E : "if our hemisphere is hit while China's isn't, but that's much harder to game out" I guess there could be a "quickie" Large Solar Flare ( LSF ) but the 1959 event was overloading the atmosphere with electrical energy for a full week ; that would necessarily include China. Weird about how telegraph systems were operating off-battery, free electricity from the Sun while it lasted. The PBS program as I remember it didn't mention most of the stuff in Ars Technica and garbled the dates. --------------------------- " just-in-time manufacturing " Terrific concept but doesn't that beg the question ? To the extent that Just-in-time depends on satellite communication it is vulnerable to solar flare disruptions. Relatively few satellites are hardened to withstand powerful flares. If they get knocked out, then the system is thrown in chaos, or near chaos. I'd look to a solution in something like nanotech, where, assuming it is feasible in a reasonable amount of time, you could get hardening technology that is strong and as lightweight as desired, maybe even retrofit existing satellites with nanotech "vests." But we would need a manned in-orbit service vehicle. Which is to say "create built-in resiliency rather than massive redundancy" sounds good, but also sounds like this limits what computers can do. That is, use of computers in materials design, actually systems design, has a lot of potential. Create all the redundancy we need with cheap nanotech stuff, presuming it can eventually be made cheaply. This does not preclude "resiliency design." To use metaphor : Fire / smoke alarms + sprinklers, not just one or the other. Billy ==================================== 5/3/2012 11:37:10 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
On May 1, 2012, at 8:23 PM, David R. Block wrote: _http://www.onesecondafter.com/pb/wp_194d9c9d/wp_194d9c9d.html_ (http://www.onesecondafter.com/pb/wp_194d9c9d/wp_194d9c9d.html) _http://www.futurescience.com/X5DNA/X5DNA.html_ (http://www.futurescience.com/X5DNA/X5DNA.html) _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse) _http://afteremp.com/_ (http://afteremp.com/) Thanks. The good news is that a long-range EMP apparently requires satellite-level altitudes, so it is beyond the reach of ordinary terrorists. Yeah, China could hit us with an EMP, but they could also hit us with a nuke (and vice versa), so we're back to MAD. Points to Billy for credible information on the likelihood of a massive solar flare, which does seem like a plausible threat. I suppose there's a potential geopolitical effect if our hemisphere is hit while China's isn't, but that's much harder to game out. Most of the preparations for dealing with an EMP sound similar to those for dealing with a tornado or earthquake. I have no doubt it would be ridiculously expensive, though I'm still skeptical of the broad-based technological collapse claims. I do think the sanest national preparation is to move much more quickly to a post-industrial society, where we have tighter local economies and more distributed just-in-time manufacturing capability. In other words, create built-in resiliency rather than massive redundancy. -- Ernie P. There are some starters on EMP. David _ "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection."—Neal Boortz On 5/1/2012 11:00 AM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote: Hi Billy, Sent from my iPhone On Apr 30, 2012, at 16:47, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: 100 % certainty, if one hit us with no warning it would blow out at least half of the transformers in the country. Maybe more like 80% plus. Is that really true? I'd like to see.a source cited. Like with EMF pulses, there's a lot of claims that sound suspicious to me. That much energy might scramble radios, but if it was really strong enough to burn out high-voltage transformers across an area larger than a city, I'd think -we- would all be fried too. In which case it doesn't really matter. :-) E -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
