Topic: Flaring up...

[Idaho_Gun_Nut]

That was the story title in yesterdays Stars and Stripes in reference to Solar Flares.  NASA apparently is very concerned about the suns activities and the impact the solar flares can and will have on the US power grid.  We experience solar flares all the time but they are expecting the big one to happen with activity peaking again in 2013 through 2014.  A large enough flare could send charged particles that could knock out all the satellites disrupting finacial transactions, GPS systems and the national power grid for months or even years... basically an EMP from the sun.

[Scarecrow]

This stuff gets my hackles up.  It doesn't happen often, but we are more reliant on our infrastructure an electronics now than ever before.

[WTF]

This!

The greatest threat is a societal collapse followed by a global natural disaster.

It takes a long time to climb up a technology tree. Even if you had the science and plans in your hands, imagine what it would take to build a nuclear reactor, starting with nothing just a group of naked humans in an empty field. The sheer amount of infrastructure required is incredible.

We have substitutes, though more expensive, for most fuels and materials that face shortages in the future. Even things like copper, zinc, etc which people have warned of "peak copper", we can always move to recycling and using more dilute sources. Oil can be replaced, at a higher expense, with biofuels, electric cars, synthetic fuels, etc.

The problem is all of these replacements are even higher on the tech tree. We're at a point know where all the easy oil has been burned. All the easily accessible iron has been mined. By "easily accessible" I mean that which can be found and extracted without much modern equipment. The first oil was found from natural pools on the surface. Ancient iron mines only extracted what we would deem very rich iron sources today. For early iron production, you need rich veins to make it profitable. Nowadays we just grind up a whole mountain and process ore that's just a fraction of a percent iron.

So, what happens if we have a collapse? The collapse could be triggered by any number of scenarios - nuclear war, global pandemic, or simply resource depletion. We get knocked back a few centuries, have another dark age.

The problem is, if we get knocked down the tech tree, we might not be able to climb back up. Right now we might need a platform floating 100 miles off coast in a mile of water to extract oil. You just can't do that with tech circa 1850. What happens when say a steam engine requires iron, but the only iron mines around require the steam engine?

So, a collapse might be permanent. The Earth might simply be so depleted of easily accessible resources that the second dark age becomes permanent. We might end up sitting here with tech circa 1600 indefinitely.

The problem is, this leaves us vulnerable. We have enough numbers and enough technology to protect us from most natural threats. With our current technology, we could probably divert an asteroid. If we were stuck in a perpetual dark age, we would just be sitting around waiting for the inevitable doom.

So, I think the most likely scenario for extinction is technological collapse followed by global natural disaster.

[RGinIdaho]

What happens when say a steam engine requires iron, but the only iron mines around require the steam engine?

What happens to all of the iron left in the rubble from the destroyed infrastructure? Is it sucked into space via some giant magnetic field?

Sorry, I forgot, we are talking EMP.

[GrayWolf]

Add to all of this the greatest disaster of all - 0bama as President!   

[Scarecrow]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/06/us-utilities-noaa-solarstorms-idUSTRE7746UA20110806

Power companies prepare as solar storms set to hit Earth

NEW YORK | Sat Aug 6, 2011 1:04pm EDT
(Reuters) - Three large explosions from the Sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days.

"The magnetic storm that is soon to develop probably will be in the moderate to strong level," said Joseph Kunches, a space weather scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He said solar storms this week could affect communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin.

An aurora, called aurora borealis or the northern lights in northern latitudes, is a natural light display in the sky in the Arctic and Antarctic regions caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere.

Major disruptions from solar activity are rare but have had serious impacts in the past.

In 1989, a solar storm took down the power grid in Quebec, Canada, leaving about six million people without power for several hours.

The largest solar storm ever recorded was in 1859 when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs.

The 1859 solar storm hit telegraph offices around the world and caused a giant aurora visible as far south as the Caribbean Islands.

Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks. Papers caught fire. And many telegraph systems continued to send and receive signals even after operators disconnected batteries, NOAA said on its website.

A storm of similar magnitude today could cause up to $2 trillion in damage globally, according to a 2008 report by the National Research Council.

"I don't think this week's solar storms will be anywhere near that. This will be a two or three out of five on the NOAA Space Weather Scale," said Kunches.

SOLAR SCALE

The NOAA Space Weather Scale measures the intensity of a solar storm from one being the lowest intensity to five being the highest, similar to scales that measure the severity of hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The first of the three solar explosions from the sun this week already passed the Earth on Thursday with little impact, Kunches said, noting, the second was passing the Earth now and "seems to be stronger."

And the third, he said, "We'll have to see what happens over the next few days. It could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all."

Power grid managers receive alerts from the Space Weather Prediction Center to tell them to prepare for solar events, which peak about every 12 years, Tom Bogdan, director of the center said.

He said the next peak, called a solar maximum, was expected in 2013.

"We're coming up to the next solar maximum, so we expect to see more of these storms coming from the sun over the next three to five years," Bogdan said.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by Alden Bentley)