[HN Gopher] What a major solar storm could do
___________________________________________________________________
What a major solar storm could do
Author : fortran77
Score : 81 points
Date : 2024-02-26 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| archive.org:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240226163016/https://www.newyo...
| superkuh wrote:
| Long article for something that can be summed up in two
| paragraphs. The primary danger is plasma from a CME or solar
| energic particles from a flare causing a rapid compression of the
| geomagnetic field by dynamic pressure and the the rate of change
| in magnetic field inducing large currents in very long conductors
| (power grid, pipelines, etc) down on earth.
|
| If the large backbone transformers in the grid are not outfitted
| with fast ground fault interrupters they would be damaged and the
| grid for large regions would go down. There are no backup
| transformers waiting. It would take a few to many months to
| produce and install new backbone transformers even in normal
| times. It might take more when the grid is down. This lack of
| electricity would have compounding effects.
|
| A much lesser worry is the satellites in orbit getting deep ion
| charging and sparking and getting damaged.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| So easy and cheap to prepare for, and the potential destruction
| is basically infinity, but here we are.
| superkuh wrote:
| Indeed. There was a strong push for funding for installing
| and mantaining fast ground fault interrupters after the EMP
| Commision in congress in 2001 (http://www.empcommission.org/)
| determined it was the best solution. And then again in 2008.
| But nothing actually happened besides words.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'm not sure that we haven't already prepared for this.
| Lightning is a thing and fast grounding transformers are the
| solution to that.
|
| As a kid, thunderstorms commonly knocked out the grid. Now as
| an adult I've rarely seen the power go out (It usually
| happens due to someone ramming a power line with their car).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Seemingly in these threads a lot of people don't understand
| solar storms at all.
|
| When lighting hits you get a few microsecond burst of a
| whole lot of power that gets dumped to ground. Your
| grounding will get very hot from this, but typically you're
| not getting hit constantly all day in the same grounding
| location.
|
| Now imagine this. You start getting excess power to the
| point it's starting to drive primary movers on the grid.
| You disconnect them because you don't want bad shit
| happening to your generators. But your grid is still
| generating power, in some places an awful lot of power that
| is acting more like DC rather than AC. So you're going to
| dump this to ground right? Have you ever welded? Because
| when you dump power to ground it's still power and it makes
| things hot. Unless you build in massive heatsinks you're
| going to have a problem.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Your telegraph lines start catching on fire, eh?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Honest question, because I don't know: _Are_ fast ground
| fault interrupters "cheap and easy"? I mean, sure, they're
| cheap and easy compared to replacing transformers. But they
| don't just grow on trees, either. What's the lead time on
| getting one?
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I meant the transformers. We're talking a relativey modest
| amount over a century or more. Governments can handle it.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Every single instance of "being prepared" has to go past an
| accountant who has to make the math, math for the next 90
| days. The conversation will go something like this.
|
| Engineer at electric company: "We'd like to get this project
| on the calendar for the quarter; should make the equipment
| more resilient against the risk of solar storms."
|
| Accountant at electric company: "What are the odds this solar
| storm happens in the next quarter?"
|
| Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a solar
| storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a solar
| storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to 1."
|
| Accountant: "That's not enough certainty when compared to the
| necessity of profitability." _scratches grid hardening off
| priority list_
|
| Now, "prepared" means "society not collapsing", and
| "profitability" means that a retired couple can buy a
| timeshare on a golf course in Florida where they can swing
| until the dementia sets in, but priorities are priorities.
| njarboe wrote:
| > Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a
| solar storm; however, as time goes on, the probability of a
| solar storm causing damage to our equipment gets closer to
| 1."
|
| Engineer: "We cannot accurately predict the timing of a
| solar storm; however, over a long enough timeframe, the
| probability of a solar storm causing damage to our
| equipment is close to 1."
| gamblor956 wrote:
| That's not what the accountants do at a company.
|
| The accountants are given the receipts after the engineers
| have already spent company money, and their job is to
| _account_ for that spending.
|
| The _finance_ department are the people who decide whether
| the engineers get to spend the money. (They 're also known
| as the FP&A team = financial planning and analysis.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I thought the engineers turned in the receipts in hopes
| of being reimbursed for the critical purchase that the
| accountants then get to decide if it meets their
| definition of critical.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'd have to imagine that now-a-days these transformers are all
| or mostly fast grounding. If they weren't, I'd expect lightning
| storms to be a much bigger and more frequent issue.
| chatmasta wrote:
| The vendors who sell fast grounding transformers must love
| these articles...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Lighting rarely hits transformers directly nor does it
| commonly hit the carrier lines. Typically you see a wire
| along the top that's grounded that 'catches' the lighting at
| the highest point and sends it to ground. Also lightning is
| pretty easy to arrest over short burst because of it's large
| influx and short duration.
|
| It's kind of like the difference between a single (smallish)
| wave caused by a boat and a tsunami. The boats wave can cause
| damage but it's typically very limited. Meanwhile the tsunami
| doesn't stop coming and becomes your environment. Fast
| grounding doesn't mean much when dumping to ground stops
| working because the ground gets so hot it's a resistor.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I feel like you're underestimating how old so much of our
| grid is. There are lines near my house (in a rural area) that
| are still just held up by warped bent poles with white
| ceramic insulators on them, a (hopefully) beefier version of
| what you'd see on an old electric fence before people started
| using plastic. Obviously old poles and cabling doesn't mean
| the transformers are outdated but I wouldn't be shocked.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| This is what I dislike about the New Yorker. It's a literary
| circle jerk. I get that you want to show me what a great writer
| you are, but I don't really need to hear about growing up on
| Alcatraz at the start of the article about a solar storm. If I
| want to read something that's 10x as long as it needs to be to
| get the point across I'll just pick up another Gladwell book.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| You think that's bad, wait until you see the recipe blog ;)
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Haha at least there's a "jump to recipe" link usually. I
| wish New Yorker had a "jump to the point" button.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Its my biggest gripe with the New Yorker, their articles are
| incredibly long winded and meandering at times.
| digging wrote:
| I really need an Abridged New Yorker feed. I love about
| 20-30% of their articles, by volume, but they're so, uh,
| "well written", that they're difficult to even scan for
| high-value information.
| tchock23 wrote:
| It's not just the New Yorker. This "Gladwell-ification" of
| non-fiction has been happening for a long time now.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > Long article for something that can be summed up in two
| paragraphs
|
| Sure, you can answer the question "What can a major solar storm
| do to our planet?" in two paragraphs, why not, if one would
| need a very quick, very short summary of what a major solar
| storm could to our planet.
|
| But.
|
| Some people might want a more in-depth answer, going into great
| detail. Some people might want so much detail that they might
| read a whole-ass book about a subject.
|
| Long form articles are not bad or unwanted; they bridge the
| space between a short summary and a book (along with essays,
| studies, etc). What is bad, though, is thinking everything
| should be reduced to a short two paragraph summary, or a 1min
| tiktok video, or a video. All mediums of communication have
| their uses and their niches, serving different needs.
| welder wrote:
| This isn't a more in-depth answer... it's a biography of a
| man researching solar flares.
| ytx wrote:
| Perhaps that's what people are actually reading the new
| yorker for :P
| anarbadalov wrote:
| Isn't this the same author who wrote that feature a decade ago
| speculating on the potential for a massive earthquake along the
| Pacific Northwest? It's too early in the week, but I'm
| bookmarking this for a weekend read. Incidentally, there's been
| news about huge solar flares in the last week (e.g.,
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/22/solar-flar...).
| DrBazza wrote:
| Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9 on the Richter
| scale. Seeing what Microsoft's business back up plan for that
| is, would be interesting, especially since Seattle would be the
| largest affected city.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| I lived in Vancouver bc and in general they're prepared. The
| office building I worked from had many earthquake supply
| cabinets that had rations, water, thermal blankets, and we
| all knew where the community muster points were. They had
| people come in to talk about the risks and remind you about
| earthquake preparedness.
|
| In general it's going to be a disaster, but people are
| prepared for it (as much as one can be anyhow)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Statistically Cascadia is long overdue a 9
|
| More precisely, it's 8, the average is 500 years, and the
| last one was in 1700.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Cunningham's law eh? :)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha! I had forgotten it had a name, but I guess that
| works.
|
| There is a fair bit of variability in the 500 year
| average, and 8 is still a seriously large earthquake, so
| preparations are definitely justified IMO.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That's not precisely accurate. The cascadian subductions
| zone uas produced magnitude 9 quakes in the past.
|
| The results I've seen (from a decade and a half ago) pegged
| the probability of a magnitude > 9 in the next 50 years at
| 1/10 and a magnitude > 8 at 1/3.
|
| The 500 years average is if you look at the last 7 events.
| 7 is a horribly low sample size and if you extend the
| timescale, that average drops by half and indicates we are
| past the 250 year average.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Statistically a lot of things are overdue. Like the big flood
| in California. https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2013/10/Dettinger_I...
| ianburrell wrote:
| The chance for Cascadia magnitude 8 is 37% is next 50 years,
| and magnitude 9 is 15%. The 37% chance is for the southern
| section, and 15% is for the full fault.
| frognumber wrote:
| My TL;DR is that we should be prepared for major disasters. I
| would love it if my tax dollars paid for:
|
| - stockpiles of food and medicine
|
| - various shelters
|
| - excess local manufacturing capacity
|
| - transparent, public, reviewable plans for different
| contingencies
|
| - subsidized making normal consumer devices more robust (e.g.
| repairable, RF-hard, etc. -- anything which can be done at
| reasonable cost)
|
| - training and coordinating responders, including something
| like the National Guard or territorial defense forces, but more
| general in scope.
|
| - making sure we can produce everything we need to survive
| locally (food, medicine, and the infrastructure to support
| those)
|
| ... and so on.
|
| It's hard to predict the next disaster, but we should be ready.
| whartung wrote:
| FEMA and State agencies have been advocating people get at
| least a 3 day bag ready in there house for each family
| member.
|
| A better plan is for two weeks.
|
| Back in the day, with the first surge of the Avian flu,
| Governor Schwarzenegger ordered an bought a large supply of
| respirators, "just in case".
|
| That stock pile was released and not maintained by later
| administrations. Then COVID hit.
|
| The problem with something like a Carrington event is that
| the potential impact is very widespread. The large bulk of
| our disaster planning is local. The planning rightly expects
| the cavalry to come to the rescue directly. Katrina was a
| poster child of both a good and bad response. The Houston
| boat lift is another. The rest of the country rallies and
| pivots to the disaster area sending material and people to
| aid the stricken.
|
| Having a 2 week store when you can shelter in place is a Good
| Plan for a very large majority of potential disasters. It
| doesn't work great for fire or floods (where you lose your
| home, and thus have no place to shelter). But the plan is to
| be able to maintain for the 2 weeks while the cavalry
| arrives.
|
| The problem with something like a Carrington event, is the
| disaster is no longer localized. But very wide spread, thus
| that cavalry that was planned for is probably not coming. Not
| soon. Not in time. And the rules have changed dramatically.
| It's a nightmare scenario. Despite the wide spread
| devastation of the Tsunami, it, too, was localized, and aid
| flowed quickly, even across the sea. With a Carrington event,
| not so much.
|
| This is where, ideally, communities must rally themselves, on
| their own initiative, to share resources and manage as best
| they can. As you can imagine, some communities may be able to
| do this better than others. But your 2 week supply for your
| family is now likely better used to support others in your
| community. For every Ant preparing for winter, there are a
| lot of Grasshoppers. And they get unruly when they get
| hungry.
|
| It would be unprecedented, and the only real course is to
| muddle through best we can. State and Federal disaster
| planning may or may not help here. Back in the day, the USDA
| running the Welfare programs stockpiled and delivered food
| (the infamous "government cheese"). Today they just offer
| debit cards. I don't know if there are warehouses of cheese
| and peanut butter standing by anywhere any more.
|
| Still, you can do you part, you can do your best. Engage with
| your neighbors, stockpile a bit more food (don't need to fill
| the garage with a year supply of dried beans, but an extra
| case of tuna won't hurt). Make your preparedness part of a
| continuing cycle of giving, as your stockpile starts reaching
| the 6 month due date, donate it to a food pantry, and get
| some more. But reaching out to your neighbors can help a lot,
| get them to work on their 2 weeks supply.
|
| Its not all about guns and gear. It's more about civility,
| and having a little more food or blankets to share with
| others in times of crisis. No reason to expect to feed the
| whole neighborhood, but don't expect them to leave you alone
| with your stocked garage while they go hungry.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| My scifi prediction is that if the worst predictions of AGI come
| to fruition that a Carrington event would actually save us
| (albeit we'd be radically changed).
| foota wrote:
| You're adding your one hope for humanity to the training set?
| :)
| fhars wrote:
| It's post 2022, it will not be used.
| fritzo wrote:
| I think it's more likely that a self-intrested AGI would save
| us from a Carrington event
| dylan604 wrote:
| but where's the scifi-ness fun of that?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| How could a thing that doesn't exist yet or remotely have
| support for it save us from an event that has near certainty
| of 1?
| gene-h wrote:
| Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by
| turning off electricity, although this is a difficult thing for
| power companies and grid operators to do. One issue this article
| doesn't discuss is the risk to undersea internet cables[0].
| Undersea fiberoptic cables need repeaters, these need
| electricity, so they have very long conductors and it's expected
| that sea water's conductivity could make induced currents worse.
| Shutting off power won't necessarily work, because induced
| currents could be 100x more than the equipment is rated for.
| Although, global connectivity is still likely to exist.
|
| [0]https://ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf
| Wieldable4640 wrote:
| Turning the power off would work, but is that feasible? Even if
| we'd be able to spot the CME, would then have enough time left
| to shut down the entire power grid?
|
| The time between detection and the CME hitting us would
| probably be measured in minutes. I don't think it's possible to
| shut down the grid in that timeframe.
| digging wrote:
| Yeah I question if it's something we even _could_ do.
|
| But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people.
| Probably _less_ than setting every electrical device on (half
| of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing
| people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their
| food spoils and they can 't get to the store.
| javajosh wrote:
| I say this only half in jest, but could we not request that
| an adversary trigger their malware to shut down our grid?
| When life gives you lemons...
| yifanl wrote:
| Wouldn't such an adversary always choose the option that
| causes us more damage?
| onenukecourse wrote:
| We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in
| seconds.
|
| Take the 2003 blackout. Yes, the whole shut down took 15
| minutes (?). But thats because it was a cascading effect that
| had to travel down the lines. Once the fault was detected by
| a particular segment of the grid, the relays responded in
| milliseconds. They have since the 1920s? Add in an "incoming
| solar flare" fault condition and we can trip the whole grid
| in seconds and send a start signal to the diesel generators
| to warm up to bring her back up.
|
| Pretty nifty trick.
|
| Question is why would we? The grid has been undergoing a lot
| of strengthening against EMPs and flares for decades. Its not
| obvious to me that a flare can take it out, especially if we
| shed dumb loads (partial blackout, say data centers) before
| it hits to give the conductors and transformers head space.
| spdustin wrote:
| If we had done enough to mitigate EMPs, the nuclear powers
| of the world wouldn't have space-based nuclear EMPs as the
| first step of their attack plan. We still do, and so does
| Russia.
|
| Geomagnetically-induced current is different from the
| plain-vanilla EMPs anyway--GIC can last for hours.
| roenxi wrote:
| We might easily be unprepared, but that the military
| tries things that might not work. Military attack is all
| about trying things that _might_ cripple the enemy and
| /or increase the cost of an effective defence. So an EMP
| isn't necessarily because it is expected to do horrific
| damage. It is just part of a thorough test of an
| adversaries preparations, making it harder to protect
| their infrastructure.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| I fail to understand why we don't do more to make
| equipment robust to this kind of thing. There's a whole
| range of problems that this solves looong before we get
| to general nuclear exchange.
|
| If stuff was shielded, isolated, and grounded better,
| everything from your phone to your WiFi would work a lot
| better and have longer range. Wind slapping power lines
| together wouldn't destroy everything plugged in inside
| your house and solar flares wouldn't be more than a
| passing concern. The design changes to affect all of this
| aren't remotely expensive or difficult, we just don't.
| nothisisntright wrote:
| > We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in
| seconds.
|
| Speaking from personal experience, this is BS. During a bad
| wind event, a bunch of lines came down, started a huge
| forest fire around 10 or 11pm which was heading for a small
| town with 50-70mph winds. First responders couldn't get in
| to warn anyone because the downed lines were energized, so
| they called up the power plant. The whole process to de-
| energize took hours. There is a kill-switch now, but most
| power plants apparently can't shut off the juice in a
| matter of seconds, and they may not even have a plan to do
| so in an emergency.
| btilly wrote:
| It is feasible.
|
| In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event it is
| estimated that the time from spotting the flare to the solar
| storm was 17.6 hours. That's plenty of time.
|
| The problem is figuring out how big the event is, and how
| directly it will hit us. So while we have over 17 hours to
| prepare, there might be some false positives due to our
| limited prediction skills. And, no matter the real
| consequences, people have limited patience for large economic
| disruptions over things that turned out to be nothing.
| kurthr wrote:
| Even better, if you turn off the electricity and prevent
| major destruction and nothing happens (other than the power
| down/up) then you're the one who caused "the problem".
|
| There's no reward for fixing a problem that doesn't happen
| and that people don't want to believe even exists. Bonus,
| if other networks are damaged while yours aren't, it must
| be _because_ you protected your network so you 're
| responsible!
| tejtm wrote:
| CME are "Coronal Mass Ejection" with mass being the operative
| word here. Electromagnetic radiation (electrons photons) can
| make the trip between sun and earth in about 8 minute but
| anything with neutrons or protons (such as the coronal
| plasma) takes much longer as in, a day and a half to several
| days. CME are not hard to spot leaving the sun with even with
| tiny amateur telescopes (the sun does not require much in the
| way of light gathering) so even without the professional
| scopes (SOHO) with dedicated satellites leading and trailing
| earth orbit constantly viewing around the edge of the sun as
| seen from earth or being able to acoustically "hear" (if you
| can call 5 minute pressure waves sound) the far side of the
| sun, it is not conceivable to me we would not be warned a CME
| was incoming, doing something about it is another story.
| ianburrell wrote:
| It takes 15-24 hours for CME to arrive at the Earth after
| solar flare. The particles are much slower than the radiation
| which arrive immediately. We have pretty good prediction if
| CME will hit Earth.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does ~8 minutes qualify as immediately, or are you doing
| the physicists thing of rounding to 0?
| ern wrote:
| For practical purposes in this case it's immediate right?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can do a lot in 8 mins. If you had 8 minute warning for
| an earthquake, what could you do? Luckily, we get more
| notice than that now for tornadoes, but 8 minutes is
| enough time to seek shelter. In 8 minutes, there's plenty
| of time to ctrl-s on everything, and then close apps and
| shut down computers.
|
| The problem is communicating to everyone when that 8
| minutes starts and how much time is left.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| But the point is that we'll have 15-24 hours, not 8
| minutes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That may be your point, but not the point to which this
| thread started.
| thfuran wrote:
| >If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what
| could you do
|
| That's not how it works. There may be detectable
| precursors that could actually give warning, but the 8
| minutes referenced is the time it takes light from the
| sun to reach earth. It's immediate in the sense that it
| is physically impossible to detect that before those 8
| minutes have already elapsed and the light is hitting
| your detectors. You could try to move your detectors
| closer to the sun to detect earlier, but any signal you
| can possibly send back to earth goes at the same speed,
| so it doesn't help.
| spdustin wrote:
| > Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated
| by turning off electricity
|
| That isn't entirely true.
|
| I guess, in reality, "turning off electricity" can work, if
| "turning off" means shutting down generation at the same time
| throughout an entire interconnected grid and physically
| disconnecting literally every transformer throughout that
| transmission grid before they're cooked by geomagnetically-
| induced current (GIC).
|
| Induced DC current alone can heat the windings in high-voltage
| transformers to the point of catastrophic failure, and that's
| assuming they can disconnect the AC current already flowing
| through the windings--if they can't, it heats even faster. This
| can possibly be mitigated by using a CT or hall sensor combined
| with a separate winding to cancel out the flux in the
| transformer's core, but I suspect that kind of work hasn't been
| done because there's no cost benefit.
|
| Some electricity providers have relaying systems in place meant
| to protect equipment, but the last time that was tested in
| real-world conditions (1989, in Quebec) they failed to prevent
| equipment damage.
|
| That says nothing about the transmission lines themselves, most
| of which are nowhere near protected from GIC, and could either
| overheat or allow enough DC to flow through smaller pole-
| mounted transformers , which magnetizes them and dramatically
| reduces their serviceable life (if not outright destroying
| them).
|
| In the case of Hydro-Quebec, GIC didn't cause equipment damage;
| their protection systems--the stuff meant to "turn off the
| electricity"--allowed damage to occur anyway.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Wild thought, is any nation preparing for this as an opportunity
| to attack?
|
| For example Russia using its whole arsenal to create maximum
| chaos to create some opportunities, or North Korea invading South
| Korea. Pakistan, China and Iran could def. also be cooking
| something.
|
| Might as well go balls to the wall now that the enemy is weakened
| and you have a lot less to lose. Especially if your economy is
| mostly self-sustained and doesn't rely on globalization to
| function properly.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Sure but what happens after they can't destroy everything? You
| get WW3 or some NATO response or worse
| spdustin wrote:
| Not a wild thought. The China, Russia, and the US (if not the
| other nuclear powers) have made known their plans to use a
| nuclear electromagnetic pulse as the first phase of any attack.
|
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#..
| .)
| tempestn wrote:
| With that being the case, you would think that grid hardening
| would not have trouble getting funding, as a matter of
| national security.
| spdustin wrote:
| Hardening essential comms and energy infrastructure has
| been funded. Trouble is, the rest of us don't benefit from
| the government redundancies, since they're focused on
| continuity of government rather than continuity of the
| electorate.
| SahAssar wrote:
| That seems to be talking about using EMP as a targeted
| weapon.
|
| I think the question was more if any countries have ready
| made plans to exploit the natural disaster for military gain.
| Like does any country have a standing order to in the case of
| massive global disruption subdue or attack their geopolitical
| rivals?
| rglover wrote:
| I find it interesting that last week, we had a nationwide AT&T
| outage and one of the causes speculated on local news outlets
| (within a couple hours) was a solar flare [1]. Now, less than a
| week later, we have articles in the New Yorker priming thoughts
| about solar storms.
|
| Why is this relevant? Consider where that speculation started:
| local news networks [2].
|
| It's worth reading Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars [3] if you
| haven't already to understand why it's worth me mentioning this.
| Easily dismissed as "conspiracy nonsense," but it's worth asking
| "why this, why now?"
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7scPFH0aq9U
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
|
| [3] https://archive.org/details/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars-
| or...
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| I just read the pamphlet "Silent Weapons to Quiet Wars" that
| you suggested and would say it is not worth reading.
|
| There is not much in it, besides a (presumably) faked origin
| and typesetting, a brief analogy to physics and electronics,
| hushed talk of banks and domination, and a lot of hand waving
| and winking at the reader
| rglover wrote:
| There's a lot more to it than that and I'd encourage people
| to form their own opinions. It maps fairly close to our
| current reality, even if that mapping is uncomfortable for
| some to read. Considering the publication date, you can use
| abductive logic to say "yep, all of this chaos was
| intentional."
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| > There's a lot more to it than that
|
| I disagree. It gestures to a lot more (operational
| research, electronics, physics, etc), but just loosely
| points to them to make analogies. If you have no
| familiarity with those subjects, it is better to read about
| them elsewhere. If you are familar with them, then the
| analogies just seem shallow and don't provide to the
| pamphlet other than to fluff it up to make it seem more
| scientific than it is.
|
| The rest of it refers to bankers (Rothchild!), domination
| and sub-nations. It also has a presumably fake origin
| story, and smacks of being a modern Elders of Zion like
| work.
|
| I didn't know anything about this pamphlet other than what
| you posted before reading it (and I only read it because it
| has a provocative title), but I would suggest to anyone
| else not to waste their time- go read instructive books on
| operational research, cybernetics, etc, instead of this
| pretending to be a secret book from the 70's
| rglover wrote:
| > I didn't know anything about this pamphlet other than
| what you posted before reading it.
|
| You didn't read it, then (you replied to me within 30
| minutes).
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| I did read it- it is very short :)
| mrexroad wrote:
| > Easily dismissed as "conspiracy nonsense"
|
| That's because it is conspiracy nonsense. It's totally bonkers
| if you read it with an actual open mind... as opposed to a mind
| already seeking to reinforce notions about some NWO and that
| most others are simply cattle with their brains tuned off.
|
| TBH, Reddit is a better place for fancy math and circuit
| diagrams to be taken at face value to help perpetuate
| conspiratorial systems thinking.
| tempestn wrote:
| I read much of it as well, and agree with the conspiracy
| nonsense evaluation. Many references to supposed secret
| meetings held between international/university/etc. elites in
| one year or another with no specifics or evidence whatsoever.
| It's literally conspiracy nonsense.
| runjake wrote:
| http://archive.today/UcMvZ
|
| (In case web.archive.org is blocked at your workplace.)
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Something to add to the mix:
|
| For those who don't know, capital expenditures that are funded
| out of a rate case make investor-owned utilities money. If you
| can get the relevant regulatory body (often a public utility
| commission) to approve raising rates to cover x dollars of grid
| resilience projects, the utilities will happily take the money
| and go forth and implement.
|
| The trick is justifying the spend to said regulators. This is
| hard with black swan events and regulators that are explicitly
| tasked with being ratepayer advocates, guarding against the
| utilities unnecessarily gold-plating things to get a greater rate
| of return for their investors. It's not like the utilities don't
| want the money, or the "work" of doing it, or anything like that.
| Rather, if PG&E went to CPUC and asked for several billion
| dollars to build a hardened bunker filled with things like
| transformers that may never be used in the lifetime of the people
| signing the documents (but the profits realized by the rate of
| return on the CAPEX will immediately go to investors), they'll
| likely get laughed out of the room. This issue complicates the
| discussion about grid resilience, because it can seem to Jeff &
| Jane Ratepayer (/taxpayer if we're talking national projects)
| it's all just an excuse to route regular people's money to
| executives & investors over something that won't happen, the rich
| get richer, yadda yadda yadda.
| spdustin wrote:
| Or, in the case of Texas, where there are no regulators that
| have done so...
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I wonder if a solar storm can get so intense that the aurora
| borealis or aurora australis is visible during daylight hours?
| ljoshua wrote:
| See the Carington Event:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
|
| It doesn't discuss seeing it during the day, but it was visible
| in places where it would never otherwise be.
| Geisterde wrote:
| Pick me! I think it would upset people, at least until after
| dinner has passed. After that, and once people have figured out
| who has a functional ice maker and whos cars still run, I think
| its back to the grind.
| johnea wrote:
| It was a dark and stormy night... as I grew up on Alcatraz? 8-/
|
| tl;dr never made to anything having anything to do with solar
| storms...
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