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Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm: NASA

https://news.yahoo.com/earth-survived-near-miss-2012-solar-storm-nasa-222404357.html

Excerpt:

Washington (AFP) -

Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century," NASA said.

The extreme space weather that tore through Earth's orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.

However, few Earthlings had any idea what was going on.

"If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire," said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado.

James Burke's "Connections," Episode 1, "The Trigger Effect"

[video=youtube;lKELMR6wACw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw[/video]

Solar storm of 1859

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
 
I know that in 1859, telegraph offices caught fire and know I wonder how many cell phones would have burst into flames? Talk about hot pockets. :y: :surprised:
 
I know that in 1859, telegraph offices caught fire and know I wonder how many cell phones would have burst into flames? Talk about hot pockets. :y: :surprised:
Unless the US power grid has an emergency plan which would involve disconnection of substations from long runs of power lines, large transformers would be fried nationwide and worldwide. It could take years to replace all of them since they're now made only in Germany (according to a documentary I saw). Imagine that, no power (other than from generators which would be in short supply) for a year or years. The entire modern infrastructure in advanced nations would collapse in just months, not years, including food production and deliveries. Imagine the wars that would probably trigger. Our life in the "technology trap" of our own design is what that James Burke's "Connections," Episode 1, "The Trigger Effect" video linked to above is about.

NASA ScienceCasts: Carrington-class CME Narrowly Misses Earth

[video=youtube;7ukQhycKOFw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukQhycKOFw[/video]
 
The odds of it happening again? 12% every ten years:

Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/

"In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc. published a paper in Space Weather entitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years.

The answer: 12%.

"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," says Riley. "It is a sobering figure."
 
Compounded probability of it happening in the next 100 year (based on 12% per 10 years): 72%.

Sobering thought :(
 
The Fermi Paradox boils down to “Where is everybody?”

One solution postulated as to why there appears to be no advanced intelligence in the galaxy is that none survive long enough, at least as a technologically advanced society, to get themselves off their home world.
Getting hit by a coronal mass ejection was one of the civilization ending events given as to a cause.

Rebuilding after being driven back to a far lower tech base is damn near impossible in that all the easily available and exploitable resources are gone. We would be reduced to scavenging metals from all the junk laying around and how would we go from a wood burning society to a petroleum base technology when all the easy oil is long depleted.
 
The Fermi Paradox boils down to “Where is everybody?”

One solution postulated as to why there appears to be no advanced intelligence in the galaxy is that none survive long enough, at least as a technologically advanced society, to get themselves off their home world.
Getting hit by a coronal mass ejection was one of the civilization ending events given as to a cause.

Rebuilding after being driven back to a far lower tech base is damn near impossible in that all the easily available and exploitable resources are gone. We would be reduced to scavenging metals from all the junk laying around and how would we go from a wood burning society to a petroleum base technology when all the easy oil is long depleted.

Interesting thought about the easily usable resources, although the area of land ready to be cultivated would be much higher that what our ancestors add access to. Still, I'm not wishing for something like this to happen. Like James Burke mentioned in the clip above, situations of the type 'kill or be killed' would be omnipresent and encourage nastiness as a means of survival. Ugly to be sure.
 
True, arable land would be available in greater amounts as we’ve already logged it off and leveled it down. Unfortunately much of the farm lands in use today require irrigation and that water is drawn from wells, often so deep that simple wind driven pumps could never pull it out of the ground the “Bread basket” would go back to being natural grass lands or outright desert. And let’s not even think about all those enormous cities in So. Cal. that are two days away from having no water at all or for that matter, food.

And then there are all the guns that are widely available. Going to be a whole lot of killing before the ammo runs out. And what happens when the power goes down and there are no controls available for nuclear power stations or petroleum refineries or chemical/pesticide plants, anybody remember Bhopal?

The fires that could result from a loss of power could prove cataclysmic, far worse than the loss of power itself as there would be no means to combat them.
 
Cannibalism

There always has to be a period of cannibalism before things stabilize.

Are you referring to Zombie’s eating the living or the more traditional humans chowing down on other humans?

You should try and be more specific as there are entirely different responses to these.

The first requires shooting the Zombie in the head while the second. . . Come to think of it; the head shot pretty much works in both cases.
 
Are you referring to Zombie’s eating the living or the more traditional humans chowing down on other humans?

You should try and be more specific as there are entirely different responses to these.

The first requires shooting the Zombie in the head while the second. . . Come to think of it; the head shot pretty much works in both cases.

I was thinking of the more traditional kind of cannibalism, not the Zombie kind.

The Zombie kind of cannibalism is sort of lopsided in that zombies like to eat people, but they don't carry weapons, while people carry weapons, but don't like to eat Zombies.

In traditional cannibalism, everyone can have weapons and everyone can eat everyone else. It's the fairest form of cannibalism.
 
I for one feel that this is highly likely to be the undoing of the world as we know it.

Three words folks - "spent fuel pools". Every one of the them in the world burning to the ground. Game over.
 
It would be a good time to be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe deep in a remote forest.
 
I was thinking of the more traditional kind of cannibalism, not the Zombie kind.

The Zombie kind of cannibalism is sort of lopsided in that zombies like to eat people, but they don't carry weapons, while people carry weapons, but don't like to eat Zombies.

In traditional cannibalism, everyone can have weapons and everyone can eat everyone else. It's the fairest form of cannibalism.

So you think that Zombies are some kind of second class cannibal?
Not capable of handling weapons and not up to the standards of being a “Normal” human’s next meal.

I happen to believe in a more egalitarian cannibalism wherein Zombies are allowed to carry weapons and Humans are required to consume Zombies.

Okay; that last part is pretty disgusting.
 
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that a CME would knock civilization back to an 18th century level. Because I don't think it would stop there. 18th century civilization relied on skills that don't exist today and a different infrastructure and economy that does not exist anymore. The chaos would be so severe and damaging, we'd be back to the Stone Age in very short order.
 
So you think that Zombies are some kind of second class cannibal?
Not capable of handling weapons and not up to the standards of being a “Normal” human’s next meal.

I happen to believe in a more egalitarian cannibalism wherein Zombies are allowed to carry weapons and Humans are required to consume Zombies.

Okay; that last part is pretty disgusting.

Call me old-fashioned.
 
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that a CME would knock civilization back to an 18th century level. Because I don't think it would stop there. 18th century civilization relied on skills that don't exist today and a different infrastructure and economy that does not exist anymore. The chaos would be so severe and damaging, we'd be back to the Stone Age in very short order.

I think you are probably correct in your thinking. There might be people with the skill sets to survive and keep alive the knowledge that could prevent the slide towards a new stone age but unless those people were grouped together and protected from the IQ 50 types and their guns they would quickly fall prey to those much less skilled but much more ruthless.

And this goes back to my original post about the Fermi Paradox. No civilization survives its initial rise to technological sophistication and there is no coming back after a hard fall.

If this is the case; it doesn’t bode well for us.
 
I think you are probably correct in your thinking. There might be people with the skill sets to survive and keep alive the knowledge that could prevent the slide towards a new stone age but unless those people were grouped together and protected from the IQ 50 types and their guns they would quickly fall prey to those much less skilled but much more ruthless.

And this goes back to my original post about the Fermi Paradox. No civilization survives its initial rise to technological sophistication and there is no coming back after a hard fall.

If this is the case; it doesn’t bode well for us.

It's an interesting idea --- that all the non-renewable resources that fueled the rise of a technological civilization the first time would be completely depleted and unavailable for the second time. You probably can't make the leap from burning wood for power all the way to something like nuclear without the fossil fuel step in the middle.
 
Interesting thought about the easily usable resources, although the area of land ready to be cultivated would be much higher that what our ancestors add access to. Still, I'm not wishing for something like this to happen. Like James Burke mentioned in the clip above, situations of the type 'kill or be killed' would be omnipresent and encourage nastiness as a means of survival. Ugly to be sure.

Not really...

Most of the best land is already in cultivation... when more land IS added to production, it's usually marginal land ill suited to agriculture or at least the crop production end of it. Usually it's land that is better suited for grazing animals like sheep or cattle for meat.

As a farmer, I can tell you that the big "rush" now is outbidding other farmers for the choicest production land, which is driving a "land boom" in the countryside. The pressure is on farmers to "get big or get out" economically because everything costs SO much that the only real savings that are to be had are economies of scale. Big farmers routinely offer rents that are getting "stupid expensive" forcing middle-size and smaller farmers out... There's no way they can afford to compete for cash rents or buying land that big farmers are willing to pay several hundred dollars an acre to farm in rent every year, or buy for $10,000-$15,000 an acre or more, depending on the area of the country. Smaller and midsize farmers have to content themselves with less productive land, more marginal land, maybe sandier soils that are droughty, low in nutrients, up on a hill and dry out too much, or down in a swale and tending to flood out...

Of course there is a LOT of pressure from developers as well. Even big farmers find themselves frozen out when it comes to bidding against a developer who wants to buy a farm and turn it into a tract housing subdivision... the "instant profits" from building McMansions on the land are staggering, but of course that land is removed from productive use, pretty much forever... (relatively speaking). My MIL used to worry about all the "urban sprawl" soaking up good farmland and turning it into housing subdivisions, and her idea was that it should fall to "government planning" and zoning and legal instruments to decide what land could be used for what. I was totally opposed to it... I think that such "legal instruments" just get in the way of progress... Simple fact is, that the land cannot produce enough for a farmer to EVER "pay" for the land with the crops or livestock he produces on it... land is worth too much, or perhaps crops and livestock are worth too little (which is what I think it TRULY happening). IF an older farmer decides to sell out and move to town for his sunset years, and can make more money selling his farm to a developer than another farmer, he should be able to do that... it IS his property after all! Some folks will sell to the farmer anyway, because they cannot bear the thought of the farm turning into houses. Some even sell their development rights for money, putting the land in conservation banks that then attach deed restrictions to the land to prevent it being developed. Thing is, ECONOMIC REALITY determines a lot of these things.

I know I was reading the liberals and the enviro-whacko element are constantly whining for "urban renewal" and want to force everyone back out of the suburbs into the urban areas to reduce transportation impacts. Thing is, if you look back at the late 18th century, folks had moved from the countryside into towns and cities seeking jobs and money created by industrialization. More money was to be made doing that than farming with horse and plow, and the work was easier in most cases. That trend continued up until about the end of WWII or thereafter, when folks had money and wanted a better lifestyle than being stuck in some tenement in the city, and saved and moved to the suburbs. Now we increasingly see the flow of suburbanites, burned out on the whole "planned community" McMansion schemes moving out to the countryside and buying 5-10 acres or so, and making it a "ranchette"... usually fiddling with a couple head of cows or various livestock, horses, etc... All well and good, but hardly production agriculture... usually don't even raise enough for their own use, let alone contributing to production. It's mostly about lifestyle. We're surrounded by such now, as increasingly the older generation is dying off and their kids, now in their 50's and 60's, who moved to the cities after college decades ago and sought their own lives as teachers, businessmen, etc. and have no desire to "move back down on the farm" after Grandpa Schicklegruber passes on, ends up parceling the land off either to developers or dividing it up into "ranchettes"... Some folks with a bucket full of money, sells their home in the city or suburbs, and comes out and buys 5-10 acres, fences it off, builds a $250,000 stone and log home on it, builds a $120,000 big steel barn behind it, buys a Kubota tractor and some dinky implements, buys a few head of Longhorn cattle, and sits on their porch and pretends their John Wayne or something... Had a neighbor raising Longhorn calves, and I thought he was nuts... Longhorns were descended from Spanish cattle brought over by the Spaniards early in the settlement of America... they're lean, tough, stringy, and have a TERRIBLE percentage of "turnout" when slaughtered for meat... in fact, the meat is practically inedible it's so tough, unless cooked for HOURS to soften it in something like stew or carne guisada (which is where the original recipe for carne guisada came from... making tough Longhorn meat soft enough to eat). Anyway, they're virtually WORTHLESS for a modern meat-production breed (buyers are all abuzz over the current "fad" of "black Angus beef" and all that, but other "modern" breeds like Herefords and Charolais are still desirable because they have good turnout and good meat quality, unlike stuff like Longhorns and Brahmans which are tough, stringy, and have low turnout (too much bones and guts for the amount of meat produced per animal). SO, I asked him, "why Longhorns?? They're worthless as meat animals". He looked at me kinda funny and said, "True, but these ranchette people moving in will pay $1,000 a head for a weaned calf, just to have them around..." (that's about 2-3 times the normal auction price for a beef animal). "Well, I can see why you're raising them then... guess it's true, though... a fool and their money are soon parted..."

Anyway, that old colloquialism about real estate is true... "land-- they're not making any more of it..."

Later! OL JR :)
 
True, arable land would be available in greater amounts as we’ve already logged it off and leveled it down. Unfortunately much of the farm lands in use today require irrigation and that water is drawn from wells, often so deep that simple wind driven pumps could never pull it out of the ground the “Bread basket” would go back to being natural grass lands or outright desert. And let’s not even think about all those enormous cities in So. Cal. that are two days away from having no water at all or for that matter, food.

And then there are all the guns that are widely available. Going to be a whole lot of killing before the ammo runs out. And what happens when the power goes down and there are no controls available for nuclear power stations or petroleum refineries or chemical/pesticide plants, anybody remember Bhopal?

The fires that could result from a loss of power could prove cataclysmic, far worse than the loss of power itself as there would be no means to combat them.

True... irrigation is a two-edged sword that's gonna turn around to bite us one day (if you don't mind me mixing metaphors...) The simple fact is, WATER EVENTUALLY RUNS OUT. Irrigation has taken a HUGE leap over the last 20 years or so... it's expensive, but then it maximizes production on the available inputs, so a LOT of farmers have "taken the plunge" and jumped into drilling wells, installing pivots, and all of that. Thing is, while yields can increase substantially in the short term, with less risk from poor weather (drought is pretty much overcome by irrigation, but there's still tornadoes, hail, untimely freezes, excessively cold or hot weather, insect infestations, etc.), on the long term, irrigation causes at least as many problems as it solves...

For one thing, it is energy intensive-- it takes SUBSTANTIAL amounts of natural gas, petroleum fuels, and/or electricity to power well pumps and pivot irrigation equipment... pumping millions of gallons of water on a pivot-equipped field isn't cheap... PLUS, there's the fact that groundwater contains minerals and salts that are pumped out onto the fields with the water-- things rainwater does NOT have, and which rainwater leaches down deep into the subsoil or dissolves and washes away with runoff... over time, irrigation water will poison the land due to the trace amounts of salt it contains... year after year, this water is pumped on the fields, evaporates, and leaves the salt behind. It slowly builds up and eventually makes the soil too salty to support crops. The minerals in the water that are left behind also can cause toxicity to plants if they build up to certain thresholds, or nutrient imbalances, locking up much needed plant nutrients due to soil chemical interactions. Not only that, but the water also eventually runs out...

The "cheap gains" to be had will eventually run out too. Our area used to be one of the biggest cotton producing areas of the State, and it's dwindling more and more with each passing year. We get enough natural rainfall in most years to make a good or decent cotton crop, but we cannot compete with irrigated farmers in other, drier regions who have installed millions of dollars of irrigation equipment and can make huge yields with the same inputs. All this "excess production" just serves to keep the prices of crops cheap, which the consumer loves, but its ultimately self-defeating. While farmers pump millions of gallons of water that took hundreds of years to accumulate underground to produce cheap cotton and grain, we're going under around here and quitting crop production and switching the cheaper endeavors like grazing livestock... In a few decades it'll turn around, once the cheap water and cheap nutrients are gone...

The "green revolution" in agriculture, made possible in the 50's on with the advent and use of new techniques and technologies, like the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, chemical weed and insect control, development of better varieties and hybrids, etc... is also hit a plateau... the "easy gains" have all been made. Even genetic engineering, which has promised to "revolutionize agriculture" is becoming apparent that it's not the panacea that was promised... it creates as many problems as it solves, and resistance to the GMO trait "protections" by pest species is increasingly becoming a problem, making the "GMO option" useless for some pest problems, depending on the area, crop, and pest in question. Like antibiotic resistance, it's a problem that wasn't foreseen and is increasingly becoming a huge issue, as all the 'easy solutions' have already been discovered and implemented. The "low hanging fruit" is the first stuff picked, and all the "low hanging fruit", whether it be land, water, chemical or GMO solutions to problems, the easy stuff has all already been done or taken. It just gets HARDER from here, not easier...

The modern "boom" in production agriculture, which has allowed yields to double and redouble again and again since the 1950's, is largely a product of the cheap availability of petroleum feedstocks. Nitrogen fertilizers are made from ammonia, produced from reacting nitrogen and hydrogen gas from natural gas. As energy prices have increased, and demand for natural gas for heating and electric generation has increased, it's pulling more and more natural gas from fertilizer production and such to those uses, since they can and will pay higher prices. That has driven the price of fertilizers through the ROOF in the last 20 years as we have to compete for natural gas with these other industries. The same is true of the petroleum feedstocks that go to make the various chemical pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides that make modern production agriculture viable. As the age of "cheap oil" ends, the age of "cheap, readily available food" will end with it. In the old days, farmers were thrilled to get a 40-50 bushel yield on, say, corn. Now if you're not getting 140 bushels or so you're losing money. It takes 200 bushel yields to make any real money... As input costs go up, the economics just keep getting worse. We used to be happy with 3/4 to a bale of cotton per acre. Now you have to make 1 1/2 bale to the acre just to break even! If you can't make 2- 2.5 bale to the acre cotton, you'd make more money working at WalMart! That's why we got out of crop production. With irrigation, it's possible to make up to around 4 bales to per acre... which is why we're seeing crop production shift to places that get tons of sun and usually not much severe weather, like west and north Texas and California and stuff... but those places are dry *because they don't get much rain*... IOW, they're using up all the groundwater, and it can't go on forever... once they use up 10,000 years worth of water over the next few decades, that land will end up as desert again until rainfall eventually recharges the aquifers... over hundreds or thousands of years...

That's why I just shake my head in amazement as I've seen places that USED to be the bastions of particular types of production supplanted by places that have some TEMPORARY economic advantage, but long term, it's not sustainable... For instance, Wisconsin used to be the "dairy capitol of the country" when I was a kid... the words "Wisconsin cheese" just went together like they were made that way. Now, Wisconsin is dwindling down year by year, and CALIFORNIA of all places is the new "dairy capitol"... California that is mostly desert unless they irrigate the h3ll out of it... What happens when that water is GONE?? Heck, like someone mentioned, a lot of California is only a few days from being out of water if the infrastructure quits... If there's a problem, the farmers will be the FIRST ones cut off... not the cities...

Anyway, it's one of those catch 22's of modern society... We farmers are constantly told we have to "double production in the next 30 years to feed the nine billion people that will be on the planet by 2050". I can tell you right now that ain't gonna happen. Like I said, all the easy pickens have been had, a long time ago. There are no technological miracles ready to be pulled out of the hat, and any that are will be transitory and temporary in nature... We can open up more land, but the BEST land has been taken long ago already-- all that remains is largely marginal or unsuited to large-scale high-yield production. Heck, input costs NOW, while we're still on the tail-end of the "cheap petroleum-driven agriculture bubble" of the last 60 years, is ALREADY forcing marginal and less productive land out of crop production-- the input costs are too high to make a profit on land only capable of producing marginal yields... This trend is going to INCREASE as input costs rise higher and higher as demand for petroleum and petroleum-derived materials increases over the coming decades, while at the same time the petroleum production peaks and tapers off, and gets increasingly expensive to produce (again, all the easy to drill oil has been drilled-- for instance, fracking was invented in the 1940's, but it wasn't economically justifiable to use until now, when the price of oil has risen enough to pay for the process and still make handsome profits... The price has risen due to a combination of increased demand and waning production, as the easily produced fields have been produced out, and the new fields being discovered or that weren't economically producible in decades past now are being fracked to produce petroleum and gas...)

Food and agriculture are going to follow a similar bell curve. You can expect food prices to rise dramatically and availability to, at best, only somewhat increase, and perhaps even decrease, at the same time demand will be going up... this will drive prices through the roof... Increasing demand in a static or declining production atmosphere for something everybody MUST have will create the conditions that force prices up. Cheap oil and gas created fertilizers and pesticides and better hybrids and plant breeding allowed yields to double or triple from 50 years ago... what was 50-60 bushel corn then is now 120-140. Doubling yields again to 240-300 bushels per acre, well, that's gonna require a MIRACLE, and I don't see any. Breeding, GMO's, fertilizers, pesticides... they're not gonna do it... The only thing that seems a "sure thing" is that there'll be nine billion mouths to feed in 2050... what they're gonna eat, who knows...

Later! OL JR :)
 
I for one feel that this is highly likely to be the undoing of the world as we know it.

Three words folks - "spent fuel pools". Every one of the them in the world burning to the ground. Game over.

Ummm... how does a "spent fuel pool" burn to the ground?? They're full of WATER!

Nuke plants could be a potential problem... they need electric power to shut down safely. It's not as simple as "scramming the reactor" and dropping the control rods in and shutting it down-- the reactor has to have coolant pumped through it for days, sometimes weeks afterwards to carry off decay heat and prevent hydrogen buildup, overpressurization, and a possible explosion and meltdown. Usually nuclear plants are taken off-line in a staggered fashion-- that's why usually reactors are built in at least pairs... one will power the other after the reactor is shut down, to keep the coolant pumps operating. If the transformers blow up, you could have a situation where megawatts of thermal energy are available, and the turbines are spinning, but no power is being produced, or you can't deliver it from the generator to the pumps that need it to run at the voltages and amperages needed to keep the pumps going. I know when I worked at the South Texas Nuclear Project, that each of the reactors were equipped with gigantic ship-sized diesel standby generators, in the event of a "double trip" (both reactors tripping at once) that would fire up to generate electricity to run the reactors' coolant pumps. BUT, that ASSUMES that the generators aren't fried by EMP, and that the transformers and lines and equipment are all intact and capable of running the system in such a way to keep the pumps operational. (these were the same kinds of diesel standby generators that were swamped with seawater by the Japan Tsunami at Fukashima... diesel engines don't run well when they're full of seawater, and without them, there was no way to power the coolant pumps after the reactors scrammed automatically... recipe for meltdown).

Spent fuel pools, on the other hand, generate SOME waste heat, and considerable radioactivity, but not enough for a "meltdown". I suppose that if the spent fuel rods WERE somehow exposed to a fire, say the coolant pool cracked and drained and the plant burned down around it, well, you COULD have some pretty nasty radioactive fallout from that spreading around. Kind of a longshot though... First you have to drain a pool usually around 100 feet deep, full of demineralized water used to carry off the waste heat and absorb radioactivity from the decaying spent fuel rods... a solar event isn't going to fracture gigantic underground concrete tanks full of water... might make keeping plenty of demineralized water available and pumped in there problematic, but it's not going to magically crack these things open.

Besides, if the d@mn gubmint would have gotten off their arse over the last 40 years and actually done reprocessing and set up a viable highly radioactive waste depository, it wouldn't be a problem anyway... the really toxic radioactive stuff would all be encased inside molten glass poured into stainless steel cans, and emplaced deep into stable salt domes to rot for millions of years... but instead they dither while all the activists scream "NIMBY" and everybody twiddles their thumbs...

Later! OL JR :)
 
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