Sometimes there are news stories about solar events which could knock out satellites and greatly damage the electrical grid. A recent story said that the Earth narrowly missed a massive coronal mass ejection back in 2012 which could have caused $2 trillion in damage and taken years to repair the electrical grid.
What if there was an even more massive electrical event which globally destroyed the electrical grid and most un-hardened electronics? In addition to no electricity, things like computers, phones, TV’s, etc. would all be destroyed.
Would something like that be possible? Some sort of global electrical event which destroyed electronics but left pretty much everything else alone?
And if it did happen, how could we recover from that? If immediately there was no electricity and no way to repair it, it seems like things would get very bad very quickly. Anything that depends on computer chips, like a car, would not work. Only the simplest of machinery would still operate (old cars, dirt bike, etc). How could the electrical grid come back online if the computers they need to operate are destroyed? How could we fix those computers if the chip plants needed to make more computers have their computers destroyed. Food production and distribution would be extremely difficult. Water would be hard to come.
Ironically, it would probably be the less developed areas which would fare the best. People living in cities would quickly run out of resources, but people living in some far away place who get water from the river and grow their own food may not notice anything even happened.
The odds are good this will happen one day. If it happened now, we would be screwed. With smart grids, distributed generation, etc… We might be better off.
I can’t wait for the SyFy channel movie about this. But such a movie would require a villain, so let’s see - I know, a hugely wealthy owner of power-generation utilities who thinks it’s in his interest to oppose things like smart grids and distributed generation, but who ends up getting wiped out financially, and then personally destroyed by the CME as he tries to escape via his own private space ship. We get to watch as his face melts.
The rest of mankind, or at least the US, is saved by the efforts of a nerdy but hot scientist and her plucky male assistant.
Even assuming the mother of all lightning storms or whatever that melt down the lines, transformers and generators, the precious raw materials won’t go anywhere. It would be a national program of recovering the damaged gear and running it through recycling system to create new components. Not that it wouldn’t be a decade of Depression-beating economic hardship, but we could rebuild it all from its own ruins… and do it better.
Isn’t it interesting how the metric of all events is dollar value? The news value of a ten thousand deaths in a cyclone in Bangladesh or trwenty deaths in a blizzard in Northern Europe are measured by the dollar value of the earning power and wealth of the people who are killed. A month-long power outage in Kinshasa wouldn’t even be mentioned in World News Daily tabloids.
I guess the most important thing is what happens to the food supply. If farming equipment survives or can be repaired quickly we can avoid starving while we fix everything.
Just the power grids would probably not the worst thing, as you can use generators. I’m pretty sure people will figure out how to use hybrid cars to power their house fast enough.
If it’s everything electronic and world wide then we’d basically have to recreate 50 years worth of technology from scratch all the while avoiding starvation and disease. That would be a big problem.
But would it be world wide? Wouldn’t a CME only hit the part of the planet where it’s day? And all electronics? I’m sure many important facilities (chip fabs…) are well protected, and lots of random stuff will survive by accident because it happens to be built in such a way that currents won’t be induced easily (is that the way CMEs affect electronics?) or they’re shielded inside a metal structure or under ground.
If it’s only half the world then replacements can be flown in from the other half and recovery would be quick.
Yeah, I am not really sure that would be the case. If a device is not dirt-grounded and has the right kind of shell (which I think most car computers probably do), a solar event is probably not going to be a problem. Of course, your car will be good for the distance it has in its tank, until they get the gas stations back on the grid.
A CME is a fairly slow-moving fluid (plasma), so unless it just grazes the planet, it will impact a lot more than the day side. Most likely, the flow would be across the Earth’s orbital track, so first impact would be at 6am as the planet plunges into the stream. Then it would wrap around the planet over the course of a day, depending on the size and shape of the stream.
Assuming that the event would be catastrophic enough that it would take decades to recover from it, the most interesting question might be how we would avoid mistakes that were made the first time through.
Consider the analogy of the city destroyed by a weather event, and how it gets rebuilt. The urban renewal accomplishes what would have otherwise been impossible, and a generation later, the storm can be looked back upon as a blessing in disguise.
Similarly, a catastrophe of sufficient magnitude could set us back to a new starting point at which, for example, transportation could skip the fossil fuel era and restart with a clean slate of clean and efficient vehicles. Much like the development of telephony in the third world, where landlines were skipped over completely, and undeveloped nations went straight from jungle drums to cell phones.
That’s a big assumption. Does this solar storm cause all of societies knowledge to disappear as well?
We know how to create power plants from greenfield conditions, we also know how to repair them when they break. It wouldn’t take decades for this to happen.
I may be mistaken, but why would chips and other component parts not attached to the electric grid be damaged? I though the way an EMP works was by energizing the power grid and burning out any delicate, unprotected components.
Would cars be effected? IIRC, a car is insulated from the ground by it’s tires and it’s frame acts like a natural Faraday cage. Ergo, you don’t get out of it during a lightning storm.
An EMP is not a magical force that renders all electrical devices inoperable forever and erase the memory of how to generate electricity.
