare, but as you expand what would be a problem and start looking deeper you almost always find it’s more frequent and not less.
So you’re right, but it’s by design.
Just long enough for it to happen, fuck everything up, claw our way painfully out, create a strategic transformer reserve, neglect it, cannibalise it, revise history, then have it happen again. Hey but at least private equity would get all the contracts.
I propose we name it the Desolation
As the tech advances and new capabilities are introduced, scientists have more data, so each time their predictions gets more dire. We should hope that it never comes true in our lifetime.
It’s one of those depressing posts where you read about shit that can happen and yet have no power to prevent it. Apart from living in a middle of a jungle or a cave, I guess.
I hope it happens. Society would be better off for it in the long term. Too many perpetually-online or heads down in their phone during traffic. I think society would suddenly get a lot calmer, and we would start bringing back more efficient ways to build housing for air flow, return to lots of people figuring out how to grow their own food, etc.
I don’t spesifically hope it happens, and I’m (globally speaking) in a very good position should every semiconductor on a planet cook tomorrow. But the harsh truth is that the world as we know it would not be possible without our everyday gadgets by any means. And I don’t mean morons staring on their phone all the time while driving a car.
Food production, water processing and waste management rely heavily on the latest and greatest technology, satellites very much included. And while at least some of that could work without semiconductors they still need electricity in a form or another. I have a co-owned tractor from 1983 and that thing CAN run without any kind of batteries or wires, but starting it without a starter motor and a battery is practically impossible, unless someone in the neighborhood happens to have even older tractor you can start with a hand crank. And even if you could get that thing running the infrastructure for fuel, oils and spare parts would very much not run.
So, it’s “a bit” more than just modern handheld electronics which would stop working. Cars of any kind (buses, trucks…), trains, planes, boats, excavators and all the machinery which makes the modern society run would just die. Depending on the burst, maybe some technology equivalent to 40’s and 50’s might survive and some of the more modern tech (like 80’s and 90’s) could be brought back to life, but it would have drastical effects on every day life, at least in the global west.
Some of you would be stranded in a big city, without heating, water, waste management and any kind of transport. People like me in a rural areas would be without at least power, communication, largely transport and quite possibly water. Available food would spoil and be consumed rather quickly, without waste management diseases would spread like wildfire and without medicine and modern tech at doctors it would be quite a disaster for quite a lot of people.
Sure, in the long run it might build up a better society, but for few years (or decades) it would cause massive death wave, possible nuclear disasters, ridiculous amounts of pollution around big cities (think slum areas on any major metropoly in India for example), local gang wars and collapses of multiple nations.
I might survive that just due to the fact that I live in a rural enough area and I have the means to keep myself warm and sheltered even without electricity. So would other rural communities all around the world, people live without any modern infrastructure already every day.
And then, assuming only half of the planet is fried and the rest are shielded by the earth itself, there’s the absolutely massive shift in power balance. If we pretend that pretty much the whole of NATO countries would get hit by a solar storm tomorrow it would create a never before seen imbalance globally. Australia, China and large parts of Russia (and other countries on that side of the planet) would become the most tehnologically advanced places in the world overnight while rest of the world is thrown back about a 100 years. That would be pretty “interesting” situation.
I think there’s a document or a blog post or something about a guy who tries to make a simple pencil by himself. Digging up raw materials, refining them and finally assembling a generic no. 2 pencil without any modern infrastructure is pretty much impossible task for a single person. And your everyday life depends on quite a bit more complex stuff than just a pencil.
Okay, once a century is neat. Now calculate the likelihood it’ll be pointed directly at us instead of any other direction it could go in, in 3 dimensional space from a spherical object.
The sun spins too, so not full 3D space. It’ll probably be flung out along the planetary plane.
