Solar Storms

[64hz]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 21706.html

Havoc wreaked by a solar storm – such as the one that occurred last week – could be equivalent to a "global hurricane Katrina" that would cost up to $2 trillion dollars in damage to communications satellites, electric power grids and GPS navigation systems, scientists said yesterday.

Thursday's solar flare was the biggest for four years and ejected billions of tons of matter travelling at a million miles per hour towards Earth.

When it hit our magnetic field it generated magnetic storms and power surges which disrupted communications and grounded flights

[wubstep]

I feel people should be freaking out a bit more.

I can easily see pandemonium coming about from lack of communication and transport.

[cityzen]

I can easily see pandemonium coming about from lack of communication and transport.

Time to bust out my Dad's sextant and my book on smoke signals....

[test_recordings]

You do realise that this wouldn't be a problem if technology used electron valves instead of shitty transistors? 'Valves are immune to electro-magnetic forces because they have larger, tougher and more separated parts.
In the 'Cold War' a Mig Type-79 landed in Okinawa, Japan, as the pilot had decided to defect. NATO got excited because they were scared from rumours that this plane had anti-EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) shielding to keep it operating even within the blast-radius of a nuclear weapon and they wanted to check it out... Turned out the solution was actually a lot lower tech than they had expected, instead of mega-advanced EMP-shielding the Russians had just used rugged electron valves which did the job even better NATO's forces at the time were more vulnerable to EMPs because they'd put all their research efforts in to developing transistors which still didn't match up...
I remember reading about research about miniaturisation of 'valves to make them useful in a wider range of situations (they are still kind of big because more research went in to transistors than perfecting existing technology), hopefully more effort will be put in to it but I bet it won't be until after something daft happens (e.g. a HUGE solar flare that catches everyone with their pants down) that it will go ahead.
Both transistors and valves can be used for computing as both can perform 'flip-flop' binary operations that all computing is based on (or was?)

[d-T-r]

Sun has been going off recently. funny to hear it on mainstream radio + news

[Forum]

Any excuse to post this

[Dub_freak]

Solar maximum next year, going to be a lot of activity leading up to it. I'd get a solar telescope if i could afford one

[test_recordings]

I wonder what it did today...

[magma]

There's a Horizon on this on the iPlayer at the moment that I haven't got round to watching yet. There was a good doc last year too...

It's one of those things I guess... we've had a few fairly big ones and it's not caused too many problems, but theoretically, yeah, it could fuck plenty of shit up. Probably won't... most of the world's important IT and power systems are massively fail-safed... it'd take something absolutely enormous to cause much more than a few days of inconvenience - I doubt we'd really see much more effect than we do when it snows and we're not ready.

We can't do a lot to prevent it, so it's an odd one to worry about too much... we'll deal with it, we're pretty fucking awesome.

[magma]

I wonder what it did today...

[gnome]

More chance to catch the northern lights!

[d-T-r]

‎(((⊰ϕ⊱ △ ☀ ⚇ ☼ ⚉ ▽ ⊰ϕ⊱)))
(((⊰ϕ⊱ ▽ ☼ ⚉ ☀ ⚇ △ ⊰ϕ⊱)))

[ascent]

There's a Horizon on this on the iPlayer at the moment that I haven't got round to watching yet.

watched that yesterday, it annoyed me because it took forever to say not very much.

[kay]

Don't have to jump all the way to electron valves, it's possible to shield against the induced current spikes. However, it's costly and heavy so no one does. Switching the circuits off also helps.

However, yes, we're woefully unprepared for this despite knowing for years it's going to happen. More of the pointless shortsightednesss of humanity.

[MrAural]

I'm rather shitting myself.

Has anyone actually issued a guide on what to do?

[fractal]

y2k pt 3

stay tuned for y2k pt 4 (mayan vip) out on 12/21/12

[MrAural]

y2k pt 3

stay tuned for y2k pt 4 (mayan vip) out on 12/21/12

[alphacat]

Good opportunity for our species to work on its emotional maturity and get it up to speed with our technological maturity.

[knell]

y2k pt 3

stay tuned for y2k pt 4 (mayan vip) out on 12/21/12

first bit of sense in this thread.

have none of you taken Astronomy/Cosmology 101 before?

[LACE]

y2k pt 3

stay tuned for y2k pt 4 (mayan vip) out on 12/21/12

first bit of sense in this thread.

have none of you taken Astronomy/Cosmology 101 before?

+1

saying to myself ''what the hell did i just read.''