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Question:Over 99% of species go extinct. What is the most likely cause of human extinction.

cosmic collision (asteroid, comet etc.)  1 (20%)
global war  3 (60%)
radical climate change  0 (0%)
super volcano(es)  0 (0%)
gamma ray burster  1 (20%)
   
Total Votes: 5 

   Author  Topic: Apocalypse Now  (Read 2511 times)
MoEnzyme
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Apocalypse Now
« on: 2009-07-18 12:52:21 »
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I will fight your gods for food,
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #1 on: 2009-07-19 15:40:16 »
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #2 on: 2009-07-20 08:05:12 »
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You also left out zombies  , sorry I had to mention it, forgive me too many late night movies.
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Re:Apocalypse Now - Zombies and Global Warming
« Reply #3 on: 2009-11-22 09:30:41 »
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #4 on: 2009-11-22 10:25:08 »
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #5 on: 2009-11-22 15:44:58 »
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[MoEnzyme] To my thinking reducing our global carbon emissions is a rather herculean technical/economic/political task that will likely take some time. I wouldn’t say that we can't or shouldn't engage in the task, however acting alarmist about the carbon problem will almost certainly poison the political possibilities for such a great and long term task,  giving the zombies and their zombie masters (see my previous response to Tas6) too many opportunities to ruin our meme-o-sphere in the process - like everytime the sunspot activity drops, and other such things.

[Hermit] GWP from Methane released from the waters of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic is now equivalent to or exceeds human caused GWP, as is the release of Methane and CO2 from the rapidly vanishing Tundra.

[Hermit] This suggests that we are past "the flipping point."

[Hermit] That is not to say there is nothing that can be done about it. The trouble is that we probably won't or maybe can't do anything about it until it really is too late. And given the economic, fossil fuel and potable water realities facing us, and the lack of recognition that capitalism has failed in the essential task for which we invented civilization, of providing food reserves capable of sustaining the population through multiple crop failures, "too late" is likely 2014 or easrlier.

[MoEnzyme] I think the source of our conundrum lies in focusing too much on carbon emissions in our solutions. Certainly CO2 got us into this problem and so we need to focus on it, but we need to be pursuing other solutions if simply as a stop-gap measures. It may be much easier to more quickly and temporarily change the albedo of the planet at the surface or at the level of the troposphere, or even in the stratosphere.

[Hermit] This scares me not because it is impossible, but because it is all too possible, is effectively what we have already been doing (we all know about the GWP of CO2 and Methane at this point, and also that well over half the cloud over the USA is formed around ice crystals from contrails), but as we have seen, not easy to predict, reverse or even measure the effects, let alone to determine how much to change our planet. I don't recommend performing any experiments without a control, let alone one on this scale, particularly in that as the apex predator, we are simultaneously hyper-sensitive to any change in the environment and the only canaries in the coal mine.

[Hermit] My approach is to say that if we have space solar, then we will also have the ability to both increase or decrease Arctic temperatures over very short periods of time, allowing much more measured intervention and the ability to reverse any interventions we engage in. This strikes me as sensible. As space solar is the only form of energy available to us through the extension of available technology on an attainable scale that can make an effective difference in minimizing resource contention while we reduce our populations, if we don't follow this path, we are doomed to extinction of at least our civilization and probably our species and possibly current life on Earth, it strikes me as sensible to work on such technologies and that will allow us to engage in temperature micromanagement on a global scale.

[Hermit] Notice that it is the GWP of fossil fuels, that force us to develop solutions fast, as the use of much more of the fossil fuel that remains available to us without addressing the problem of global warming will leave us without the economic base we need to address the problem of climate change just as our massive over population, pollution of our environment and depleted resources conspire to drive us into wars which we will probably fight far too effectively to survive.
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #6 on: 2009-11-22 21:20:53 »
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Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

[ Hermit : Not the sun exploding exactly, but disaster from the sun is feasible even without an explosion, and the loss of national defence satellites, networks and capacity could easily lead to war. ]

Source: New Scientist, Magazine issue 2700 [ Hermit : Subscription now required to access ]
Authors: Michael Brooks
Dated: 2009-03-23
Related editorial: We must heed the threat of solar storms [ Hermit : Subscription now required to access ]
Video: When plasma is flung at Earth
Full referenced report: http://www.empcommission.org/
Solar Storm Watch: http://spaceweather.com/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
Also Recommended: Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which describes the effect of a super-massive particles' emission from the Sun and the effect on earth.

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Worse than Katrina
[ Hermit : Potentially very much worse than Katrina because it could affect a much larger area leaving people without food, water or energy - and no available response. See comment below article. ]

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.


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 [ Hermit : Attachment, Infra. ] ). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

[b]First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

72 hours of healthcare remaining

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced.
"From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

30 days of coal left

Nuclear power stations wouldn't fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."

Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. "If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse," says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

4-10 years to recover

"I don't think the NAS report is scaremongering," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team. Green agrees. "Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful," he says. "This is a fair and balanced report."

Such nightmare scenarios are not restricted to North America.


High latitude nations such as Sweden and Norway have been aware for a while that, while regular views of the aurora are pretty, they are also reminders of an ever-present threat to their electricity grids. However, the trend towards installing extremely high voltage grids means that lower latitude countries are also at risk. For example, China is on the way to implementing a 1000-kilovolt electrical grid, twice the voltage of the US grid. This would be a superb conduit for space weather-induced disaster because the grid's efficiency to act as an antenna rises as the voltage between the grid and the ground increases. "China is going to discover at some point that they have a problem," Kappenman says.

Neither is Europe sufficiently prepared. Responsibility for dealing with space weather issues is "very fragmented" in Europe, says Hapgood.

Europe's electricity grids, on the other hand, are highly interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading failures. In 2006, the routine switch-off of a small part of Germany's grid - to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables - caused a cascade power failure across western Europe. In France alone, five million people were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated we don't fully understand the effects of twiddling at one place," Hapgood says. "Most of the time it's alright, but occasionally it will get you."

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.

15 minutes' warning

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.

He was part of a space weather commission that three years ago warned about the problems of relying on ACE. "It's been on my mind for a long time," he says. "To not have a spare, or a strategy to replace it if and when it should fail, is rather foolish."

There is no replacement for ACE due any time soon. Other solar observation satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can provide some warning, but with less detailed information and - crucially - much later. "It's quite hard to assess what the impact of losing ACE will be," Hapgood says. "We will largely lose the early warning capability."

The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens.
Kintner says his students show a "deep indifference" when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. "It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible," he says.

The report outlines the worst case scenario for the US. The "perfect storm" is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity - something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth's field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.

What's more, at these times of year, electricity demand is relatively low because no one needs too much heating or air conditioning. With only a handful of the US grid's power stations running, the system relies on computer algorithms shunting large amounts of power around the grid and this leaves the network highly vulnerable to sudden spikes.

If ACE has failed by then, or a plasma ball flies at us too fast for any warning from ACE to reach us, the consequences could be staggering. "A really large storm could be a planetary disaster," Kappenman says.

So what should be done? No one knows yet - the report is meant to spark that conversation. Baker is worried, though, that the odds are stacked against that conversation really getting started.
As the NAS report notes, it is terribly difficult to inspire people to prepare for a potential crisis that has never happened before [ Hermit : Except, as the Carrington event shows,  it has happened before, only we had relatively little vulnerable electrical equipment then. ] and may not happen for decades to come. "It takes a lot of effort to educate policy-makers, and that is especially true with these low-frequency events," he says.

We should learn the lessons of hurricane Katrina, though, and realise that "unlikely" doesn't mean "won't happen". Especially when the stakes are so high. The fact is, it could come in the next three or four years - and with devastating effects. "The Carrington event happened during a mediocre, ho-hum solar cycle," Kintner says. "It came out of nowhere, so we just don't know when something like that is going to happen again."

Bibliography

1. Severe Space Weather Events - Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts (National Academies Press)


When hell comes to Earth

Severe space weather events often coincide with the appearance of sunspots, which are indicators of particularly intense magnetic fields at the sun's surface.

The chaotic motion of charged particles in the upper atmosphere of the sun creates magnetic fields that writhe, twist and turn, and occasionally snap and reconfigure themselves in what is known as a "reconnection". These reconnection events are violent, and can fling out billions of tonness of plasma in a "coronal mass ejection" (CME).

If flung towards the Earth, the plasma ball will accelerate as it travels through space and its intense magnetic field will soon interact with the planet's magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Depending on the relative orientation of the two fields, several things can happen. If the fields are oriented in the same direction, they slip round one another. In the worst case scenario, though, when the field of a particularly energetic CME opposes the Earth's field, things get much more dramatic. "The Earth can't cope with the plasma," says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division. "The CME just opens up the magnetosphere like a can-opener, and matter squirts in."

The sun's activity waxes and wanes every 11 years or so, with the appearance of sunspots following the same cycle. This period isn't consistent, however. Sometimes the interval between sunspot maxima is as short as nine years, other times as long as 14 years. At the moment the sun appears calm. "We're in the equivalent of an idyllic summer's day. The sun is quiet and benign, the quietest it has been for 100 years," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team, "but it could turn the other way." The next solar maximum is expected in 2012.

Michael Brooks's latest book is 13 Things That Don't Make Sense (Profile, 2008).


The EMP commission was established a number of years ago to study the effects of an electromagnetic pulse attack on our grid. The commission has a couple of their studies online; they were done with a terror attack in mind but also mention geomagnetic storms.

The Critical National Infrastructure report released last year is a big one and covers the SCADA systems, electric power, telecommunications, banking, petrol and natural gas, transportation, food, water, emergency services, space systems, government and the effects on people.

We're used to dealing with short-term, localized outages but this report delves into the problems of wide-spread long-term ones. Here's a snip regarding transformers:
    [i]"All production for these large transformers used in the United States is currently offshore. Delivery time for these items under benign circumstances is typically one to two years. There are about 2,000 such transformers rated at or above 345 kV in the United States with about 1 percent per year being replaced due to failure or by the addition of new ones.

    Worldwide production capacity is less than 100 units per year and serves a world market, one that is growing at a rapid rate in such countries as China and India. Delivery of a new large transformer ordered today is nearly 3 years, including both manufacturing and transportation."
Then, you realize just how dependent food processing is on electricity:
    "Growing crops and raising livestock require vast quantities of water delivered by a water infrastructure that is largely electrically powered. Tractors, planters, harvesters, and other farm equipment are fueled by petroleum products supplied by pipelines, pumps, and transportation systems that run on electricity. Fertilizers, insecticides, and feeds that make possible high yields from crops and livestock are manufactured by plants requiring electric power.

    Food processing—cleaning, sorting, packaging, and canning of all kinds of agricultural and meat products—is typically an automated operation, performed on assembly lines by electrically powered machinery.

    Food distribution also depends on electricity. Refrigerated warehouses make possible the long-term storage of vast quantities of vegetables, fruits, and meats. Road and rail transportation depend on the electric grid that powers electric trains, runs pipelines and gas pumps, and powers the apparatus for regulating traffic on roads and rails."


 Blackout_Warning_sol17_02.jpg
« Last Edit: 2009-11-23 09:12:30 by Hermit »
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #7 on: 2009-11-23 13:08:54 »
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #8 on: 2009-11-23 16:15:41 »
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There are a number of serious problems with the idea of the "Amish tak(ing) over the world" which others have proposed, but I don't see happening.
  • The Amish are dependent on modern manufacturing too, they always bought ploughs etc which if modern "civilization" fails won't be available to the Amish either.
  • The Amish are not renowned for their military prowess and might not survive the initial anarchy of desperate gun toting city people flooding to farms in search of sustenance.
  • Most farm land is in much worse shape than when Amish techniques were the norm, and without modern fertilizers could not be used for farming.
  • The last time Amish people fed the world, the population was anout 1/7 of what it is today.
  • We farm a much smaller area than the old timers did, and much land has been built on making it unavailable for the forseeable future.
  • Amish farm techniques use a lot more labor to produce a lot less,
  • 2/3 of the output of Amish farms is used to feed the working animals, reducing output accordingly.
  • Rather than the 18  to 24 months of grain stocks on hand as was common into the 1800s, modern farming and distribution have reduced that margin to 12 weeks, making widespread starvation an inevitable consequence of any major crop failure.

The combination would probably imply that if Amish techniques are adopted, about 11/12 of all people currently alive would need to die to allow sustainability with the inevitably lower production. Which is why I would see the deliberate depopulation intended by the resource wars as an almost inevitable consequence of a major solar event as described here.
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #9 on: 2009-11-24 10:00:36 »
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Re:Apocalypse Now
« Reply #10 on: 2010-01-29 10:20:29 »
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Mo Enzyme


(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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