I fully understand that there is a great deal of concern over just what is happening with the economy. Not to take anything away from how serious this, with real consequences for real people, but...
It's perhaps useful to remember that the universe has a way of reaching out and getting our attention - often from a direction we were not even looking. Consider HIV for example - lurking out there for who knows how long when circumstances finally combined to make it the uninvited presence threading through too many lives. We've achieved a tenuous accommodation with it for the moment - at least where people can avail themselves of medical treatment sufficient to wrestle it to a standstill.
Or, consider the threat of a tsunami in the Atlantic, sweeping the coasts of North America, Europe, Africa with waves tens of meters high. Geological evidence suggests it has happened in the past. And, that it could happen in the future. When is the sticking point - but conditions are present today that could cause it to happen.
Or, consider a threat that could strike in seconds and take down our civilization. (more)
As it happens, a group of researchers have been looking at the historic record and putting it together with an examination of how the way we have set up our civilization could leave us all in the dark.
Literally.
It's not global warming or peak oil - though those are threats too. No, it's something we see every day and take for granted. It's the sun.
The article linked above in New Scientist gives the broad details of how we've come to rely on an electrical grid based on design choices with immediate benefits - but choices which also mean we are increasingly vulnerable to electromagnetic storms coming from the sun. Just as our technology was used against us on 911 - bringing down skyscrapers with airliners, we are vulnerable on a far greater scale to natural events which we can neither predict nor control. The only question is, when the next one will occur.
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.
What was a spectacle for the Victorians and a minor inconvenience would be a disaster for us. As the New Scientist article reports, a study funded by NASA and issued by the National Academy of Sciences in January has determined that another Carrington level event would deliver a knock out blow in about 90 seconds.
Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. "From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.
There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.
The second problem is the grid's interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. "It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."
According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.
emphasis added
Power companies today already try to monitor electromagnetic events coming from the sun, since there have been small scale events in the recent past - small that is in terms of a Carrington magnitude storm. But, warnings are based in part on data from platforms in space - and those platforms are aging and not fully adequate to the task.
The good news is that, given enough warning, the utility companies can take precautions, such as adjusting voltages and loads, and restricting transfers of energy so that sudden spikes in current don't cause cascade failures. There is still more bad news, however. Our early warning system is becoming more unreliable by the day.
By far the most important indicator of incoming space weather is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). The probe, launched in 1997, has a solar orbit that keeps it directly between the sun and Earth. Its uninterrupted view of the sun means it gives us continuous reports on the direction and velocity of the solar wind and other streams of charged particles that flow past its sensors. ACE can provide between 15 and 45 minutes' warning of any incoming geomagnetic storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems for a critical event, so that would seem passable.
However, observations of the sun and magnetometer readings during the Carrington event shows that the coronal mass ejection was travelling so fast it took less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is positioned to Earth. "It arrived faster than we can do anything," Hapgood says.
There is another problem. ACE is 11 years old, and operating well beyond its planned lifespan. The onboard detectors are not as sensitive as they used to be, and there is no telling when they will finally give up the ghost. Furthermore, its sensors become saturated in the event of a really powerful solar flare. "It was built to look at average conditions rather than extremes," Baker says.
One bad spell of stormy weather on the sun could render outrage over AIG bonuses totally irrelevant.
This diary is not to diminish the import of what is happening in the world of finance - it's to remind every one that finance is merely part of a much larger world. We need to keep our sense of perspective so we can make the right choices within the resources we have. The threat of a solar storm is so great that it surely makes sense to devote some attention to the matter.
Unfortunately, our political system has not proven especially adept at coping with long term problems; Katrina was a long-forseen disaster that had been predicted for years. We should have been ready. We've seen how that turned out - yet even today there are politicians who have learned absolutely nothing from it.
President Obama seems well on track to giving Science something more than lip service. Given that our civilization depends on science and the technology derived from it, this is going to be ever more important - along with keeping an eye on the REALLY BIG PICTURE. Hyperfocus AND Macrofocus.