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Internet Apocalypse?

An 'Internet apocalypse' could ride to Earth with the next solar storm, new research warns

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The underwater cables that connect nations could go offline for months, the study warns.

The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. For the most part, our planet's magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake.

But sometimes, every century or so, that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm — and, as new research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference warns, the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life.

In short, a severe solar storm could plunge the world into an "internet apocalypse" that keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in the new research paper. (The paper has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal).

"What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it's the same with internet resilience," Abdu Jyothi told WIRED. "Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event."

Part of the problem is that extreme solar storms (also called coronal mass ejections) are relatively rare; scientists estimate the probability of an extreme space weather directly impacting Earth to be between 1.6% to 12% per decade, according to Abdu Jyothi's paper.

In recent history, only two such storms have been recorded — one in 1859 and the other in 1921. The earlier incident, known as the Carrington Event, created such a severe geomagnetic disturbance on Earth that telegraph wires burst into flame, and auroras — usually only visible near the planet's poles — were spotted near equatorial Colombia. Smaller storms can also pack a punch; one in March 1989 blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec for nine hours.

Since then, human civilization has become much more reliant on the global internet, and the potential impacts of a massive geomagnetic storm on that new infrastructure remain largely unstudied, Abdu Jyothi said. In her new paper, she tried to pinpoint the greatest vulnerabilities in that infrastructure.

The good news is, local and regional internet connections are likely at low risk of being damaged because fiber-optic cables themselves aren't affected by geomagnetically induced currents, according to the paper.

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Originally Posted by J. Falcon (Post 22910883)

An 'Internet apocalypse' could ride to Earth with the next solar storm, new research warns

It would probably be a really good thing for humanity if a solar storm destroyed all digital technologies.

Unfortunately I doubt that it's going to happen and this news story is most likely bullshit.

Good. Earth is in need of a deep cleansing. This will surely accomplish that.

How often do they say this is going to happen?

I personally believe that this is a real risk and it should (but won't) be taken seriously.

We have not had a significant CME event that hit the Earth since long before electric power transmission was widespread - let alone unprotected satellites orbiting the planet.

CME happens all the time as a normal part of the Sun's functioning. We will surely be hit directly and repeatedly over time, and I would be very surprised if the next such event doesn't knock out all the satellites that are unfortunate enough to be between the sun and the earth when it arrives.

The power grid of the USA and all sun-facing locations will be substantially damaged or destroyed and normal Internet operations will similarly have their wiring and hardware degraded or rendered inoperable.

More likely is a glancing blow from a CME, though, or a less powerful CME will arrive before a "big one." The damage could be less substantial and serve as a serious warning, giving us time to harden our infrastructure.

It is also one of those events that is, from my perspective at least, impossible to time. The sun ejects mass in CMEs very often - but it does it in all directions. That means it is not like an earthquake fault line that ruptures when the pressure has built up to the point where it snaps. This kind of action is somewhat predictable because pressure builds slowly over time, and we can estimate the maximum amount of pressure the fault can tolerate. In that way, we can estimate when a next earthquake along the fault is likely (they come every 300 years, for example, so maybe 200 years or maybe 400 years, but never just 10 years apart or 1000 years...)

With CME, you could get two hits in two months, or you could get no hits in 1000 years. They may average 100 years apart or so, but there is no relationship between when one happens to when the next one may happen.

So, maybe a 1% chance per year? It would suck, but it doesn't keep me up at night. (ugh, now I have to knock on wood lol)