A CME erupts on the solar surface. If a powerful one erupted today on the solar central meridian we'd have barely 12 hours to protect whatever electronic data stored on drives, disks etc.
Most human knowledge, believe it or not, is hard won - the result of a dedicated synergy of contributions- and significant energy to either collect data, or assemble it in discrete caches. The urgency and mandate now is not only to protect the storage of historical data, e.g. the archives of sunspot observations, sunspot numbers to define solar cycles, but also incoming future data. For example, an enormous radio telescope called 'the Square Kilometer Array'- with installations in South Africa and Australia - is expected to generate 160 terabytes of raw data per second. How will it be stored, in which digital archives, and how secure will these be? Say from a central meridian coronal mass ejection with the power to obliterate digital storage on millions of hard drives, and even in the 'cloud'.
Let's face the fact that a vast amount of our knowledge - not just in astrophysics - is on paper, or worse, in electronic form which is even more vulnerable. Sadly (and pathetically) much of humanity's hard won knowledge and collective achievements are stored on volatile, vulnerable electronic media. Many visitors, when they come to our home and see my library, are amused I have such an extensive book collection. They often ask why I just don't just ditch the books and get their facsimiles in digital form.
But they usually shut up when I point out computer hard drives have 100 % failure rate and any digital item that depends on them for storage isn't going to last long.. And if they have vast gigs stored on such a device - or other, related ones (Ipads, smart phones etc.) , what then, if it's lost say in a freak electrical mishap ? Jump drives? They don't last that long either. Meanwhile, I still have college texts I've kept that are 55-56 years old. I will take those books, old and new, to digital versions, any day. (Especially given most of those texts don't even exist in digital format) One requires computers, notebooks, tablets and smart phones to access those digital works. But those tablets, smartphones, etc. are only useful so long as electricity is available or the batteries last.
In the case of the most energetic CME, the electrical grid worldwide could be down for up to a year. And getting it back would not necessarily mean retrieving any stored data or media. In addition, modern storage media are not as secure or long lasting as you might believe. Both CDs and DVDs degrade over time, and are also subject to powerful electromagnetic interference such as would be expected with an intense CME. Blue Ray discs have a 'normal' lifetime of 30-50 years. Jump drives may or may not last as long depending on the nature of the external effects to which they're subjected. No physicist I know believes any of these media - if not buried deep underground- would survive a central meridian CME's powerful ground currents and disruption..
If a CME were on its way right now we'd have no more than 12 hours to prepare. Ground currents arising from CMEs alone can melt the copper windings of transformers leading to massive power outages- such as occurred in Ottawa in 1989.. While it is true - as I noted in previous posts - that maximum flare energy (as well as that to power coronal mass ejections) is limited by the magneto-hydrodynamic potentials available on a star like the Sun, e.g.
E(t ) ≡ −(1/c) dΦ(t )/dt
Where the rate of change of magnetic flux ( Φ ) drives the change in E-field intensity. In any case, this is not really much consolation if and when a major energy burst whacks us straight on broadside with 1 million amp field-aligned induction currents that have the potential to take out all our power grids in a cascade of failures. Space weather aficionados call such maxi-catastrophes "Carrington Events" after the signature original event that transpired in September, 1859, which incepted geo-magnetic currents so large that for days telegraph operators could actually disconnect their equipment from battery power and send messages solely via the emergent "auroral currents".
In our own present situation, we've become a more vulnerable society by constructing mammoth, interlocked power grids which can crash if the right combination of factors is imposed. While we do have high voltage transformers that connect directly to the ground (zero or earth potential) to neutralize power surges from lightning strikes, these don't afford any protection against powerful geo-magnetic currents that are induced in the earth and flow upward into the grid. Then ...one such mammoth event, could spark calamity. Possibly no electric power for days, maybe longer ...over vast swatches of North America.
Back to the idea of having secure "knowledge Arks" - akin to the mythical Noah's Ark - designed to preserve species in the Flood. In this case we want knowledge Arks to preserve cumulative human knowledge from everything from CMEs, to the runaway greenhouse effect, to nuclear war and major asteroid impacts etc. Before one dismisses such concepts as too "far out" or "sci fi" let's remember we already have storage vaults, e.g. for seeds. Thus, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (also known as the 'Doomsday Vault') has been designed to preserve diverse seeds to meet whatever comes for future generations. The vault has the capacity to hold 2.5 billion seeds, but alas - even as it's designed to withstand most threats - it is ironically now in danger on account of rising temperatures in the region. (On a remote island halfway between Norway and the North pole).
Let's return to the concept of knowledge vaults for storage of human data and knowledge collected over the centuries. We ask first what other types of long term options for storage media are there?
In the examples below none are computer-based:
- Paper, if properly treated, preserved, can easily last over several human lifetimes. My father-in-law left me several volumes of literature (original works by Alfred Tennyson), including one dated from 1833. (Books printed on acid-based paper don't last more than a few decades)
-Alkaline book paper has an expected lifespan of 500 years for typical grades and more than 1,000 years for the best grades. (But only if stored in ideal conditions, of temperature, humidity)
It would appear then, that paper affords a much better means of "safety deposit box" for our knowledge. But hold strain. Despite its relatively long survival timelines, paper too must one day come to an end. What if another civilization arrived on our planet one day and came upon a storage facility, say one million years hence, well all the paper works, storage materials, would have long since become dust.
A deep underground facility (like the 'Crypt of Civilization") - beneath Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, GA. might be feasible, but that is not a true knowledge vault - only a temporal slice of one manifestation of human civilization. (According to Wikipedia, it contains numerous documents and artifacts from American daily life at the time of its creation (between 1937-40).
Is there a better solution?
Perhaps the best option from where I sit, is nanostructured glass. This was recently developed at Southampton University in the UK. It is thermally stable up to 1,000 Celsius and just one disk can hold up to 360 terabytes of data. It is reported to have the potential to last up to "13.8 billion yeas" by one report. Indeed, items like the Bible have already been embedded into it, e.g.
Of course, it is immaterial that the medium lasts 13.8 billion years - or even 5 billion - given the Earth will have been long since consumed by the Sun as a Red Giant star, having exhausted all its hydrogen fuel after another 4 b years.
To learn more about nanostructured glass storage go to the video link below:
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