In this episode I talk about how a solar flare could wipe out all digital media and how I’m preparing for the AI Apocalypse.
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And it’s not just theory. I listened to several great podcasts which just aren’t around anymore. I have some backups from the time I used to save everything to my harddrive. But some are just gone. And these days I mainly use the phone and everything gets deleted client-side. Also pretty much impossible to re-surface some niche stuff. My YouTube favorites playlist contains an ungodly amount of deleted videos. I constantly lose songs in my Tidal playlists, and several of my old CDs aren’t published on any of the music streaming services… Not really concerned with AI… But all the subscription services which constantly change things in the background aren’t all that great.
The thing about solar flares, is that the plasma takes a long time to reach earth. Maybe a half a day, maybe 1 or 2.
If you just check spaceweather.com once a day, and sign up for NOAA alerts, you’re pretty much covered and will have hours of time to react. Sure, have your stuff ready to go into something safe, but it’s not like if given even 2 or 4 hours of lead time of a huge X-class flare, most people already looking for the info can’t save themselves.
But do you genuinely believe any of these corpos, which are rabidly engaging in enshittification, to maintain solar flare preparedness systems?
Even if an intern set up an alert to warn about solar flares (and it wasn’t dismantled by an errant vibe code push), it certainly won’t be in a critical alert path.
And it absolutely won’t be in training for the employees to know what to do to harden their systems when the warning arrives. It’ll either be a crunch to shore up or no attempts at all. It’s practically an act of God, so how is the company’s problem at all?
FFS, chill out and DDG anything before you react.
Yes, because hardening since the 2003 October solar flares that caused blackouts that were expensive. Standards for the baseline engineering of a lot of power and telco systems changed then, and have remained above those standards.
So what do you do to protect against a solar flare?
IRL, unplug everything electronic and move it away from windows. Anything sensitive, wrap in a couple layers of paper or cloth, then foil. If you have a basement, put things in there.
And that’s for a solar flares so large that your power will be out for days possibly. The largest X-class flares of the 21st century were the May 2024 ones that resulted in mostly just cool auroras.
Mylar, magnetic fields, concrete/lead. basically you want to protect against ionized particles and runaway electrons, so think static/esd protection
At work, we have these giant metal mesh blankets we put over the racks when we get an alert
Got a link to those blankets?
Can’t get you links to the ones we buy, but this is close in concept at least: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805999634716.html
Cheers!
