The sun is beginning to enter a more active time for flares that cause solar storms that can impact the Earth.
As Earth enters this new phase, experts have been discussing how these solar storms could affect modern advancements on the planet and even lead to what a team from George Mason University called an “internet apocalypse.”
“The internet has come of age during a time when the sun has been relatively quiet, and now it’s entering a more active time,” Professor Peter Becker of George Mason University told Fox Weather. “It’s the first time in human history that there’s been an intersection of increased solar activity with our dependence on the internet and our global economic dependence on the internet.”
A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.
Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.
Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.
Shame we went with AC in the end, HVDC doesn't care about solar storms. It's just a tiny low frequency load modulation for HVDC.
A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.
what's wrong with starlink?
Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.
Shame we went with AC in the end, HVDC doesn't care about solar storms. It's just a tiny low frequency load modulation for HVDC.
A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.
During a solar storm, each line would have a different voltage induced, so this would cause large circulating currents to flow in them, causing circuit breakers to start tripping all over the place. If the storm is large enough the breakers might not be able to interrupt the amount of induced voltage, causing them to arc over and destroy themselves.
A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.
what's wrong with starlink?
- Irrational dislike of Elon Musk (don't get me wrong, he's a class-A dick, at least on social media, but I don't hate the products his engineers work on; Starlink is one of those).
The problem is that when the earths magnetic field swings around during the storm it induces a voltage in any long conductor.
If he didn’t force them to implement his terrible ideas into their products and just left them to do their jobs I bet SpaceX would be much further along and Tesla could have stayed a leader in electric cars
Would an early warning system help ? So that many circuit breakers would be activated in advance and the lines grounded in as many points as possible ?
Varying the current running in the HVDC wire induces a magnetic field swing too. From the generator's point of view it just adds or subtracts from the load to maintain the same voltage and it ain't much.
If it was inducing gigawatts of power into the circuit, even small lengths of wire would be blowing stuff up. It obviously doesn't. The problem with AC is that for very low frequencies the impedance of the roundtrip circuit is very low, so even small amounts of power can induce large currents and drive the transformer into saturation, HVDC doesn't have frequency dependent impedance.
And even if you had DC, such a isolated DC/DC converter would have some sort of limit on the isolation voltage between the sides
https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/14/23960735/what-is-solar-stormQuoteThe sun is beginning to enter a more active time for flares that cause solar storms that can impact the Earth.
As Earth enters this new phase, experts have been discussing how these solar storms could affect modern advancements on the planet and even lead to what a team from George Mason University called an “internet apocalypse.”
“The internet has come of age during a time when the sun has been relatively quiet, and now it’s entering a more active time,” Professor Peter Becker of George Mason University told Fox Weather. “It’s the first time in human history that there’s been an intersection of increased solar activity with our dependence on the internet and our global economic dependence on the internet.”
Do I think is going to be as destructive as they say? I will reply the same way as the Y2K previsions of end of the world.
Yes they will be disruptions, yes probably a ton of old satellites orbiting Earth's will be rendered space junk, specially old stuff from the 80s if there is some still around. But the doom and gloom they are trying to portray? No, absolutely not.
Note that it's still looming for 2100, as some still haven't learned the lesson. Some significant amount of software/firmware still uses only 2 decimal digits to store years in dates.
Note that it's still looming for 2100, as some still haven't learned the lesson. Some significant amount of software/firmware still uses only 2 decimal digits to store years in dates.
there's also going to be some stuff left with 32bit time running out in 2038
could nations take advantage of disabled communications ? we should not allow for a solar storm gap.