We have a lot more wires lying around than they did in 1859, so that's a lot more induced current than they had to deal with. They probably had all of the fires out within a day or two--I'm not sure we'd be so lucky.

I wonder if we have enough replacement parts on hand to recover after an event like that. Given our labyrinthine supply chains, if it becomes a manufacturing bottleneck it could take years to retool.

In a morbid way though, I'm also looking forward to the holiday. I'm really curious to see what changes we make while the lights and cameras and payment systems are offline.

If the power was out in large swaths of urban areas, then a lot more people would suddenly be able to see the night sky. A similar thing happened in parts of the LA area after the '91 Northridge earthquake.

I believe you mean ‘94. That was a fun one. ;)

I knew I should have confirmed that year before posting =) I couldn't remember the epicenter, I just knew it was up in the Valley, so I did look that up on a map. I only knew of it from stories, as I was nowhere near California at the time. I had a co-worker that had just moved to that area the day before the quake. He said he debated about putting off the unpacking and checking out the new area or busting ass to unpack and just be "moved in" and done with it. He chose the unpacking, and then that night the quake where he lost a lot of stuff. Had he left everything in the boxes, things would have been just fine. I bet he's now a firm believer in procrastinating!

The first episode of Connections—"The Trigger Effect"—plus times I've read here and other places that the destruction of a lot of critical power infrastructure in a big chunk of just the US could leave power off for weeks before replacements can be procured, even with the whole rest of the world functioning fine, make me... pessimistic that we'll do very well, in such a situation.

No clue what sort of plans major governments have for it. Hopefully they have some. We're incredibly dependent on electricity—the point of that Connections episode was largely that human history is a series of events in which we take on some critical new technology, it permits a huge boom in productivity/population/whatever, and from then on, we're flat-out dependent on it to avoid disaster—and that, now (for 1978 values of "now"), electricity has become one of those things that we have to have or most of us will die.

The document posted gives a range from 100 to 250 years, but I'd like to see some more scientific estimates.

I'm more worried about electrical lines shorting out transformers than I am about the world's data being erased all in one go. The Carrington event showed large amounts of current generated on long telegraph lines. Data is protected by error checking and surge protectors. Electrical lines are protected by old transformers that like to catch on fire when they short out.

If it happens during fire season we may not be able to stop the resulting fires from burning the entire west coast of the US.