How the sun could wipe us out a burst of plasma would set in motion a devastating cascade of failures ( Article from July 2021)

[newarkhiphop]

long and terrifying read, this is just part of it

How the sun could wipe us out

A burst of plasma would set in motion a devastating cascade of failures

unherd.com

The world began to end on 12th May 2024, though another 309 years would pass before our species finally went extinct. The apocalypse was not the result of one thing, unless that one thing was that we repeatedly ignored signs that industrial civilisation had become increasingly fragile, even as it grew ever more powerful. But our end very definitely had a trigger. A burst of charged plasma from the sun caused the sudden, simultaneous collapse of numerous electrical grids across the world, setting in motion a cascade of devastating failures from which humanity would never recover.

In one regard, this was perfectly predictable. In any given decade since the grid’s invention, there was a one in eight chance that such an electrical collapse could occur. In 2013, a report had warned that an extreme geomagnetic storm was almost inevitable, and would induce huge currents in Earth’s transmission lines. This vulnerability could, with a little effort, have been completely addressed for a tiny sum of money — less than a tenth of what the world invested annually in text messaging prior to the great collapse of 2024.

And it wasn’t as if the profits of some powerful industry depended on leaving the vulnerability open; the fossil fuel industry had a reason to oppose sustainable power, but the grid’s vulnerability enriched no one. In fact, every person on Earth stood to benefit from fixing the flaw. And yet it remained, never a priority, perhaps because nobody could predict when the fuse would be lit.

The burst of plasma leapt from the Sun’s surface on 9 May, 2024. It was detected by Earthbound space-weather observers, who track these dangerous Coronal Mass Ejections. They made the usual calculations and issued the standard warnings. Had the grid been promptly disconnected, the crisis might have been lessened. But as was invariably the case with geomagnetic storms, they could not say how seriously — or even if — this burst would disrupt power, so the scientists’ warnings were largely ignored by grid managers, who don’t like blacking out vast areas on the remote chance of a severe problem. Crossing fingers had worked pretty well in the past. This time it did not.........

 

[acri1]

yup, and sooner or later this WILL happen, it's just a matter of when.

I think I read there's about a 50/50 chance of it happening in your lifetime.

 

[88m3]

there are worse ways to go


sad to think about /

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Really not a great idea to take a Bret Weinstein article seriously, he's the king of trying to normalize outlandish theories and fear-mongering.

Bret Weinstein Sure Has A Lot Of Theories

It’s frustrating to watch the worst sort of conspiracy theorist become a thought leader by scaring and misleading people

jessesingal.substack.com

A huge solar storm could certainly disrupt the electric grid, but some of the claims he is making feel quite far-fetched to me. For example:

Few who faced the initial blackouts had any idea what had happened, how big an area was affected, or that substantial grid repair would take years. The blackout cut them off from power, yes, but also from information. Most assumed their electricity would be back within hours or days.

Electrical blackout doesn't mean a complete information blackout. Cell phones would still work until their batteries run out, and many cell towers have backup power sources. Radio and television stations have backup generators to allow them to continue broadcasting during an outage. Some people would get information via battery-powered radio, or well-charged cell phones with backup batteries and/or power banks, but it's also become more and more common for people to have home solar, or backup home battery storage (inverters), even an electric car can power a home in many instances.

Of course, many people would be without a directs source of information. But those people who were getting information would pass it on. Neighbors would talk to neighbors, police or military would be conscripted to distribute notices. Word regarding the general situation would spread.

By the second and third consecutive nights, the mood became increasingly panicked. People started trying to flee the blackouts by car. Most, not knowing how far it extended, made their situation worse. Without power, no gas was available, and so these first refugees were forced to abandon their vehicles haphazardly. Roads became blocked. The military tried to keep order, but their attempts to calm the population with false promises and inadequate aid caused them to be viewed with suspicion and hostility and sometimes targeted. Desertions became common as soldiers set out to protect their families.

He's suggesting that blackouts would cause people to flee their homes until gas ran out, would cause the population to target the military, and would cause military members to begin deserting....2-3 days into the blackouts. Seriously.

Even where the power remained on, life was not normal. Those near the blackout border quickly faced armed raids from the dark zones. Residents fled toward the powered interior. Wave after wave of refugees arrived — drawn to anything functional, quickly overwhelming it and creating new refugees. As everyone saw chaos erupt around them, they became intensely focused on immediate needs. Everywhere, there was hoarding. The sound of gunfire became ubiquitous as armed syndicates emerged to overwhelm isolated preppers. The distinction between offensive and defensive killing was lost. Canned and freeze-dried food became inconceivably valuable. Currency became worthless as people realised society was unrecoverable.

This is....how long into the blackouts? He jumped from "by the 2nd and 3rd nights, some people might drive around" to "America devolves into armed factions led by warlords" without giving a single additional timeline.

Just a few years ago, Puerto Rico had a blackout where like 90% of the country was off the grid for weeks and hundreds of thousands of people were off the grid for months. People didn't go apeshyt over it.

In the third week after the collapse, a helicopter clipped a light pole in the fog and crashed at the North Anna reactor in Virginia, spilling its fuel and sparking a devastating fire that engulfed the generators. Retardant dropped from above was sucked into the air intakes, and the combination killed the power, which remained out long enough for the reactor cores to meltdown and slump. The containment breached, forcing the site to be abandoned.

I don't know much about how nuclear power plant sites are set up, but "flying a helicopter carrying thousands of gallons of fuel so close to the site that it sparks a nuclear meltdown" seems unnecessary to me. He doesn't think the people actually in charge of flying the helicopters would be able to keep them slightly further away from the reactors than that?

Not to mention that using helicopters to transmit fuel would be a huge waste - they would be transmitting the fuel by train or truck.

Meanwhile, the population was nearly helpless as the skills they had acquired for the pre-collapse world were rendered useless. Many thought that, with modern weapons, they could hunt their way through lean times — the result being that populations of every terrestrial animal one might think to eat crashed all at once.

There are 40 million cows in America, if we really descended to Mad Max status, I'm pretty sure folk would be picking off cows first before they started crashing wildlife populations.

Hundreds of thousands of humans fled into the wilderness, many with no idea how to function there. The result that first summer was unprecedented wildfires — some started carelessly, some set deliberately by people hoping to flush out animals. In North America, 100 years of foolish forest management centred on fire suppression had left a giant tinderbox. Post collapse, there was no firefighting effort to contain these blazes. They burned, hot, until they went out, desertifying vast landscapes, killing many, and creating ever more refugees with nowhere to go.

That claim only works if the government has entirely ceased to function, because firefighting efforts really aren't all that resource-intensive in the grand scheme of things. And nowhere in his essay has he explained why government would cease to function. The government would be resiliant to virtually every issue he's brought up so far, so why wouldn't they be able to muster fire-fighting efforts?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

It is funny that Weinstein is one of the founders of a movement that heavily promotes distrust and fear of centralized government.....when the only serious way to solve this issue would be via a major effort by centralized government, and the primary way to combat the issue after it emerged would be via a major effort by centralized government. Plus, half the issues he describes in the essay are caused by public distrust of government which he has played a large part in signal-boosting.


The one good thing he does manage in the essay is to shine a light on what a lot of our societal vulnerabilities are. He correctly notes that industrial monoculture relying entirely on massive external outputs is a serious vulnerability. He correctly notes that numerous nuclear reactors which require constant active work to prevent meltdown is a serious vulnerability. He correctly points out a lot of major environmental vulnerabilities, which are occurring at a slow burn right now rather than suddenly, but are still occurring (Weinstein, a biologist, is one of the few on the right/IDW who admits that humans are causing an environmental catastrophe right now). And perhaps unintentionally, he notes that lack of societal trust and fear-mongering towards sources of "authority" have themselves become a huge societal vulnerability.