Good Article on Solar Storm Scenario

[MediumTex]

...in Popular Mechanics.

Not everyone is optimistic that our modern society will successfully address the problem—including physicist Avi Schnurr, who is also the president of the Electric Infrastructure Security Council, a non-governmental organization advocating space-weather resilience. "If a Carrington Event happened right now it probably wouldn’t be a wake-up alarm—it would be a goodnight call," he says. "This is a case where we have to do something that is not often successfully achieved by governments, and certainly not by democracies: We have to take concerted action against a predicted threatening event without having actually experienced the event itself in modern times."

LINK

[Lone Wolf]

Very good article, thanks for posting.  Popular Mechanics does some nice work.

BTW, did you find this line gratifying?  I've seen you touch on this theme many times in unrelated topics.

That growth has been accompanied by a shift to higher operating voltages, which increase the efficiency of electricity transmission but make the grid less resistant to exterior impinging currents.

[MediumTex]

Very good article, thanks for posting.  Popular Mechanics does some nice work.

BTW, did you find this line gratifying?  I've seen you touch on this theme many times in unrelated topics.

That growth has been accompanied by a shift to higher operating voltages, which increase the efficiency of electricity transmission but make the grid less resistant to exterior impinging currents.

It is a pattern that repeats endlessly through much of the modern world--we build things to deal with 99% of the situations that are likely to arise, and when when that 1% scenario comes along it wipes everything clean.

The banking system seems to go through such a process on a regular basis.

[Indices]

I hope it comes and wipes out my credit card debt.

[MediumTex]

I hope it comes and wipes out my credit card debt.

I think that a fascinating and entirely believable science fiction story could cover a scenario about a not too distant future where all printed knowledge had been digitized and paper records no longer existed in the forms of books, documents, etc.

In this world of entirely digital knowledge some event occurs like a solar storm that simply erases all of these digital records, leaving people with what would essentially be an oral history of all human knowledge.

The solar storm would also sets off some kind of military conflict that would throw the whole world into chaos and at the end of a relatively short period the world would find itself having regressed hundreds of years as the entire transportation, production and knowledge infrastructure simply no longer existed.

Since all knowledge would have been digitized and all electronic devices would have been destroyed, even the people who possessed the knowledge would have trouble finding an outlet for recording it, since no one would know how to write in longhand any more and there would likely be no writing instruments or paper on which to record the remaining knowledge anyway.

[patrickjhall]

Since all knowledge would have been digitized and all electronic devices would have been destroyed, even the people who possessed the knowledge would have trouble finding an outlet for recording it, since no one would know how to write in longhand any more and there would likely be no writing instruments or paper on which to record the remaining knowledge anyway.

Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz? Roughly the same themes, with a nuclear holocaust as the trigger event.

[Ralphy]

One Second After, written by Gingrich's buddy William Fortschen, follows a similar idea, though it focuses more on survivalism than the loss of knowledge.  The story takes place in the aftermath of an EMP attack.