We could always fall back to running the internet with RFC1149

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

Some hope on Colapse OS [1] perhaps?

[1] http://collapseos.org

Must be somewhat depressing to be living in a state of fear such that you build an OS specifically for when you assume all supply chains fail globally, probably this decade. Seems both stressful AND unlikely your project will truly be useful in such a position. Not knocking the tech or author, just a thought about such depressing predictions!

Well, someone's got to think of contingencies. It might as well be someone who's already prone to such consuming thoughts. I hope it's never needed, but if it is, there's also some chance we may be thankful for its existence.

It's a very interesting hobby project that involves thinking about technology in a different way. It's not any more useless than Haskell.

Many major businesses use Haskell. A better comparison might be brainfuck.

I’ve written production Haskell that dealt with billions of USD transactions per day, fwiw

The only hope is one can find the now obsolete computing parts needed after the last modern computer stops working. Collapse OS is a fantasy.

Half of the Earth will be unaffected by the flare. Even if a storm fries all electronics on one side of Earth, there will remain devices, networks, and factories on the other side, likely somehow protected by the bulk of the planet.

Flares aren’t line-of-sight nor instantaneous. The whole earth would be affected.

Not true.

The flare itself is fairly fast. But the issue is charged particles that take longer to get us. And they are spread out in time.

As https://www.livescience.com/carrington-event describes, the Carrington Event was a solar flare lasting only 5 minutes. But the magnetic disturbances kept arriving over a week.

Reminds me of an episode of an old TV show (I think it was [0]), where one night, the Moon was shining unusually bright. While everyone else marveled at the beauty of the phenomenon, the protagonist is one of the few who understood that if the Moon is this bright, it means the other side of the Earth is currently on fire, and they all have but a few hours left to live.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Outer_Limits_(1995...

based on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.

Oh. I'm adding it to my to-read queue then, and bumping Larry Niven up in the queue in general too. I've been meaning to read his works ever since I learned about Known Space / Star Trek connection.

I liked his stuff a lot, a soft spot especially for protector.

I liked the Niven/Pournell books and I still think back to them often enough. The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer I think I read back to back. It's been a long time but I really enjoyed them when I was younger.

The misogyny in Lucifer's Hammer did not age well at all. Mote is not as in-your-face with it. I do like all the different kinds of moties.

Interesting and not surprised. I don't actually remember any but it's half my life ago at this point

And the safe half will be brimming with plentiful retro 8-bit CPU's, all the necessary support chips, and input/output devices? I can see this being a fun "what-if" project that provides a hobby but not as a serious solution.

You'll still get packet loss on any long distance communication, though:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-storms-can-...

or smoke signals

No good when everything is on fire /s

A 1Tb usb on a bird could give decent bandwidth!

FEMA's got you covered: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_incide...

That's not the disaster recovery plan itself, it's FEMA instructing a bunch of agencies and departments to make their own. Ordered by Executive Order 13744 signed by President Obama in 2016.

I believe the FEMA plans are for Carrington event-level storms, not a once-in-15,000-years storm.

Being properly prepared for a once-in-15k-years storm would likely require such a cost over such a long time for the expected benefit that it's not worth it. Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs.

Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or once-a-millennium event.

I believe that solar storms able to cause widespread havoc on our modern infrastructure are a much more frequent occurance.

The Carrington event in 1859 caused serious damage to telegraphs, for instance.

It's a risk that is more once a century than once a millenium... so we may very possibly see one this century.

Considering how reliant we are on electricity, if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale: just imagine no access to money and thus not being able to buy food, fuel, etc. and then supply chains shutting down anyway.

I'm aware of the Carrington event, which is why I mentioned being prepared for 100-year or 1,000-year events. The GP was specifically asking if any governments had plans for "a similar storm today", where the referenced storm is this one found in tree rings, not the Carrington event.

Similar event has to be understood as meaning able to cause havoc because that's what matters over the specific strength.

> because that's what matters over the specific strength

... but the specific strength does come into play when discussing the costs of hardening and mitigation.

This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event.

And all of the events it is being compared about are at least an order of magnitude bigger than the Carrington event.

This should not surprise us, by the way. I'd expect major solar storms to follow a Zipf's law distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc.

So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was.

All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.

This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event, which is at least 10X as powerful as the largest event in recorded human history, back in the 1800s, which set telegraph poles on fire. So, yeah, it's a big Twinkee.

> if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale

Forget about civil unrest. Chain of command in the military goes down and every unit is on it for themselves. Imagine generals not knowing if the President is still alive.

> Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs.

Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.

But lower dividend yields mean lower yielding retirement funds, with quality of life effects downstream from that.

Now, there's plenty to be said about the funding side of the equation to improve wealth inequality and/or increase budgets, but that's orthogonal to the spending-side necessary tradeoffs to harden against extremely rare disasters.

In other words, supposing you had the political pull to get more money entirely from the richest 0.01%, 1%, or 5% (and putting aside that not everyone agrees that would be good), that extra money would probably still be better spent on more infrastructure and social programs, not on hardening against extremely rare events.

Why does it have to be either/or?

Planetary GDP is around $85tn annually.

The US military budget on its own is around $1tn.

One-off mitigation costs followed by annual maintenance would barely be a rounding error on that.

They'd have the added benefit of hardening systems against hostile EMP, which is a more likely threat.

Edit: simplified version of my assertion: current budgets are X. It would cost Y to harden infrastructure against an event 10 times as large as the Carrington event. Even if it were trivial to increase the budget from X to X+Y, it's probably not a good use of money to perform such extreme hardening. This is true for all positive finite values for X and Y in a world where we still have cancer, heart disease, poverty, etc.

If I read you correctly, you're making an argument regarding the marginal effort to increase the budget by Y.

My argument is about the millions of things we could do with Y that would be more beneficial to human flourishing. Even if it's trivial to increase the budget by Y, that doesn't imply that it's trivial to increase the budget by Y enough times to run out of more important things to do.

Original (longer) argument:

It's possible that hardening against a Carrington-level event is a good use of money, but that's not the original question. The original question is about an event 10 times as big, twice as big as the previously known largest event.

If I understand your assertion, you're asserting that the money could easily be raised with little downside. Maybe it can be. For the sake of argument, I'll grant you that.

But my assertion is that it's not a question of if the money could be raised to harden against a 15k-year solar storm. My assertion is that even if the money were already in hand, hardening against such an extreme event is probably not worth the cost.

Whatever the budget is, it will be finite. Given present technology, whatever that budget is, it won't be sufficient to give all people worldwide a utopian lifestyle while fully funding all promising medical research, etc. Tradeoffs will need to be made. Hardening against a 15k-year event an order of magnitude more powerful than the Carrington event is probably not the best use of finite budget.

If I could start a side gig in a polka band and sell plasma to raise enough money to make my Florida home polar bear proof, that wouldn't have any bearing on the wisdom of polar-bear-proofing a home in Florida. Even assume that cost were the only downside to polar-bear-proofing a home, the availability of the money wouldn't be the problem with the plan. The problem is that the other things I could do with my limited resources would be much more beneficial. Yes, all else being equal, a polar-bear-proof house in Florida is better than a non-bear-proof house in Florida. In the real world, all else is not equal.

There is almost always a trade-off. Some risks aren't worth mitigating, and we're better off accepting them than either worrying ourselves over them or wasting limited resources on unwise mitigations.

My point is that a lack of political will to come up with the funding isn't the biggest obstacle to such extreme measures.

Perfect safety is a bad goal, and worrying that we aren't perfectly safe is unwise.

Edit: if I've missed something and you're talking about some hypothetical world where we've already solved cancer, heart disease, poverty, wealth inequality, climate change, polio, dementia, put basements / tornado shelters in all of the houses and trailer parks in Tornado Alley, figured out why the laundry always contains an odd number of socks, etc. Sure, then if we could scrounge up enough money to harden against a solar storm 10 times as powerful as the Carrington event, then go for it.

Florida has enough crazy exotic animal people that I bet the polar bear example isn’t as far fetched as you think.

I picked polar bears assuming probability of zoo (public or private) escape or ice age over the next 15k years means there's some real, but minuscule, risk.

Unless this precious tech is used against the people: surveillance, control, etc.

I interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage.

[1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/solar-flare

I won't comment on 1 and 2 but 3) is laughably untrue. I guess the word 'many' might be stretched to mean 'a few' but I've worked at more than one very large utility directly as an engineer responsible for design of large generation and transmission interface systems and these transformers are not only not spare, they're almost impossible to get quickly even at current market demand. If you toasted even 10 percent of the large generation and transmission transformers in North America it would be years before the grid would even come close to working again, and that's if there was nation state level resources applied.

These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.

This keeps coming up and I keep wondering how in the world are large transformers that complicated to build. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way but a "boy do I have a gap in my knowledge of the world" way :-)

I think that is a pretty common reaction when it comes to physical/mechanical objects. Another way of thinking about it which might be helpful is. Hundreds or thousands of very talented engineers have been working non-stop for 150+ years in a transformer arms race.

This has resulted in incredibly high performance designs and incredibly high requirements.

No doubt. But same could be said of, say, automobiles, or microchips, and many other things. Even larger objects like power plant turbines seem relatively frequently manufactured. Large transformers on the other hand appear to be closer to nuclear power plants in rarity/difficulty of replacement, and as a result for me they have a very high difficulty-of-replacement-to-perceived-complexity ratio.

Large transformers are built to a very specific custom specification. Each one is a custom engineered unit. A transformer is basically a sealed vessel full of volatile oil that you pass an extremely large voltage and current through. The machine has to be perfect. The smallest clearance issue, insulation problem, etc and you have a bomb. And that's just making it safe. We haven't even talked about making it effective.

Transformers are the sort of think that are not rocket science to build, but every single detail is very very important. It requires a team of people to design, construct, and validate and all these people need to have the skills from doing it many times before. These people and facilities simply don't exist in large enough numbers because they are very expensive.

There are also supply chain issues to consider - the steel used in transformer magnetic circuits for example is a very specific metallurgy and construction. During COVID it was quite difficult to find. Poor steel means poor efficiency which at the scale of these machines can mean millions of wasted mwh of power over time.

Thanks for the detail, this is very neat. I wonder if transformers like this are in an "uncanny valley" of manufacturing where there is barely not enough demand to bootstrap mass production like for example turbines. Turbines have very exact tolerances as well, but it seems that with higher unit counts orgs like GE managed to churn them out.

Perhaps the liquid piece is also making things more difficult; I'm sure a dry object is a lot easier to warehouse until needed.

I thought turbines had lead times on the order of years

12GW at 1100kVDC. [1] That's bonkers! I wonder what the spare part plan is for this beast.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGH1B863oI&ab_channel=Engin...

They are dry until delivered, because they already max out the transport vehicle's capability (often highly specialized transformer carrier train cars with like 16 axles at each end to spread the weight).

Any thoughts on how the situation compares in Western Europe? Too many disparate systems, or…?

No idea, my experience is strictly NA. I wouldn't want to speculate

I appreciate your perspective. Perhaps I should have said "few" instead of "many" and "parts" instead of "systems". But it does sound like your overall impression of backup and restorative capacity differs from what I gathered in that interview.

He did say damaged HV transformers would be a big deal and repairs would take weeks, but maybe that was an optimistic take. Talking about solar storms and grid damage, the range of possibilities is very large, depending on the storm's intensity and where it hits.

I work in power grids, and I can also confirm that number 3 is not true. If a large number of high-capacity power transformers are required, we are in trouble.

In the UK, the National Grid Operator maintains "black start" plans[0] for rebooting the entire national electrical grid from a zero power situation, and they pay individual plants to conduct annual drills. However, for obvious reasons, these plans have never been tried in anything close to real-world conditions, and it's something of an open question whether it would work.

[0] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/

It's not just rebooting. There will be damage even in stored brand-new equipment

How it gets damaged? For comparison lightning is stronger than solar flares but only rarely damages stored unconnected equipment.

The earth and everything in and on it is part of an electrical system, as solar emissions wash across the landscape they’ll stimulate the flow of electrons in everything especially metal and circuit based items. Since circuits in many items are delicate things, designed for very specific currents, it will be a near guarantee that electrical components will be damaged.

This is incorrect. A solar flare is not like an EMP. It's low frequency so only wires that are miles long would be energized. It could possibly destroy electronics that aren't protected by a power strip. But no, it's not going to destroy your cellphone or the electronics in your car.

Thank you for explaining the distinction, I had assumed the result was more similar to emp.

The last time we had a significant solar storm was during the telegraph age, the Carrington Event of 1859:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

"telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks"

No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them

> "...in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks"

The real life precursor of exploding starship screens/consoles

There was a great radio ecoshock episode about this a couple years ago. Let me see if I can dig it up.

https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html

The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive.

From the text:

"Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay down for at least a year, or a decade, or forever. There are ways to protect the system, but a captured Washington regulation system has not pushed for these simple steps.

A hostile power aside, our expert guest tells us an EMP hit is “inevitable” within the time of those living now, because the Sun can also crash our electrical systems world-wide.

A large solar storm, big enough to do it, was seen in 1859. It’s called the Carrington Event. If part of the Sun blows our way, all satellites are knocked out. The wires of our electric system act like antennae, receiving the deadly pulse."

I doubt the doomsayer timetable but the industrial capacity and delivery concern is absolutely valid.

If this actually happened, I think community solar would be choked as it gets ramped up everywhere at once and some neighborhoods would have power centers to go charge lithium ion portable power packs as the overall grids become decentralized. Shelf-stable, non-refrigerated food would become the norm and people would just make do with less electricity. We'd go back to a cash economy and things like night time entertainment that relied on sound systems and electric lights would become almost non-existent. Without street lights, nighttime in general would be dramatically quieter

The real problem would be people who have to use battery powered medical devices who don't have convenient ways to charge.

But yes, huge problem regardless

Return of the gas lamps!

Seriously though. It wouldn’t be hard to make a dynamo and some incandescent (or carbon arc!) lights with material already available in most metropolises. The bars would get prioritized, hah.