2y ago

TIL that in 2012 a large solar storm nearly missed Earth by a margin of nine days. If it hit, it could have caused damages to a cost of around $2.6 trillion.

en.wikipedia.org

July 2012 solar storm - Wikipedia

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Nearly missed means it hit?
- That’s a fun little language nuance. Narrowly or barely would be better, physically describing the distance of the miss is uncommon.
  It was a near miss though, as in “close call”.
  
  The nuance is that "near miss" and "nearly miss" mean exact opposites.
  "Near miss" means it almost hits, but actually misses.
  "Nearly miss" means it almost misses, but it actually hits.
  They just messed up the phrase.
- It missed in a near fashion
Dude so the Mayans and all the Nostradamus hooplah could've coincidentally occurred with that solar storm?! Ya'll remember that right?
A Carrington event level impact will be quite a disaster, and it's only a matter of time. But if that's not bad enough for you, look up Miyake events. Seemingly far more devastating in what it could do to a technological society, and we don't know what the source is. Doesn't seem to be the Sun as it doesn't line up with other things. And we're within the time range for another one, given when the last few ones were based on evidence.
- new fear unlocked
One of these hit Earth in the late 1800's, and it was wild. Telegraph lines were setting on fire and people would get shocked just from touching the telegraphs. And that was when we had just barely started to wrap the world in conductive wire, if this happened now we would be majorly screwed.
- Would we? I remember reading Ted Koppel’s book Lights Out a few years ago, but I’d assume that utilities, grid operators, and governments have been making efforts to improve grid resilience
  
  I find your excess of faith disturbing…
  
  laughs in Texas *
  
  Being proactive for risks that are small for the near term is expensive, and not very profitable for the shareholders.
  
  Lol
- My power goes out every hurricane which is at least once a year.
  
  Yeah but the power going out is what is supposed to happen. Its a good thing. It means the fault was cleared and the area made safe. The issue with one of these events is were not currently protecting against it in a lot of places. So real bad things have the potential of happening WITHOUT the power going out. No breakers tripping (or not tripping fast enough) means more equipment damage. It currently takes over a year to build a HV transformer, and that's with power. What happens when 500 all explode at the same time (cause the power didn't go out fast enough) and we need to replace them all at once? Without power?
Plot twist: it did hit in 2012. Any survivors had their consciousnesses uploaded to simulation.
- That would explain a lot.. things seemed normal until about 2013...
- uploaded by who
Dammit. We need a good solar flare to remind us what's real and what isn't

24 comments