Question about EMP

SilentRunning

Honorable
I've asked this before on a survivalist forum, and never got an answer that made sense.

Why is it that there's an assumption that's validated by the media that an EMP attack would wipe out civilization for years to come?

Yes, it would suck. Yes, for a short period of time, there would be a fairly high death toll. Yes, it would be really crappy. Yes, it would be hard to deal with for at least say, six months. And no, I don't have any faith in the government getting the lights back on in a decent amount of time, especially after seeing what's happened/is happening in Puerto Rico.

However.

The corporations will want the power back on. They're not making any money if people aren't safe/aren't fed/housed/clothed. Knowing as I do that our society has turned into one giant consumerist mudball, why wouldn't your local electric company be busting its butt to get things fixed?

Please somebody explain to me why the power would still be off five years down the line, because almost all of the media surrounding EMPs just doesn't make sense to me in that manner. At all.

Thank you!

SilentRunning
 

spacecase0

earth human
the big issue is the oil refineries
they are computer controlled
so there is a very real risk that they will be taken out,
and when they go offline, many will likely have issues shutting down,
even if they don't all burn to the ground when it happens, there are not enough replacement parts to fix them.
the parts would have to be built. and built by factories that no longer have the tools to build the parts.
so, there would be very little fuel.
the government would likely be fine with this,
but the farmers will not be.
this is a food supply and distribution issue.

another major issue is how many people get water that is pumped by electricity
even if you manage to get the power back up with a generator for your well,
no new fuel will be headed your way

to top all of that off,
most of the communications will be gone,
so organizing your way out of it will likely not happen.
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
A full scale EMP attack would fry every thing! cars, trucks, phones.
nothing would run. or work.
it's hard to fix the grid when you have no tools of worth
 

SilentRunning

Honorable
I see both your points, but do you honestly think that Britain and the EU wouldn't be sending their techs over to help us? This would be a humanitarian crisis on a global scale. As I said in my original post, yes, the first six months to a year, the death toll would be horrendous. But it's not like we're the only country on Earth, guys.

See, this is what nobody else takes into consideration. If, say, NK popped an EMP above us, I don't think it would affect most of the rest of the globe. Canada and Mexico, sure, but there's a lot of other countries out there that would step up to help us with both parts and technicians.
 

spacecase0

earth human
my best guess is that another country will send something,
china wants at least california, I bet they wait till most people die and then try to take it.

someone might send help,
but there are not enough parts in the world to fix what would break, and it takes to long to make them.
things might be running in some limited way after about a year,
but how many people can live with no food or water for a year ?
I expect that you will not need 2 to 5 years of food needed for everything to get fixed.
once most people die off, things will get a bit easier, and that will not take that long.
so, you are correct, it will get better. just not before most of the people in the cities would have died.

also,
this mess of an infrastructure will never be rebuilt,
the ones left will never trust it.
the nation wide power grid will never return. it will go back to local power only.
 
There's actually a far more urgent reason to harden our electrical grid: solar coronal mass ejecta (CME). The last time one of these beasts struck the Earth's magnetosphere was in 1859 - the Carrington Event, at the dawn of the electrical age, and it wrought havoc with every telegraph system and electrical line around the world. The aurora borealis was seen near the equator; Cuba, Hawaii, south-central Mexico, etc. Telegraph operators received electrical shocks from their equipment. Other telegraph operators found that they could send and receive transmissions, even though their power was out, because the electrical currents induced by the violent geomagnetic storms were charging the lines.

Estimates for the damage that we expect from the next Carrington-class CME impact range from $600 billion to $2.6 trillion for the US alone, but the effects will be global. Communications and industry will grind to an immediate halt all around the globe, and no low-Earth--orbit satellite will survive. We'll be thrust back to a feudal level of technology literally overnight.

In 2012 the Earth had a near miss with a Carrington-class CME. It's only a matter of time before one of them strikes.

I reckon that once the fires and riots and mass starvation and disease epidemics and wipe out most of the species, following the next Carrington-class CME event, the world will resemble that of The Road Warrior, and it will probably take many centuries to rebuild our current level of technological civilization.

So we really need to be hardening our electrical grid right now, before it's too late. The useless corporatist sycophants in Washington, D.C., keep giving lip service to a national infrastructure program - safeguarding the nation (and all nations) against this inevitable catastrophe should be a top priority.

also,
this mess of an infrastructure will never be rebuilt,
the ones left will never trust it.
the nation wide power grid will never return. it will go back to local power only.
If we're talking about a single EMP attack, or even a few blasts, the prognosis isn't this dire. Think about all of the megaton nuclear tests done in Nevada, for example - none of those tests had any significant impact on the nations's power grid. An EMP high over NYC would be a major problem for NYC, but the rest of the nation would be fine, and could rush in to help them rebuild the grid and replace all of their computer and cell technology.

It's the CME's that we need to worry about, because those effects are both catastrophic and global (and inevitable, if we don't take drastic measures to protect our systems before the next one hits).
 
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SilentRunning

Honorable
I agree completely that we need to start safeguarding against both EMPs and CMEs. I've just had a hard time understanding why and how civilization is supposed to STAY in the feudal/pre-electricity times, because it just doesn't make SENSE to me.

You mentioned the corporatists, Thomas, and my question basically revolves around them; the robber barons are global now, and they will want to get things back on track ASAP, because any sort of collapse that involved the developed nations would hit them where they hurt most; their bottom line.

For instance, if my original scenario happened, the corporate offices in Europe/Asia would be gung ho as heck to get the power back on and things normalized in North America as soon as possible, because 1., everything's based on the dollar, and they'd be losing millions a second, #2, we import so many goods and services they'd have to get us back on our feet.

In the case of a CME, the corporations would then have the ability to do what they really want to do anyway, which is control the entire world. All they'll have to do is step up and get it done.

Maybe I'm not making sense. I just think there's a difference between being thrown back into the late 1800s and clawing our way back out of it with help from other governments and corporations, and being thrown back there and STAYING there. I don't think we'll STAY there for as long as I guess everyone else does.
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
I agree with you on this matter.
we need to harden our infrastructure!
the whole thing will cost billions maybe up to a trillion
 
I agree completely that we need to start safeguarding against both EMPs and CMEs. I've just had a hard time understanding why and how civilization is supposed to STAY in the feudal/pre-electricity times, because it just doesn't make SENSE to me.

You mentioned the corporatists, Thomas, and my question basically revolves around them; the robber barons are global now, and they will want to get things back on track ASAP, because any sort of collapse that involved the developed nations would hit them where they hurt most; their bottom line.

For instance, if my original scenario happened, the corporate offices in Europe/Asia would be gung ho as heck to get the power back on and things normalized in North America as soon as possible, because 1., everything's based on the dollar, and they'd be losing millions a second, #2, we import so many goods and services they'd have to get us back on our feet.

In the case of a CME, the corporations would then have the ability to do what they really want to do anyway, which is control the entire world. All they'll have to do is step up and get it done.

Maybe I'm not making sense. I just think there's a difference between being thrown back into the late 1800s and clawing our way back out of it with help from other governments and corporations, and being thrown back there and STAYING there. I don't think we'll STAY there for as long as I guess everyone else does.
Think of it this way: we're at feudal levels of income inequality right now - so where the rubber meets the road, we're back in the Dark Ages right now, economically.

Now consider that a sudden collapse of technological civilization all around the globe would be the single most devastating event in human history. The rule of law would evaporate within days all around the world. No more governments, nothing. It would be pure bedlam as factions arose in various geographical locations and fought for dominance. All of that would have to be worked out until a clear victor emerged, at which point national sociopolitical structures could be rebuilt. And who knows what forms those might take? Many will be brutal dictatorships, no doubt.

In any case, all of those power dynamics will have to settle down before we can focus on rebuilding our technology. It's hard to say how long it would take for all of this to come back together, but I think that 2-3 centuries at a minimum is a good bet.

But it could take a lot longer: look what happened in the Dark Ages. If fundamental religion takes hold again, and if the survivors are sufficiently traumatized by the complete and sudden failure of all technology, they might reject technology altogether for quite awhile, and stick with paddle wheels and mules for a few centuries, possibly even longer.

So I think 2-3 centuries is a best-case scenario in the aftermath of another Carrington-class event. In any case, we'd never live to see anything even remotely as advanced as today's technology, with Mars landers and personal computers and smartphones and all the rest of it.

I agree with you on this matter.
we need to harden our infrastructure!
the whole thing will cost billions maybe up to a trillion
We spend about this much every single year on our insanely bloated military budget to perpetrate non-stop mass murder operations abroad, so clearly we can afford it. It's just a matter of priorities: for once, we should put our national and global interests above those of the war profiteers and multinational banks.
 
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Good points!

I guess I'm just a little too optimistic.
Thanks! I think it's natural to look at things from our current perspective - right now, aside from the despicable and relentless warmongering of the US, global civilization is humming along quite nicely. We have generally effective international diplomacy between peaceful nations, most of the industrialized world enjoys reasonably democratic societies with more or less forward-looking agendas, and we all understand that modern technological progress requires global cooperation, which ultimately benefits all nations.

So it's easy to forget how fragile this system is. A sudden and complete collapse of industrialization would thrust us back almost to the Stone Age. None of us are prepared for that. The death toll alone would probably reach the billions. It would make the Black Plague look like a minor inconvenience. The rule of law would become "dog eat dog" for many decades if not centuries - and the most brutal and sociopathic among us would be best equipped for survival, so all of us nice and polite, well-meaning souls would be pig feed and slave labor, until we slowly fought our way back to real civilization again.

We see reminders of this all the time, but we try to forget about them. But I still remember how Los Angeles become a burning hellscape within hours, after the Rodney King verdict. Cars overturned in the roads, trashcan fires in the streets, looting everywhere, columns of smoke rising up like pillars of doom all over the city. Within a matter of hours civilization completely collapsed and unchecked savagery ruled the day - that's what's lurking beneath the thin veneer of civility, and our polite greetings to strangers at street corners and coffee shops.

With the sudden and complete collapse of technological infrastructure all around the globe - not even phone lines or newspapers to inform us about events the next town over, the whole world would descend into open warfare and the fight for survival 24/7.

It's taken centuries to build the fragile edifice of our comfortable and convenient modern society - it's crazy that we haven't taken any steps to protect it from this inevitable natural catastrophe that could take it all away in a matter of hours.
 

SilentRunning

Honorable
Thanks! I think it's natural to look at things from our current perspective - right now, aside from the despicable and relentless warmongering of the US, global civilization is humming along quite nicely. We have generally effective international diplomacy between peaceful nations, most of the industrialized world enjoys reasonably democratic societies with more or less forward-looking agendas, and we all understand that modern technological progress requires global cooperation, which ultimately benefits all nations.

So it's easy to forget how fragile this system is. A sudden and complete collapse of industrialization would thrust us back almost to the Stone Age. None of us are prepared for that. The death toll alone would probably reach the billions. It would make the Black Plague look like a minor inconvenience. The rule of law would become "dog eat dog" for many decades if not centuries - and the most brutal and sociopathic among us would be best equipped for survival, so all of us nice and polite, well-meaning souls would be pig feed and slave labor, until we slowly fought our way back to real civilization again.

We see reminders of this all the time, but we try to forget about them. But I still remeber how Los Angeles become a burning hellscape within hours, after the Rodney King verdict. Cars overturned in the roads, trashcan fires in the streets, looting everywhere, columns of smoke rising up like pillars of doom all over the city. Within matter of hours civilization completely collapsed and unchecked savagery ruled the day - that's what's lurking beneath the thin veneer of civility, and our polite greetings to strangers on street corners and coffee shops.

With the sudden and complete collapse of technological infrastructure all around the globe - not even phone lines or newspapers to inform us about events the next town over, the whole world would descend into open warfare and the fight for survival 24/7.

It's taken centuries to build the fragile edifice of our comfortable and convenient modern society - its crazy that we haven't taken any steps to protect it from this inevitable natural catastrophe that could take it all away in a matter of hours.


Well, to be honest, part of the reason I'm interested in this topic is because I'm a writer, and I have an idea for a story that involves EMPs or CMEs. But I've never been able to make myself just...blindly agree with authors like S.M. Stirling or Forstchen, so it's been really difficult to make myself look into the possibility and really try to figure out how long it would last, because as I said above, I just couldn't make it make sense.

Your points are well made and make more sense than any others I've come across, and as I said, I've asked the question on survivalist forums before; mainly I just get the panic responses and get told to read Lights Out and whatnot, and I just have to shake my head and go, yeah, no, did that already.

So thank you very much for bearing with me. Maybe I can make that stuff make a little more sense now in my head.
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
Well, to be honest, part of the reason I'm interested in this topic is because I'm a writer, and I have an idea for a story that involves EMPs or CMEs. But I've never been able to make myself just...blindly agree with authors like S.M. Stirling or Forstchen, so it's been really difficult to make myself look into the possibility and really try to figure out how long it would last, because as I said above, I just couldn't make it make sense.

Your points are well made and make more sense than any others I've come across, and as I said, I've asked the question on survivalist forums before; mainly I just get the panic responses and get told to read Lights Out and whatnot, and I just have to shake my head and go, yeah, no, did that already.

So thank you very much for bearing with me. Maybe I can make that stuff make a little more sense now in my head.
a little off topic please look at the topic about my WIP let me know tour thoughts!
 

spacecase0

earth human
if you are writing stories,
you may want to know how a EMP or CME differs,
an EMP would mostly get things with transistors in them that are plugged in to long wires, so your computer and internet router plugged into the wall would be gone, but your cell phone should be fine even though there would be no way to make a call with it.
it would leave the power transmission wires, distribution transformers, power generators, and large motors intact. so electricity might be back on relatively fast. but the question is then, what would you do with it.
I do wonder if the smart power meters will fry in the mode to give you electricity or will fry so you don't get power until you go bypass it.
testing shows that there is a good chance that most cars would be ok, but like I said before, no new gas.
even the gas stations are not going to work, but someone should be able to set up another pump to get the gas out of the tanks.
a 12V stand alone solar power system might be ok, the EMP can't hurt the solar itself, but may get the charge controller and any reverse diodes in the panels (you can remove these in a 12V system and some don't come with them in the first place).
if building this, use only one ground point and you are way better off.
an EMP could be local, or if planned, could be the entire USA

a CME melts the distribution transformers and potentially the transmission wires, but it should leave the computers all functional (but good luck getting them electricity. a CME if not that big might just get the north and south and leave be the areas closer to the equator. but a big CME would take out any power system not hardened, and it will do it world wide.
I wonder if the factories in china that make the transformers need electricity to do it. (and it takes them a year to build the large ones as it is now)
things like refineries should be able to be shut down and switched over to run on generators till things are fixed
your home stand alone solar power system should be totally untouched by this sort of thing.
but I worry a bit about melting transformers and wires setting fires almost everywhere at the same time.

so each is a mess, but not in the same way.

by the way, if anyone wants tech details on how to make an off grid power setup that should live through almost anything, I will tell how.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Now consider that a sudden collapse of technological civilization all around the globe would be the single most devastating event in human history. The rule of law would evaporate within days all around the world. No more governments, nothing. It would be pure bedlam as factions arose in various geographical locations and fought for dominance. All of that would have to be worked out until a clear victor emerged, at which point national sociopolitical structures could be rebuilt. And who knows what forms those might take? Many will be brutal dictatorships, no doubt.

In any case, all of those power dynamics will have to settle down before we can focus on rebuilding our technology. It's hard to say how long it would take for all of this to come back together, but I think that 2-3 centuries at a minimum is a good bet.

But it could take a lot longer: look what happened in the Dark Ages. If fundamental religion takes hold again, and if the survivors are sufficiently traumatized by the complete and sudden failure of all technology, they might reject technology altogether for quite awhile, and stick with paddle wheels and mules for a few centuries, possibly even longer.

So I think 2-3 centuries is a best-case scenario in the aftermath of another Carrington-class event. In any case, we'd never live to see anything even remotely as advanced as today's technology, with Mars landers and personal computers and smartphones and all the rest of it.


We spend about this much every single year on our insanely bloated military budget to perpetrate non-stop mass murder operations abroad, so clearly we can afford it. It's just a matter of priorities: for once, we should put our national and global interests above those of the war profiteers and multinational banks.

Thanks! I think it's natural to look at things from our current perspective - right now, aside from the despicable and relentless warmongering of the US, global civilization is humming along quite nicely. We have generally effective international diplomacy between peaceful nations, most of the industrialized world enjoys reasonably democratic societies with more or less forward-looking agendas, and we all understand that modern technological progress requires global cooperation, which ultimately benefits all nations.

So it's easy to forget how fragile this system is. A sudden and complete collapse of industrialization would thrust us back almost to the Stone Age. None of us are prepared for that. The death toll alone would probably reach the billions. It would make the Black Plague look like a minor inconvenience. The rule of law would become "dog eat dog" for many decades if not centuries - and the most brutal and sociopathic among us would be best equipped for survival, so all of us nice and polite, well-meaning souls would be pig feed and slave labor, until we slowly fought our way back to real civilization again.

We see reminders of this all the time, but we try to forget about them. But I still remember how Los Angeles become a burning hellscape within hours, after the Rodney King verdict. Cars overturned in the roads, trashcan fires in the streets, looting everywhere, columns of smoke rising up like pillars of doom all over the city. Within a matter of hours civilization completely collapsed and unchecked savagery ruled the day - that's what's lurking beneath the thin veneer of civility, and our polite greetings to strangers at street corners and coffee shops.

With the sudden and complete collapse of technological infrastructure all around the globe - not even phone lines or newspapers to inform us about events the next town over, the whole world would descend into open warfare and the fight for survival 24/7.

It's taken centuries to build the fragile edifice of our comfortable and convenient modern society - it's crazy that we haven't taken any steps to protect it from this inevitable natural catastrophe that could take it all away in a matter of hours.

Hello Thomas, hope you're doing well today...Very good points which are possible scenarios, but we have to consider another element that will be greatly effected by a sudden loss of our beloved technology...I'm referring to the nuclear power plants scattered across the planet, which with no doubt most would be in operation when and if a sudden long term loss of electrical power occurs...

Keeping this in mind and calculating the extent of time it might take for those power plants to begin meltdowns, also taking into consideration that fail safe shutdown procedures did not function either, I would say within the first generation the planet will become heavily exposed to dangerous levels of radiation...The world would become a radioactive wasteland, radioactivity in the air, in the ground, nothing will survive, except perhaps bacteria on the surface or deeper underground or it could be that deep ocean life may live on, but mankind would be one of the first to go once those reactors start melting down and contaminating the planet...

...
 

spacecase0

earth human
Hello Thomas, hope you're doing well today...Very good points which are possible scenarios, but we have to consider another element that will be greatly effected by a sudden loss of our beloved technology...I'm referring to the nuclear power plants scattered across the planet, which with no doubt most would be in operation when and if a sudden long term loss of electrical power occurs...

Keeping this in mind and calculating the extent of time it might take for those power plants to begin meltdowns, also taking into consideration that fail safe shutdown procedures did not function either, I would say within the first generation the planet will become heavily exposed to dangerous levels of radiation...The world would become a radioactive wasteland, radioactivity in the air, in the ground, nothing will survive, except perhaps bacteria on the surface or deeper underground or it could be that deep ocean life may live on, but mankind would be one of the first to go once those reactors start melting down and contaminating the planet...

...
I forgot about the nuke plants...
in the USA they have 100% manual controls as backup (or at least they did 5 years ago when I quit paying attention)
at one reactor, for the year 2000 test, it took out the main computer and the backup computer copied the time and also failed...
they ran the plant on manual controls for 8 hours, and then they got the computers running again
they can run them and shut them down safely with no computers.
the big issue here is the spent fuel ponds, there is no containment on them
in the USA, unlike japan, they have batteries on carts to run pumps, they have generators, they have backup generators.
but they only have a few weeks of fuel on hand.
I wonder how much food and drinking water they have, (pretty sure it is almost nothing)
if many many people do very good jobs, there will be no issues.
but it would not take many of the fuel ponds to dry up and make up to 85% of the USA not that habitable for 300 years
many places would still have people living in them, just shorter lives and lots more pain.
it makes me wonder why they built them in the first place,
if they were really worried about war with russia back then, was the goal to make the USA totally unlivable if they tried to take over ?
 

nivek

As Above So Below
I forgot about the nuke plants...
in the USA they have 100% manual controls as backup (or at least they did 5 years ago when I quit paying attention)
at one reactor, for the year 2000 test, it took out the main computer and the backup computer copied the time and also failed...
they ran the plant on manual controls for 8 hours, and then they got the computers running again
they can run them and shut them down safely with no computers.
the big issue here is the spent fuel ponds, there is no containment on them
in the USA, unlike japan, they have batteries on carts to run pumps, they have generators, they have backup generators.
but they only have a few weeks of fuel on hand.
I wonder how much food and drinking water they have, (pretty sure it is almost nothing)
if many many people do very good jobs, there will be no issues.
but it would not take many of the fuel ponds to dry up and make up to 85% of the USA not that habitable for 300 years
many places would still have people living in them, just shorter lives and lots more pain.
it makes me wonder why they built them in the first place,
if they were really worried about war with russia back then, was the goal to make the USA totally unlivable if they tried to take over ?


Hello spacecase0, hope you're day's going well, thank you for descriptions of some of the inner components of these nuclear plants, which to me shows quite clear if they lose power for a prolonged period, we are in a very bad situation that is beyond our control...Some lands will last the longest, those far from any nuclear plants, if there is human life remaining on any remote islands they eventually be killed off as the radioactive clouds and rains reach those remote areas, its only a matter of time...I say no more than 100 years all human life will be gone because of radiation covering the earth, probably all animal life, but they will take longer to go...It would probably start within the first 3 months of indefinitely losing power...

...
 

spacecase0

earth human
Hello spacecase0, hope you're day's going well, thank you for descriptions of some of the inner components of these nuclear plants, which to me shows quite clear if they lose power for a prolonged period, we are in a very bad situation that is beyond our control...Some lands will last the longest, those far from any nuclear plants, if there is human life remaining on any remote islands they eventually be killed off as the radioactive clouds and rains reach those remote areas, its only a matter of time...I say no more than 100 years all human life will be gone because of radiation covering the earth, probably all animal life, but they will take longer to go...It would probably start within the first 3 months of indefinitely losing power...

...
it is not that bad,
where I live would be just fine (why I moved here)
lots of places would be quite livable,
most of the southern hemisphere would have no issues at all
but much of the USA would be a hell zone
 
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