Mongoose Pete
Mongoose
A very long, yet somewhat humorous post follows...
An expectantly large CME strikes the Earth, rivalling or superseding the Carrington event. With only a few hours advanced notice, the space weather astronomers completely fail to convince western governments that a disaster is about to occur, and little or no preparation happens.
90+% of the satellites fail, the planet's power grids surge, and about 300 main transformers in the US are irrevocably damaged, cutting off electricity to 130 million, without even considering the damage to power lines themselves. With no immediate ability to replace that number of bespoke transformers, the extended blackout could last months. In nations with significant economic disparity amongst the population, some social breakdown occurs (c.f. 1977 New York).
With solid state microcircuits failing at a mere 5 kV/m or less, almost all electronic equipment fails. Computers, air conditioners, fridges, phones, etc. In Northern Scandinavia, thousands die from hypothermia as their central heating ceases to function.
Transportation infrastructure collapses. There are few functioning vehicles. The train system is paralysed, the engines and navigation systems of ships are destroyed and planes (those which didn't fall out of the sky) are right out since the funding for aviation NDB's was considered redundant by national governments - not that any pilot still knows how to use them.
Within a week, with automated sewage systems no longer working and no refrigeration, dysentry and cholera spread like wildfire, fatalities exceeding 20% due to the lack of clean drinking water. As there is no possible method of food transportation to supply overcrowded urban centres, survivors start dying from the follow up starvation.
Every first world nation clamours for replacement chips for their vital equipment. But there aren't any. No stores were laid aside in EMP-proof warehouses, and the machines to manufacture such items were themselves crippled. There is no way to build any intermediary piece of equipment without literally returning to square one, and building a sequence of tools to build slightly more complicated tools, to build machines to purify a substance, etch a line, manufacture the acid, melt the metals, and so on. In most cases, the knowledge of how to build such equipment has been lost with the elder generation. Even building a basic electronics-free model-T Ford is beyond most folks since the ability to mill metal (if any basic lathes remain), create the right steel by hand, and make and bend piping are all lost skills.
The Germans, believing themselves well prepared for such a disaster immediately order their Information Archive to be opened. However, there are only a handful of VW Beatles still remaining after EU legislation hiked road taxes to unaffordable levels for non-green vehicles. What pre-EMS cars remain are forcibly requisitioned by the government. Eventually though, an official arrives by bicycle. Unfortunately when he gets there, the lifts down into the mine are no longer working. Although there is an on-site generator, the elevator's electronics have fried, and a 2km descent by rope-ladder is deemed infeasible.
Eventually the government finds an army electrical engineer, pulls him off the urgent repairs to the electricity grid and he comes up with a jury-rigged bypass. Lift now working the records can now be accessed. However, the microfilms can only be read on special albeit low-tech readers, and there are only 20 of the machines available in the archive. All the machines formerly distributed throughout the nation's bureaucratic offices have long since been thrown away. Having set up a bicycle message system with Berlin, the flood of technical requests swamp the staff and handful of machines, and since information needs to be copied by hand, vital information becomes bottle-necked. Paper supplies begin to run short. Toilet paper becomes worth its weight in gold.
Worse still, due to age and overuse, the bulbs for the readers begin to fail. But since incandescent bulbs were banned 20 years earlier, there are no spares available. The government immediately orders new bulbs be made, but there's no machinery to make such things anymore, and nobody alive has the skill of blowing glass. Then there's the fact that Tungsten is in short supply, no imports of the metal have arrived for months due to the lack of working ships, and Germany has no tungsten refinery of its own. A team of medieval re-enactors are given the task of mining, refining and hand drawing tungsten wire. Unknown to everyone, the Data Archive builds up high levels of condensation which begins to damage the microfile stores and the lower mine levels flood because nobody remembered about the dehumidifying and pumping systems which haven't worked since the CME.
In an ironic twist the UK falls into civil war, Scotland and Wales seizing the chance to claim full independence and charging England vast sums in food and equipment for electrical power from their still functional nuclear power stations. Coal and gas stations standing idle for want of fuel. Iceland, sitting pretty on its natural geothermal resources makes an economic killing by forging simple screwdrivers to replace the ubiquitous powertools which have replaced hand tools across Europe. Sweden and Finland race to see who can rebuild their manufacturing base first, a golden opportunity awaiting whomever can corner the increasingly desperate toilet paper market.
Global obesity plunges now that everyone has to walk everywhere, placed on the ten year waiting list for a new car. Adults have to be taught how to use maps now that GPS phones don't work. Children moan over practising how to use toothbrushes at school, no muscle memory for using them since growing up with electric toothbrushes.
Actually this sounds like a fun one-shot scenario to use on Loz...
Silliness aside, the global loss of electronics could be extremely serious. Preserving the information is one thing, but unless you specifically preserve intermediary levels of infrastructure as well, most of that knowledge is going to be near useless or indeed inaccessible, until you can rebuild to a critical point.
What are the chances of a world wide series of HEMP? Currently negligible, but as orbital access improves and nuclear tech spreads, the chances for a strategic take-down of hi-tech societies will gradually increase. I'm sure it won't take terrorists long to come up with a plan to hijack a suborbital craft, say a Virgin flight launched from northern Sweden with a Russian or Pakistani nuke aboard and take out a chunk of northern Europe with a single bomb.
What are the chances of another Carrington event or even something larger? Guaranteed actually. It is just a matter of when it will happen and whether we have hardened all of our vital infrastructure by then. At the moment though, few governments seem willing to maintain the expense of doing so.
Unfortunately until you suffer a disaster, expediency and, as BP rightly observed, greed will undermine contingency planning and redundancy. Why was there no Indian Ocean tsunami warning system until after 2004 when the US had maintained one in the Pacific from the 40's? Why is there no significant investment in NEO object identification and the defection systems needed to divert a potential collision? Why are so many national nuclear bomb shelters no longer maintained, instead being sold off to property developers? Why do people continue to live on the slopes of Vesuvius or the San Andreas fault?
Although we can technically conceive of possible disasters, risk analysis suggests the likelihood to be small. So humanity plays the odds but then always acts surprised when that once in a millennia event finally occurs. We're great at shooting ourselves in the foot!
Just for fun, how about this for a doomsday scenario set 20 years in the future...rust said:
An expectantly large CME strikes the Earth, rivalling or superseding the Carrington event. With only a few hours advanced notice, the space weather astronomers completely fail to convince western governments that a disaster is about to occur, and little or no preparation happens.
90+% of the satellites fail, the planet's power grids surge, and about 300 main transformers in the US are irrevocably damaged, cutting off electricity to 130 million, without even considering the damage to power lines themselves. With no immediate ability to replace that number of bespoke transformers, the extended blackout could last months. In nations with significant economic disparity amongst the population, some social breakdown occurs (c.f. 1977 New York).
With solid state microcircuits failing at a mere 5 kV/m or less, almost all electronic equipment fails. Computers, air conditioners, fridges, phones, etc. In Northern Scandinavia, thousands die from hypothermia as their central heating ceases to function.
Transportation infrastructure collapses. There are few functioning vehicles. The train system is paralysed, the engines and navigation systems of ships are destroyed and planes (those which didn't fall out of the sky) are right out since the funding for aviation NDB's was considered redundant by national governments - not that any pilot still knows how to use them.
Within a week, with automated sewage systems no longer working and no refrigeration, dysentry and cholera spread like wildfire, fatalities exceeding 20% due to the lack of clean drinking water. As there is no possible method of food transportation to supply overcrowded urban centres, survivors start dying from the follow up starvation.
Every first world nation clamours for replacement chips for their vital equipment. But there aren't any. No stores were laid aside in EMP-proof warehouses, and the machines to manufacture such items were themselves crippled. There is no way to build any intermediary piece of equipment without literally returning to square one, and building a sequence of tools to build slightly more complicated tools, to build machines to purify a substance, etch a line, manufacture the acid, melt the metals, and so on. In most cases, the knowledge of how to build such equipment has been lost with the elder generation. Even building a basic electronics-free model-T Ford is beyond most folks since the ability to mill metal (if any basic lathes remain), create the right steel by hand, and make and bend piping are all lost skills.
The Germans, believing themselves well prepared for such a disaster immediately order their Information Archive to be opened. However, there are only a handful of VW Beatles still remaining after EU legislation hiked road taxes to unaffordable levels for non-green vehicles. What pre-EMS cars remain are forcibly requisitioned by the government. Eventually though, an official arrives by bicycle. Unfortunately when he gets there, the lifts down into the mine are no longer working. Although there is an on-site generator, the elevator's electronics have fried, and a 2km descent by rope-ladder is deemed infeasible.
Eventually the government finds an army electrical engineer, pulls him off the urgent repairs to the electricity grid and he comes up with a jury-rigged bypass. Lift now working the records can now be accessed. However, the microfilms can only be read on special albeit low-tech readers, and there are only 20 of the machines available in the archive. All the machines formerly distributed throughout the nation's bureaucratic offices have long since been thrown away. Having set up a bicycle message system with Berlin, the flood of technical requests swamp the staff and handful of machines, and since information needs to be copied by hand, vital information becomes bottle-necked. Paper supplies begin to run short. Toilet paper becomes worth its weight in gold.
Worse still, due to age and overuse, the bulbs for the readers begin to fail. But since incandescent bulbs were banned 20 years earlier, there are no spares available. The government immediately orders new bulbs be made, but there's no machinery to make such things anymore, and nobody alive has the skill of blowing glass. Then there's the fact that Tungsten is in short supply, no imports of the metal have arrived for months due to the lack of working ships, and Germany has no tungsten refinery of its own. A team of medieval re-enactors are given the task of mining, refining and hand drawing tungsten wire. Unknown to everyone, the Data Archive builds up high levels of condensation which begins to damage the microfile stores and the lower mine levels flood because nobody remembered about the dehumidifying and pumping systems which haven't worked since the CME.
In an ironic twist the UK falls into civil war, Scotland and Wales seizing the chance to claim full independence and charging England vast sums in food and equipment for electrical power from their still functional nuclear power stations. Coal and gas stations standing idle for want of fuel. Iceland, sitting pretty on its natural geothermal resources makes an economic killing by forging simple screwdrivers to replace the ubiquitous powertools which have replaced hand tools across Europe. Sweden and Finland race to see who can rebuild their manufacturing base first, a golden opportunity awaiting whomever can corner the increasingly desperate toilet paper market.
Global obesity plunges now that everyone has to walk everywhere, placed on the ten year waiting list for a new car. Adults have to be taught how to use maps now that GPS phones don't work. Children moan over practising how to use toothbrushes at school, no muscle memory for using them since growing up with electric toothbrushes.
Actually this sounds like a fun one-shot scenario to use on Loz...
Silliness aside, the global loss of electronics could be extremely serious. Preserving the information is one thing, but unless you specifically preserve intermediary levels of infrastructure as well, most of that knowledge is going to be near useless or indeed inaccessible, until you can rebuild to a critical point.
What are the chances of a world wide series of HEMP? Currently negligible, but as orbital access improves and nuclear tech spreads, the chances for a strategic take-down of hi-tech societies will gradually increase. I'm sure it won't take terrorists long to come up with a plan to hijack a suborbital craft, say a Virgin flight launched from northern Sweden with a Russian or Pakistani nuke aboard and take out a chunk of northern Europe with a single bomb.
What are the chances of another Carrington event or even something larger? Guaranteed actually. It is just a matter of when it will happen and whether we have hardened all of our vital infrastructure by then. At the moment though, few governments seem willing to maintain the expense of doing so.
Well they probably did have some plans in place, but we taken by surprise by the scale of the destruction. Nobody expected the entire world to be taken out. Since then the post-Maghiz Darrians certainly learned their lesson and are almost paranoid about independent colonies, knowledge caches, fall back TL manufacturing infrastructure and over-engineered EMP resilience.
Unfortunately until you suffer a disaster, expediency and, as BP rightly observed, greed will undermine contingency planning and redundancy. Why was there no Indian Ocean tsunami warning system until after 2004 when the US had maintained one in the Pacific from the 40's? Why is there no significant investment in NEO object identification and the defection systems needed to divert a potential collision? Why are so many national nuclear bomb shelters no longer maintained, instead being sold off to property developers? Why do people continue to live on the slopes of Vesuvius or the San Andreas fault?
Although we can technically conceive of possible disasters, risk analysis suggests the likelihood to be small. So humanity plays the odds but then always acts surprised when that once in a millennia event finally occurs. We're great at shooting ourselves in the foot!
