Solar storm to hit Earth on November 30, will disrupt mobile communication

OMFG I NEED TO BUY ALL THE TOILETTE PAPER POSTHASTE

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Dude for real. A cheap bidet attachment for your toilet is the way to go.

First off, a bidet is better than toilet paper. I've been using it for years, and it cleans you 100%. I use basically 1 square of TP to dry myself after, and it's always completely clean. If you had a bird shit on your arm would you just wipe it off with paper and call it a day?

I laughed at all my friends who made fun of me for getting one on all my toilets after the great TP shortage of 2021, and a few of them ended up switching over.

For the apocalypse I have a camping toilet with a foot operated bidet. I mean I already use it when car camping, and I have a hand bidet for backpacking.

Solar panels are also in play. I also bought a freeze dryer and have about 5 deers worth of freeze dried jerky, and buy and freeze dry on sale fruit and veggies pretty regularly. I try to maintain around a 1-2 year supply of on hand food. A few steel plates, ar-15 pistol, and enough ammo to hold off the upper floor for quite a while too, but that's another conversation. I'm as ready to go as I can though, let's do this.

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- A cheap bidet attachment is only good in areas with warm water. The tap water here is ice cold in winter.
  
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- I’m thinking we set up our cooperative farm/compound in Anchorage. It’s gorgeous, and one of the places least likely to be affected by climate change disasters.
  
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- Is there a trick I’m missing? Spray my butthole for 30 seconds and I need pretty much as much TP, actually more because the first batches get wet.
  
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NOT IF I BUY IT FIRST!

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- I’ll burn your house down!
  
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This comment is quite the rabbit hole for a solar storm

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Cool. I'll go to your house.

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- TOILET PARTY PAPER, WOOOOOOOOO!
  
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More scientific source on space.com:

https://www.space.com/aurora-alert-solar-flare-eruption-cannibal-cme-november-30-december-1

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This most extreme level can cause complete HF (high frequency) radio blackouts on the entire sunlit side of the Earth, lasting for a number of hours.

So, is that really it? A HF radio blackout? I can't imagine most of us would even notice if HF were disrupted. I don't know the physics involved, but if VHF/UHF were hit it would be a much bigger problem.

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- The carrington event knocked out telegraphs all over the world in the 1800s.
  
  That’s the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. It induced so much current in the telegraph wires that they literally melted.
  
  In the 1800s that wasn’t a huge deal. But if it happened today, billions of dollars of electrical infrastructure could be rendered useless, and stockpiles of replacements are already non existent. It would take years to recover.
  
  But this is not that strong of a storm, so I doubt it’ll do anything but cause some pretty lights and maybe ground a few flights due to communications issues.
  
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I edited the post to use that URL instead, thanks!

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It says it will be "G1, which could cause an increase in auroral activity around the poles and minor fluctuations in power supplies." Explicitly says it won't disrupt mobile communications lol

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@j0hn@j0hn@lemmy.world you can swap the link out, just edit the old one into the body so the context is there for anyone talking about it

also I think the bigger news story here is an increased chance of Auroras 🌌 Take a peek outside if you live somewhere northern and clear-skied

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Why does the article include so many whatever they’re calling tweets now about aliens/conspiracy theories smh

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Yikes lol. Here is another source that is more sciency.

https://www.space.com/aurora-alert-solar-flare-eruption-cannibal-cme-november-30-december-1

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They're called Xcrements

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- Why haven’t I heard this before? We’ve had plenty of time to get this going. :p
  
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Because social media is useless now.

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- It was useless before, too, so it's just still useless.
  
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Now this will be a "Internet detox day" done right 😅

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I hope someone can ELI5. I mean, we're told that sunlight/etc we see is 8 minutes old - it took 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth. The radiation, light, etc all travel at the speed of light, neither slower nor faster.

If we can see anything on the sun, it happened 8 minutes ago. It's not like we're looking out over a Kansas field and see a tornado coming.

Further, there's this from a quick Google (while attempting to answer this question myself), from Oct 13 2023:

"How much warning do we have for solar storms? So it should come as no surprise that a team at NASA has been busily applying AI models to solar storm data to develop an early warning system that they think could give the planet about 30 minutes' notice before a potentially devastating solar storm hits a particular area."

So how are we getting a notice one or two days in advance here? Is the sun currently ejecting matter into space, intersecting the place in our orbit we'll occupy tomorrow (or the next day)? Or is this like predicting a volcanic eruption, basing it on other observable behavior?

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CMEs and solar flares do not travel at the speed of light, as they are not light

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The charged particles that affect our electrical and electronic systems have mass and therefore cannot travel at the speed of light... We can see the visible light effects of a flare and know that the slower-moving particles that will cause actual damage are on the way.

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- That was a very succinct explanation; two sentence refresher course. Thank you!
  
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I would surmise they're talking about a system to let us know where the worst effects are happening so people can prepare. This article says the fastest storms take 15-18 hours to arrive and most are slower. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections

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Yes, it's not just light, it's better to understand it as an ejection of super heated plasma. It is mass ( actually called a coronal mass ejection ) and maybe kinda comparable in ELI5 concept to a volcano eruption.

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So, the thing is we can't really predict CMEs. What we can do is observing them by satellites like SOHO or SDO (actually you can also check these data, check for jHelioViewer). While light indeed needs roughly 8 minutes to travel from the Sun, the ejected plasma is much slower than that, it travels at a comfy pace of 1000km/s or so. So it takes about a day to reach Earth (you can do the precise numbers as a homework or use Wolfram alpha to cheat), so from the observations we have roughly this time to do anything.

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ChatGPT says:

This delay is due to the fact that solar storms consist of charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) ejected from the Sun. These particles are not electromagnetic radiation (like light), so they don’t travel at the speed of light. Instead, they are propelled by the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles that flows outward from the Sun.

The solar wind travels at varying speeds, but it typically takes several days for the charged particles associated with a solar storm to travel from the Sun to Earth. The exact time depends on the speed of the solar wind and the distance between the Sun and Earth.

So, although light from the Sun reaches us in just over eight minutes, the charged particles involved in solar storms take longer to traverse the vast distance of space between the Sun and Earth.

*downvoters be like “oh no, it answered the question successfully, how can I get triggered emotionally by this?!” Like seriously guys you realize it’s basically a calculator for language? what the fuck are you hating on?

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- Excellent! Thank you!
  
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- who cares for what GPT says
  
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- Why are you using ChatGPT as a source? It doesn't know anything, it can only guess the next word in a sentence based on previous words and input. It will happily spout completely false information and nonsense as true fact. ChatGPT has no capability for learning real information, it's just a word generator.
  
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there are satellites orbiting the Sun, much as how we have satellites orbiting the Earth to help predict our weather. same principle

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I’m supposed to be on an airplane on December 1st. If the storm ends up happening on the 1st instead of the 30th, could that potentially mess with air traffic controllers and radio comms in the plane?

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Possible but extremely unlikely.

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Hey guess what

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Oh, great

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Is it only India that's impacted by these events?
Going back to the late 1900s I don't recall any solar storm/flare having an impact on US electronics/communications like every article written has made claim to.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1921_geomagnetic_storm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1972_solar_storms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Halloween_solar_storms

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- So not just India; though the odds of impact on an individual is up there with getting bit by a shark while traveling down the highway.
  
  I'm looking for something that had an impact, like the 2003 Northeast US Blackout.
  If someone had told me (back then) that it was caused by a Solar Event, I'd of believed them based on every article written up to that point.
  
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NASA and weather experts are issuing a warning about an upcoming solar storm projected to strike Earth on November 30. This relatively minor storm is anticipated to disrupt radio and GPS signals.

Meh

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We sure it didn't hit today? My GPS was going apeshit when I was driving around downtown a half hour ago.

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How will I find my way around the house without GPS!?!?!?!?!!? Says a really rich person somewhere.

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- As a scientist I’m meh, as a human being I’m enjoying the conspiracies and hype, though!
  
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