End of the world

@Ghostinthemachine Same here 👍

@Fluffybull with my luck, someone would dodge it and it would hit me 🤣

@bleach it’s ok. I’m almost certain the inevitable new solar flare tax will fix it 👍

And the Gravity Tax. @TheOneyouwerewarnedabout

@stratosranger No, it does not take much to destroy semiconductors at all, but I would hope the various utility and services organisations are aware of the hazard and protect the key parts of their systems appropriately.

You've made me think of one aspect of any armageddon-like possibility. This is that the more technically "sophisticated" we are, the less likely we are to survive and recover from whatever happens.

In 1999 there was widespread panic that all computers would crash because someone had the idea that their internal clocks would all stop at midnight on 31st December. They didn't, of course, but it raised the simple question, "All right, suppose they do? How did we manage only 30 years previously when it would have been just inconvenient?"

It seems we want to make everything,technical and administrative, as complicated as possible; forgetting that the more complicated it is the more fragile it is, and the harder it is to protect it against whatever hazard might pose the highest risks. One effect is we lose the skills and means to do the same things more simply if necessary, compounding the hazard.

@ArishMell Yes. We are held together by the most delicate of gossamer strands. Utilities have a plan in place should a powerful CME come our way and that is to shut down the grid prior to it’s arrival. We can fortunately see these things coming days in advance. But how will it still affect the grid? The 1859 telegraph operators in some cases had disconnected their batteries only to find there was so much charge in the lines they could still communicate with one another. 🥺

@stratosranger It's not only as delicate as a spider's web. It also uses a colossal amount of electricity, with cyber-currency among the biggest culprits, and we surely can't go on like that.

I read that about the telegraphs still working with the induced electricity - a curious and very unexpected result. The wires and relays used at the time would have withstood it but as you pointed out, modern electronics would not unless very carefully protected.

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The electricity supply here in Britain was State-owned but sold off in the 1980s - 1890s to a rag-tag assortment of commercial companies, mostly foreign-owned: one. EDF, is actually owned state-owned - by France! However, they are middle-men. The distribution system and I think generating-stations are still UK State-owned, by National Grid. (Many Britons, including me who used to support "private ownership", think it should all have stayed UK-State owned.)

I don't know how it would respond to severe solar flares, but the national grid as such is physically very robust with a lot of protective circuit-breakers, alternative routes, etc. It also has exchange-trading connections by submarine cables with the European continent. I think it would stand up to induced currents but the problem would be preventing those from feeding back into the alternators, or downstream into users' equipment. If the induced current is d.c. it won't go through a transformer, but the initial transient, spikes and ripples might.

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Most of the UK's telephone system (including broadband services) uses buried cables, though with wires on poles for local distribution and in rural areas. I don't know how well burial protects the signal wires themselves from solar radiation, but it must help by the ground itself acting as a Faraday Shield.

The network, especially between town and as far as many of the local distribution points in town streets, is becoming mainly fibre-optical, replacing the copper wires, so presumably immune from induced currents and magnetic fields. We need hope the exchange equipment is safe, of course.

BT (British Telecommunications) aims to move entirely to fibre right to the premises - this will take some years and does bring a problem of its own, that the domestic telephone will need its own domestic power-supply, instead of being exchange-supplied. So it will not be safe from power-cuts without an auxiliary battery. Luckily power-cuts in any particular area are not very common and are usually fairly short-lived, although last Winter three severe storms left many homes in some parts of Britain without electricity for several days. (Part of the delay was the repairers also faced with blocked roads, in rural areas.)

In one of those cut-off villages, a resident with a land-line 'phone became the emergency contact with the outside world for neighbours who had replaced theirs with portable 'phones they could not recharge!