[Cthulhu_]

> a new dark age is far from impossible.

Nah, it's just transformers and the power grid, that can be fixed pretty quickly - see the response after natural disasters, Ukraine's power grid being directly attacked, etc.

The only limiting factor would be the availability of spare parts and personnel.

[tree_enjoyer]

It's vastly different when it's a local outage and there's functioning equipment outside the effected area. How will communicate the needs of grid stations with no electronics, satellites, internet? How will this be coordinated? How will the trucks moving the equipment be able to refuel when the grid is down everywhere, and everyone is rushing to gas stations and clogging the freeways? How can even emergency services coordinate responses?

If transformers do blow, the big ones at substations and stations... We don't tend do keep spares of those on hand. They're very often made to order, with a multi-week lead time, and that's with a functioning power grid to produce and coordinate them, again.

[jakeinspace]

I wonder whether ships (nuclear and diesel) and diesel-electric trains might be an essential resource in slowly restarting the grid. If that equipment survives, it would be invaluable to have a few mobile GW of power to hook up to gas plants.

[delfinom]

No utility in the US has enough transformers on hand to replace them in the case that they all fail, hundreds of millions of transformers.

Even right now, disaster responses? All US mainland utilities are part of a emergency response pact (private, not government run) that obligates each other to send workers and equipment _at cost_ to each other. That's how things get fixed pretty quickly right now, they are depending on the supplies and labor of other utilities that weren't affected by the disaster.

That is far different than if the entire country is down.

[Aerbil313]

A global disaster is very different from a local one. I suggest you review your faith in The Almighty We. Civilization has never been more fragile in history than it is now.

[falconinthesun]

But there's nothing in the article to suggest that these events actually affected the entire world. Most of the analysis seems to have been carried out in the northern hemisphere. If one of these events happened, perhaps it'd affect only one hemisphere or we'd have portions of the world unaffected or partially unaffected and able to provide assistance.

[Turskarama]

Half the world is still very different to one country.

In fact, if the "once country" was _China_ (or Taiwan) it could be a civilisation ending event. We've built a house of cards, and while it does have some redundancy it's not all that resilient.

Keep in mind the modern world as it is now hasn't even existed 50 years, it has never really been tested with a truly international disaster.

[Apocryphon]

We’re just coming out of an international disaster.

[bequanna]

The “international disaster” was voluntarily shutting down production for a relatively short period.

Let’s see how we handle something real like another world war or global natural disaster.

[forgetfreeman]

You're ignoring (among other things) global food logistics. You delete the ability to produce, deliver, and distribute fuel to a hemisphere for a couple of months and the resulting disruption to agriculture guarantees a global famine.

[TechBro8615]

Would it be global or would it only be the side of the Earth that was facing the Sun at the time of impact?

[Turskarama]

It hardly matters. Pick a hemisphere, you will probably hit 2 of China, the US, and Europe. No matter what a large chunk of the worlds manufacturing is going down.

[pixl97]

Not the side, it's about the hemisphere. And in general the northern hemisphere is weaker to intrusions by powerful electromagnetic events (would have to lookup why again). It also turns out that most of the worlds population is in the northern hemisphere above the tropic of cancer.

[dash2]

Japan after WWII recovered pretty fast even though the entire world had been set back a lot. Human knowledge is the key resource and electrical surges don't wipe that.

[Turskarama]

That's a very different circumstance though. For one thing, the majority (about 3/4) of Japans manufacturing was actually still intact, it just wasn't up to the task of keeping up with Americas war machine (which it frankly wasn't even at its peak).

They also, as a key point, imported a lot during this period. That's something you can't do if everyone else has also collapsed.

[Aardwolf]

Unless it manages to kill enough hard disks in data centers to truly lose a lot of knowledge...

[dash2]

All our important knowledge for the long-run still resides in physical books and journals. At most we'd lose some e-only scientific journals.

[blacksqr]

That's like saying the only limiting factor for the Titanic reaching New York is the big hole in the side of the boat.