[HN Gopher] How Prepared Are We for the Next Giant Solar Flare?
___________________________________________________________________
How Prepared Are We for the Next Giant Solar Flare?
Author : firebaze
Score : 132 points
Date : 2021-02-26 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I personally have made no preparation at all. Should I?
| benibela wrote:
| I just made a backup of my files on DVD for that
|
| But I do not think it worked. It did burn for 20 minutes and the
| DVD changed its color, but then the laptop reports the DVD is
| still empty
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dml2135 wrote:
| How would one go about protecting their own personal backups from
| something like this?
|
| Would a hard-drive be fine if it is just not plugged in at the
| time? Or would it need to be stored in some sort of faraday cage?
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Faraday cages around anything electronic that you care about.
| Honestly though, your digital media is going to be the last
| thing you are going to care about as you are starving to death
| with no water, heat, power, and armed people roaming the
| streets looking to take all your provisions.
|
| Your faraday or powered down devices also won't prevent them
| getting destroyed in a neighbourhood going up in fire either.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I think it would be safe. In the Carrington event the damage
| was caused by currents induced in long wires.
|
| Of course we have a lot more long wires now so the problems
| would be correspondingly larger.
|
| I suspect that more damage would be caused by secondary effects
| than the direct effect of the induced currents. Some power
| lines would trip out and this would add extra load to other
| circuits which would trip out even if not affected by the
| direct effects of coronal mass ejection. In a poorly designed
| or poorly maintained power distribution system this will cause
| a cascade of failure that can disable power supplies and
| communications over a huge area. This sort of cascading failure
| happened in the US North East in 2003, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003.
|
| See https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-
| te... for some first hand comments.
| jaycroft wrote:
| The danger from CMEs comes from very very large scale current
| loops (thousands of miles in perimeter, hundreds of square
| miles in enclosed area). The issue is a slowly varying but
| intense change in magnetic flux. We're not talking even as
| strong as the earth's magnetic field, but over a large
| encircled area you can get one hell of an EMF. This is bad for
| power lines. This can also be bad for thousand foot tall AM
| radio towers and their conductive guywires.
|
| This is not a problem for your cell phone. Your hard drive,
| even if it is legacy spinning metal in a live laptop
| disconnected from your wall power will not notice any more than
| it will notice you setting your credit card down on the palm
| rest, from some basic order of magnitude on the change in
| dB/dt.
| lrem wrote:
| A safe in the cellar, under the 4 weeks worth of food and water
| reserve, seems about right.
| hikerclimber wrote:
| hopefully not. I hope this happens this year so the U.S. power
| grid gets knocked out.
| williesleg wrote:
| I'm still scared of the fresh water shortage. Don't confuse me.
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| Are we ever prepared for anything?
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| > How Prepared Are We for the Next Giant Solar Flare? As well
| prepared as we were for the Next Big pandemic. We even have a
| whole ideological system to shirk responsibility and run
| unchecked into disaster.
|
| Every nation on this planet should by now have a 3 year basic
| food reserve, to buffer against failing harvests due to global
| warming weather events/changes.
|
| Its currently difficult to setup, costs too much, we already did
| it during the cold-war and yet, soon as the wall fell, it was all
| slashed and cut. I blame the retirement of politicians who
| remembered how starvation feels.
|
| First real long-term drought with aquifer failings or a cold-
| burst pre-harvest, will hit us like a hammer. Nothing like mass-
| starvation, to re-calibrate political priorities.
|
| There is no awareness that the strategic reserve exists only in
| name now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_grain_reserve
|
| Basically is a price control tool, where over-production is
| shipped of as aid. What it not is - is a reserve.
|
| Interesting paper:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237409034_Strategic...
| chokeartist wrote:
| You are correct, but sadly it won't happen in my opinion.
|
| Why? MBAs have made way too much money advocating Just In Time
| (JIT) supply chains. To go back on that would make a fair
| number of "super smart" business people look short-sighted.
| hollerith wrote:
| Do you have an explanation for why there has never been a
| famine so far in the 231-year history of the US?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lawrence_Island_famine
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| The St. Lawrence Island famine is interesting -- though a
| very small incident that seems more due to extreme
| geographical isolation than anything else.
|
| The word "famine" doesn't appear once in the 5000+ word
| article on the Dust Bowl; and, we know it wasn't really a
| famine. Poverty-inducing, for sure, but mass starvation is
| an entirely different type of disaster that is almost
| always man-made by bad economic policy or war, which I
| believe is what OP's point was.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| GIC[0] is a pretty interesting risk factor but popular reporting
| on it is not great. The posted article has some interesting
| history on the Carrington event and good details on what CMEs are
| but falls down on when talking about the risk to the power
| system.
|
| Example: "The power grids of most countries would be completely
| and effectively leveled. The top way to mitigate the effects of
| such a flare would be through increased grounding, so that the
| large currents that would otherwise flow through grid wires would
| instead flow directly into the Earth. Every time power companies
| attempt to do this, however, what winds up happening instead is
| that the conducting substance used for grounding (such as copper)
| is stolen for its material value."
|
| Power grids would not be "completely leveled". And "grounding" is
| not the issue (although yeah, copper theft is a thing). Source[1]
| states that Hydro-Quebec tripped for over current on long
| transmission lines. This has nothing to do with inadequate
| grounding and the solution was to increase the over current
| settings because the system could handle the induced current. The
| system was restored in 9 hours. Another event[2] listed resulted
| in "disturbances" across a large geographic area: a voltage
| collapse and unusual power flow but not outages.
|
| If the induced current was much higher the system would trip off
| to protect itself while the GIC lasted. This could take a while
| to recover from if it was a wide spread outage but we're not
| talking a civilization ending event like headlines suggest.
|
| What power companies are most concerned about are damaged
| transformers. Replacement transformers (at transmission levels
| anyway) are very expensive and have months to years long lead
| time so if a few get damaged restoration could take a very long
| time. But we have literature[3][4] that tells us what transformer
| designs are susceptible to overheating due to GIC. TLDR: Most
| modern transformers will be fine.
|
| What I'm more concerned about are satellites. I don't know how
| many satellites would be disabled and are at risk of collision.
| That sounds bad. What critical things rely on satellite
| infrastructure? GPS seems like a big one. Power systems use GPS
| timing, in some cases to enable differential current protection.
| But usually these systems will default to impedance protection on
| a loss of GPS signal and at any rate the industry is probably
| moving to terrestrial time sources because of the risk of GPS
| spoofing anyway.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_curren...
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_August_1972 [3]
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6281595 [4] https://www.pes-
| psrc.org/kb/published/reports/GIC%20Presenta...
|
| Source: I have worked on GIC monitoring systems at a major
| transmission company. But the opinions expressed are my own, etc,
| etc.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| You seem to know a lot so I might ask:
|
| As a consumer what/is there anything we can do to better
| protect say a 100W mobile solar panel + chargeable battery +
| phone? Maybe there is not threat?
|
| Though perhaps useless if the phone can't connect to
| anything...
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Headlines sound like "The next Carrington event could fry
| anything with electronics!" But it's not true. The danger is
| that a CME can interact with the Earth's magnetic field to
| induce a large current in the Earth. Long conductors parallel
| to the Earth are going to experience an induced current due
| to coupling with the ground. This is what got the telegraph
| system in trouble in 1859. We had transcontinental lines and
| primitive protection. Household scale cables aren't long
| enough to see a problem.
| izend wrote:
| The Carrington event supposedly took 17 hours to hit Earth,
| wouldn't the best option be to detect the CME and shutdown the
| grid before hand? I'd rather be without power for 24 hours vs 3
| months or longer.
| mongol wrote:
| Yes it sounds like that, if it would be possible. Without
| power for 24 hours is inconvenience. Without for 3 months
| could equal mass starvation.
| firebaze wrote:
| This is partially covered in the linked article.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| This is why the UK National Grid switched its transformer specs
| to no longer install three phase five limbed in the 1990s.
| Those are particularly vulnerable to damage.
| olivermarks wrote:
| I contemplated writing a book on the implications of a CME a
| few years ago, did some research but didn't have the time.
|
| An example of a critical thing that relies on satellite
| infrastructure are most gas pump payment processing and
| operations as I understood it.
|
| Regarding transformers there have been various US government
| level efforts to have back up Replacement transformers ready to
| go in storage in the last 20 years, the situation has not
| improved at all and like much single point of failure
| infrastructure an over reliance on China.
|
| I find it astounding the Pentagon can spend trillions on
| 'defence' but we can't scrape together the pocket lint to have
| back up offline infrastructure for the power grid ready to go
| with staffing and processes in place.
|
| Having said this there is a lot of alarmist information
| arguably primarily driven by page views floating around.
|
| The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark is a terrific read on the
| historical context of all this, highly recommend
|
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691141268/th...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I find it astounding the Pentagon can spend trillions on
| 'defence' but we can't scrape together the pocket lint to
| have back up offline infrastructure for the power grid ready
| to go with staffing and processes in place.
|
| Astounding yes, but it doesn't surprise me. "Defence", no
| matter the country, and much of aeronautics/astronautics is
| mostly a jobs creation program. Just look how immensely
| widespread Airbus, Boeing and EADS are - their operation
| spans continents, mandated by the lawmakers who fund their
| programs. No wonder that SpaceX (and Tesla!) who are to a
| large-ish part privately funded can be so cheap and agile -
| they simply don't have to account for logistics of
| transporting all the stuff and produce as much as they can
| on-site, without nasty politicians shouting from the sideline
| they want a return (=jobs).
|
| Transformer production doesn't yield to creating many jobs or
| wide-spread jobs in contrast, and thus it isn't high up on
| priority lists of politicians. Also, keeping large amounts of
| spares isn't ideal because the technology itself can date -
| oils can go rancid, metal can rust, and especially isolator
| material can break down.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Also, keeping large amounts of spares isn 't ideal
| because the technology itself can date - oils can go
| rancid, metal can rust, and especially isolator material
| can break down._
|
| Couldn't that be a good source of jobs, though?
| Warehousing, guarding, inspections, ongoing maintenance and
| replacement, logistics for all this. I think it could
| achieve both meaningful job creation (particularly if you
| threw in some procedural inefficiencies under the guise of
| "national security") _and_ meaningful impact on _real_
| defensibility of a country.
| mfer wrote:
| > "a CME the size of the 1859 Carrington Event would, if not
| prepared for, effectively level the power grid of the United
| States...
|
| CME refers to coronal mass ejections[1]. The 1859 Carrington
| Event is a case where one of these happened[2].
|
| The US power grid is susceptible to some real damage from one of
| these. It would take a long time to fix.
|
| The US, at least, isn't prepared.
|
| [1] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
| ryandrake wrote:
| Part of the power grid in the USA isn't even prepared for a
| chilly week, as we just found out. First rule of infrastructure
| funding: Don't actually spend it on infrastructure. Just pocket
| it as profits and when things fall apart, say we never could
| have seen this coming or prepared. Isn't that what everyone
| does when a bridge falls down, a gas line explodes, or an oil
| pipe leaks?
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _First rule of infrastructure funding: Don't actually spend
| it on infrastructure. Just pocket it as profits and when
| things fall apart, say we never could have seen this coming
| or prepared._
|
| And the corollary: _After_ things fall apart, ask for a
| taxpayer bailout.
| harry8 wrote:
| Still no big anti-corruption coalition. Some of that money
| will be spent to buy the politicians with lobbying,
| campaign contributions, media focus on tribal culture wars.
|
| The anti-corruption view that has massive support gets none
| of that and gets nowhere, at least yet.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Corollary to the corollary: After taxpayer bailout, raise
| rates to cover costs associated with new infrastructure.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Maybe of interest in this thread, there is some current
| regulation in the U.S. for handling GMDs that might be induced by
| a CME, called TPL-007. Power operators have to start collecting
| data, like magnetic field data, to plan and understand how GICs
| may affect their grid. The hope is that in the event of another
| major event like Carrington, power operators would be given
| enough time to react before damage is done, and avoid the largest
| consequences.
|
| Disclosure: I work for one of the major providers for GMD/GIC
| solutions: Computational Physics, Inc.
| mrhyyyyde wrote:
| Could you do me (and others) a favor and not speak in acronyms,
| not meaning to sound combative, just the 2 seconds of someone
| passing over your comment they're likely to gloss over whatever
| you said because of the time it would take to search into the
| terms and find the correct ones. Thank you!
| Cederfjard wrote:
| I had already went and done the search when I saw this
| comment. I think GMD is Geomagnetic Disturbance, and GIC
| Geomagnetically Induced Current.
| snug wrote:
| There is a show on Apple TV+ called "For all mankind," (without
| spoiling) the latest season has a solar flare event, wonder if
| this is what prompted this article.
|
| Anyways, it's a really great show and recommend anyone watch it
| if they are interested in the space race to the moon.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I'm only a few episodes in and I'm really impressed so far.
| It's probably the best show that no one I know has actually
| watched. I really enjoy how it feels almost like a documentary
| at times, but there's still suspense because you don't know
| which outcomes will diverge from what happened in our reality.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| > It's probably the best show that no one I know has actually
| watched.
|
| I feel the same way about other shows on the platform like
| Servant and Ted Lasso. Apple TV+ is clearly an underdog in
| streaming, but the quality is high.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| The idea of the internet being completely crippled, submarine
| cables fried, data centers zapped, backup power gone, is
| terrifying in itself. Almost every supply chain depends on modern
| communications. Everything we do is so embedded and dependent on
| technology losing power would just be scratching the surface of
| numerous catastrophic disasters. Nuclear power station
| meltdowns... oof.
| hollerith wrote:
| >submarine cables fried
|
| All submarine cables laid down in the last 20 years use fiber-
| optics, which isn't susceptible to solar flares like copper
| cables are.
| lgats wrote:
| many submarine cables have powered repeaters https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...
| Repeaters are powered by a constant direct current passed
| down the conductor near the centre of the cable, so all
| repeaters in a cable are in series. Power feed equipment is
| installed at the terminal stations. Typically both ends share
| the current generation with one end providing a positive
| voltage and the other a negative voltage. A virtual earth
| point exists roughly halfway along the cable under normal
| operation. The amplifiers or repeaters derive their power
| from the potential difference across them. The voltage passed
| down the cable is often anywhere from 3000 to 15,000VDC at a
| current of up to 1,100mA, with the current increasing with
| decreasing voltage; the current at 10,000VDC is up to
| 1,650mA. Hence the total amount of power sent into the cable
| is often up to 16.5kW.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Good point! Man, I am too old when I think of those cables I
| think of fat copper core slugs.
| king_magic wrote:
| My god, Forbes ads are so obnoxious.
| vertis wrote:
| Forbes has ads?
| covermydonkey wrote:
| I have quite the adblocking setup for my network and browser.
| Every now and then I get a glimpse of what the bulk of
| humanity has to endure on websites. I can't believe the
| difference. Those of us who enjoy an ad free Internet
| experience a completely different Internet lifestyle.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| You don't have uBlock Origin?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah. I'm on a tablet - about 60% of the horizontal space is
| lost to padding and ads/whitespace, and after a minute of
| reading a video moves in bottom-left with no close button,
| scooping up 25% of the screen.
|
| Effectively, only 30% (!) of the surface are used for
| displaying content. What an utter disgrace. And the data volume
| that is wasted for all of this _nonsense_...
|
| There's a reason why mobile ads are so much more expensive - it
| is extremely hard to block them. Chrome and AOSP webkit don't
| support any kind of adblocking plugins, and editing /etc/hosts
| requires rooting (which gets ever harder and harder) or weird
| VPN/fake VPN solutions that have their own massive security and
| battery life implications.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| There is the possibility to block them via a pihole.
|
| I never tried it myself so I do not know about the
| effectiveness and false positives.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I heard on the radio that it's number 4 on the UK government's
| list of things to worry about.
|
| Sorry to be data free; it was an interesting factoid though.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| I don't know about ranking but:
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
| page 35 it is on the national risk register.
|
| Here is the preparedness strategy (from 2015):
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
|
| The GB network tends to have relatively short lines and has
| used a GIC resistant transformer design since the 1990s so
| would probably only lose 1% or so of its transformers in a
| Carrington event.
|
| Three phase transformers with five limb cores are particularly
| vulnerable and have not been installed since 1997 on the GB
| grid.
| polycaster wrote:
| Do you happen to remember number 1 to 3?
| calebm wrote:
| I believe this is one of the most likely large-scale doomsday
| scenarios for our time. "One second after" is a good fiction book
| on the topic.
| lgats wrote:
| great book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After
| exhilaration wrote:
| I picked up a series on Audible with the same theme called
| Trackers, mostly because it was 33 hours of audio for a single
| credit: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Trackers-Series-Box-Set-
| Audio...
|
| It's not going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature but it was
| interesting, made you think about how quickly society might
| fall apart after an EMP attack.
| dfee wrote:
| I thought the URL was funny, "/sites/startswithabang" and peered
| in.
|
| There is one author, and here's his site:
| https://www.startswithabang.com/
|
| So is Forbes more or less a blog distribution platform now, like
| Medium or Substack?
| macintux wrote:
| Disclaimer: this is all far outside my wheelhouse.
|
| But IIRC, the task of preparing our grid for another Carrington
| Event isn't all that dissimilar from protecting it against an EMP
| attack, and last I read it was remarkably cheap.
|
| Certainly dramatically cheaper than the F-35 program. I seem to
| recall it was so cheap Congress could practically pay for it with
| change found in the couch.
| wrycoder wrote:
| If that's the case, why doesn't Congress pass enabling
| legislation for DOE regulations that would require the power
| industry to provide the necessary protection and spares within
| a defined time frame?
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Cool solar activity dashboard:
| https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/electric-power-communi...
|
| "Space Cyberspace Weatherman" really is a possible future job
| more and more.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Are there studies or technical resources on what kinds of E and B
| fields, as well as other radiation to expect at the Earth's
| surface due to a CME?
|
| I'd like to take a quantitative approach to evaluating and
| designing mitigations.
| boringg wrote:
| How about for the next Tunguska event?
| meepmorp wrote:
| Most of the earth's surface is still unpopulated, we're
| probably fine assuming the same blast size. Even over a
| population center, it's a local problem.
|
| Otoh, there's a lot of risk from human factors, especially if
| over a city. With the right placement and timing, it could
| trigger a nuclear exchange.
| watertom wrote:
| How prepared are we for any large scale natural event?
|
| Not prepared at all.
|
| It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever
| happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever
| will get fired for choosing profits.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| CEOs get fired all the time for not foreseeing unusual
| disastrous events.
|
| There are plenty of mechanisms to handle rare disasters
| rationally. The insurance industry manages a lot of it.
|
| But of course, Earth doesn't have a CEO. On balance I think
| that is a very good thing. Though it does cause some
| coordination problems.
| hinkley wrote:
| Which is why not all decisions should be made by CEOs.
| nullserver wrote:
| What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for
| all contingencies?
|
| Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to
| leave it out of fear.
|
| Rebuilding after disasters is a tried and true method.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to
| leave it out of fear.
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a
| cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any
| potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never
| mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose
| it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by
| thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way
| to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital
| point is that stasis only protects us against the danger
| posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning
| us against other inevitable dangers like disease,
| earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or
| otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of
| unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > thinking that technological stasis or regression is the
| way to prepare for or protect against disasters.
|
| Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all
| civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job
| to actively resist decline.
|
| Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound
| meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an
| existential crisis when one such object is in our
| trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not
| IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.
| agallant wrote:
| By that logic, no preventive measures should ever be taken.
| But individual measures have varied costs and returns, and it
| is worth considering those and selecting measures that make
| sense.
|
| Would you never screen for cancer because you can use
| chemotherapy?
| maxerickson wrote:
| Inexpensive mitigations in this case are things like
| evaluating and improving transformer designs so they are more
| resilient to these events, maybe speeding up replacement of
| some transformers (if they are especially susceptible or very
| critical) and maybe having a few more spares around.
|
| Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but
| there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving
| things.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Definitely having spares around. We should aim to be able
| to bring back power to major cities (around 30-50% of the
| population) within a month.
| NortySpock wrote:
| And it would be good if the transformers / grids were able
| to detect and self isolate during this kind of electrical
| weather.
|
| Far better to have to go manually restart a safed
| transformer than have to replace a destroyed one.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Who's suggesting we be 100% prepared for all contingencies?
|
| At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and
| resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in
| efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops.
|
| Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue.
| Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold
| temperatures _even though_ they suffered this same issue 10
| years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to
| rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes
| often cost people their lives.
| projectileboy wrote:
| That approach was not incredibly effective in New Orleans in
| 2005.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's not incredibly effective for the disasters that
| happen, no. It still may be the right approach, though.
|
| There are _many_ possible disasters. Being prepared for
| _all_ of them takes all your time and resources - more than
| all, in fact. We don 't have enough time and resources to
| prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort
| into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one
| of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more
| "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones.
|
| Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly
| seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-
| evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand,
| sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's
| hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we
| did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that
| one coming".
| Hammershaft wrote:
| The cost of a company not preparing for a catastrophe is
| hugely externalized, resulting in a lopsided risk
| equation that represents a market failure.
|
| In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured
| in preventable deaths, none of which private energy
| companies needed to account for when managing risk.
|
| In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power
| for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern
| civilization.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
| projectileboy wrote:
| You make good points. Please consider, however, that
| historically those decisions have not been made on
| relative likelihood, they've been made based on who we
| didn't care about. New Orleans is a prime example -
| experts had warned for decades about what would happen if
| NO were to be hit by a cat 5.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Using Texas as an example again: 10 years ago, 1M+ Texans
| lost power due to unusually cold temperatures. Last week,
| the same thing happened.
|
| This wasn't some unpredictable event. It just wasn't
| considered sufficiently profitable to prepare.
| shakezula wrote:
| Which is a really solid argument for why we maybe
| shouldn't put profit first when it comes to things like
| our energy grids.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Well, its just that people who made the decision are not
| paying for all the business disruption, productivity and
| health damages (including deaths) they caused.
|
| For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet"
| sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole
| powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yup. Money is a surprisingly good metric for these
| things, but it's how you count money that matters. That a
| power grid can collapse due to a predictable natural
| event tells us that the accounting we use here is wrong,
| as it doesn't correctly allocate costs of failure.
| aaomidi wrote:
| > Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and
| resources - more than all, in fact.
|
| Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few
| common features to it.
|
| - Food
|
| - Power
|
| - Transportation
|
| - Housing/Shelter
|
| These are common issues with every single possible
| disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for
| "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the
| outcome of "every disaster possible."
|
| These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant
| amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit
| our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the
| potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand
| years because we didn't.
|
| So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for
| disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| OK, but... take power, for example. Ensuring power after
| a Carrington Event is completely different from ensuring
| power after cold weather in Texas. Not completely
| different because of scale; completely different because
| the intersection of the solutions is very close to the
| empty set.
|
| So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of
| merit, what you have to do to _handle_ the consequences
| still depends significantly on what the cause of the
| problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for
| multiple scenarios. (I 'll give you this, though: It may
| be _fewer_ scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Carrington Event does have overlap with EMPs, if I
| understand my physics correctly, so there's at least an
| overlap with military concerns, which is tied to
| unlimited budget.
| bordercases wrote:
| Unfortunately military concerns are not the same as
| civilian ones.
| bordercases wrote:
| At what point do you allow for any risk management
| whatsoever? Your arguments against risk management rely
| on an an event space being large enough such that
| attempting to prepare for at least some events is absurd.
| That's the charitable version anyhow since I'm assuming
| that you actually do want to do risk management, which
| you discounted out of hand at the beginning just because
| there are many risks.
|
| Any heuristic to make this more tractable (including ones
| that eschew having to work with probabilities and thus
| event space sizes, like the consequence-based approach)
| works in favor of more prep.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The solution to keeping the entire grid powered is very
| different between the two events, but the solution to
| keeping hospitals powered is basically the same (diesel
| backups with huge tanks).
|
| Unless there's extreme weather you don't need to keep the
| entire grid operational for people to survive, only key
| infrastructure. So you can cut out those concerns if you
| have preparations for extreme hot and cold events (with
| cold being much easier to prepare for)
| njarboe wrote:
| If you do any camping you can easily be prepared for most
| disasters that happen when it's not winter. Buy some
| serious sleeping bags and you could be ready for
| disasters in winter also.
| njarboe wrote:
| Don't forget the most important one: Water.
|
| Many areas have natural water sources that could be used
| in a serious emergency, but having some potable water on
| hand and a way to purify more, is pretty easy and
| inexpensive.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Yep! I include Water in Food, but definitely extremely
| important as well.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared
| for all contingencies?
|
| No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for
| all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts,
| even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event
| are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it
| would seem rational to invest at least as much into
| preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car
| safety.
|
| See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016
| /04/a-hum...
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| > _even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type
| event are greater than your chances of dying in a car
| crash_
|
| That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something?
| Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying
| in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car
| crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level
| disasters?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| In the US, 0.01% of the population dies in car crashes
| each year (I didn't misplace a decimal, it's actually a
| fairly rare event).
|
| If there's a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1%
| of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk
| dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a
| car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than
| 1%, it's more likely than dying in a car crash. I'm not
| sure if the person you responded to is correct about the
| numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare
| extreme events can be important risks.
|
| I think people tend of overrate rare events that only
| hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and
| lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a
| lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather
| events, or other society-scale disasters).
| FooHentai wrote:
| It hinges massively on how correct the worst-case
| predictions about impact are. I don't agree with the
| worst-case predictions but let's entertain them for a
| moment as a thought experiment: let's say grid power is
| almost entirely knocked out for a full year in and that
| leads to mass starvation and a general breakdown in
| society. 30% of the population dies of either starvation,
| heat/cold exposure or from th troubles.
|
| If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in
| five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in
| such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car
| crash. Much higher, at that, so the real figures don't
| need to be anything like this extreme. Low-frequency
| high-impact risks can lead to that situation and it's one
| reason why 'the odds' is often too simplistic to be
| useful in assessing risk. Humans have a general cognitive
| blind spot when it comes to assessing this kind of thing.
|
| We're generally terrible at predicting how high-impact,
| low frequency events will impact us and play out and part
| of that is that our collective reaction is the most
| unpredictable element, with potential to multiply or
| mitigate the impacts to a huge degree in either
| direction. The current pandemic illustrates that quite
| well, as does Texas. A CME if/when it hits will open us
| up to a similar opportunity (or risk) of reacting in a
| way that either minimizes or intensifies the damage.
| jordan_curve wrote:
| It's pretty weird reading that Atlantic article in a world
| with covid.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Tell that to the people of Texas.
| travisporter wrote:
| I'll attribute this comment to the CS way of thinking of edge
| cases to break your code, not a strawman argument.
| reddotX wrote:
| Texas...
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