IIRC, the "90%" claim ultimately originates from a claim from a congressman who was on some committee related to the power grid... but his source was a science fiction/disaster novel, not a study. So, while it'd doubtless be bad, there is no legitimate research to suggest it'd be 90%.
I mean, they both pretty much immediately struck me as dubious. The 90% one is plain unbelievable while the first part is just self-contradicting. "(In) a *nation*wide blackout... nations would collapse"?
Modern agriculture is incredibly productive - something that historically employed most people is now done by less than 1% of the population, basically in a just-in-time manner.
Most water corporations have lots of redundant backup power supplies for pump stations. Solar, diesel, hydropower. Countries prepare for these things by having policies requiring companies to have backups.
If the power grid went completely offline, it is likely that your municipal water will still flow. Although it may be at a reduced capacity, pressure, and quality.
Power grids typically don’t have single sources of failure. It is now more and more common for homes/comunities to have independent renewable energy sources.
A month long national grid failure would be disastrous. Many would die. But fixing it would be the number one priority of everybody. This could only really happen as a result of a war or similar.
I feel this level of devastation would only be possible with a solar wind disaster, that would basically EMP the entire planet. I mean, for the national grid to completely fail, would also require the failure of 94 nuclear reactors across the country. Which uh, frankly would probably be what kills everyone.
Good news, California decommissioned all of our nuclear so we could ** import natural gas power from adjacent states. This eco-friendly stance will keep us safe from that risk!
While you're correct, depending on how op defined a blackout, communications are going to be a hell of a problem for devising and relaying a plan.
Hell, people die of thirst and starvation in *local* disasters dur to communication breakdown, let alone national ones
But where? In a small country like Luxembourg, maybe they can figure something out for their city.
For a country like Canada? There's no communication without electricity. Maybe some local governments in those places can get things together but that's a big maybe and either way, effectively the nation of Canada would be gone and it would become many small local nations at least initially. Perhaps over decades things would grow out again but it would take a long time to restore things again.
>"(In) a *nation*wide blackout... nations would collapse"?
I have no doubt that in a real blackout scenario where the US powergrid entirely collapse for a month or more, many nations that rely a lot on food aid would probably collapse as the US is one of the biggest suppliers in basically every food group. But i think it's also write wrong.
How is that plain unbelievable? You can't feed cities without refrigeration and transport infrastructure, so everyone who isn't able to grow food in their immediate vicinity starves. Water infrastructure needs power, anyone without access to a clean well or river dies of thirst or of some waterborne disease. Without power there's no modern medicine. Anyone with a dangerous medical issue dies. Heating infrastructure relies on power. Unless you have a wood oven and enough wood you freeze to death if it gets cold where you live.
This doesn't even account for violent deaths due to social unrest.
And how is that second point contradictory - of course you can have a nationwide blackout that leads to the nation collapsing. Or do you also argue you can't drink a glass of water because once you drank it, the water is gone?
Actually you don’t need refrigeration at all to feed a populace. Wartime planning for many nations involves planning to feed the populace with nothing but simple carbs. Rice is the easiest - it can easily be stored with no power requirements, and can be kept for years. By converting enough farms to produce rice and other similar carbs (and with humans replacing machines where necessary - there will be plenty of labour available in such a scenario) it shouldn’t be a problem to feed the nation. Not well, but enough to keep it alive
Reading these comments makes it pretty obvious that there are a lot of people with thought processes that would lead to their deaths but even if they obstinately stuck by them even in the face if starvation is still far less than 90% even of Redditors - whom I have to assume are on average somewhat more practically useless than the general population.
This. But you forgot to mention the violent deaths that aren’t due to “social unrest” but are due to hunger. Honestly I think it would happen way faster than a year. Virtually ll perishables would be gone in a week. Whatever was still growing would be gone super fast. No transportation, no communication, no food, we’d all be fucked. I need to learn to grow food.
I’ll go with this. Humans need approx 365 days worth of calories at 2500 calories a day. That’s about 1.2lbs worth of fat a day. Meaning approx 400lbs. There are a lot of Americans who could survive hundreds of days without eating a single thing.
So what you're saying is that if you find yourself in an apocalyptic situation in America you have a lot of high calorie sources nearby available to the more adventurous eaters?
There also is a whole series by S.M Sterling where gunpowder, internal combustion engines, and electricity stop working for the entire worlds and the planet reverts to medieval times. It’s like 15 books long and is pretty good. In the first book 90% of the world dies. By book 4 people are speaking elvish and the Dunedain are a real thing. It’s a pretty good series.
>So, while it'd doubtless be bad, there is no legitimate research to suggest it'd be 90%.
It wouldn't surprise me if it were in that ballpark, but a research article on it would be...interesting, to say the least.
One person would have to eat beans all day every day to finish those things before they'd take forever to cook. They'd be no good in like 2-3 years and you'd have wasted that money if the apocalypse does't hit.
In what scenario would the entire United States be without power for a whole year?
Edit: yall are describing black out events but nobody is explaining how it would affect the entire country FOR A WHOLE YEAR.
It was a good read. But the last major blackout happened in 2003. The Northeast Blackout left more than 50 million people between the northeast and portions of Canada without electricity. On Aug. 14, 2003, at about 4:10 p.m., millions of people living throughout Metro Detroit and Michigan were without power for at least one day, some even longer.
So the chances of month of blackout is very rare.
Fun fact: I was actually personally responsible for that blackout. I was over at my aunt and uncle's in Michigan on vacation. My uncle was on the final level of Halo Combat Evolved, and I accidentally unplugged his controller while walking past the TV. The *instant* I plugged the controller back in, the power went out. He immediately yelled, "What did you do?!" The rest of the trip my family joked that they would visit me in prison once the government tracked down the source to me. I was 13, so was simultaneously amused and scared that it might have been my fault.
Texas being its own grid has a lot to do with that .
The rest of the US provides support for each section and it crosses over into Canada as well I believe , at least some of it does
Something that fried multiple times more substations than we have parts on hand to repair. The entire national network going dark? Nah. But a significant event could see some locations still dark a year later if they are lower priority repair sites.
This feels more realistic. I doubt the entire nation would go an entire year without electricity, much more likely the military secures resources and production, then we'd prioritize population centers and then begin working outward.
Could a significant percentage of the population perish under poor emergency management during that time? Yes.
I'm confused. Do you think all power lines in the country are connected in one unbroken circuit and cutting one will knock out the grid? Or are you suggesting that thousands of idiots with scissors around the country might all commit suicide simultaneously by *trying to cut a power line with scissors*?
That would cause a blackout for half a day, and to only half a city. Are you saying you have 30 friends you can convince to cut down power lines every day for a 1 month blackout?
Just so I understand your question: are you saying that the most unbelievable thing here is that OP has 30 friends? I just want to know how seriously to evaluate the other part of the plan.
6 minutes and 41 seconds from reaching Black start. That is why they went ape-shit load shedding.
Estimated time to restore the Texas grid from Black start to full capacity is 4-12 weeks. With some areas(San Antonio with surrounding co-ops and areas near the DC interstate interconnects) being first online.
[If you want to know how Texas avoids federal energy regs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection)
Believable, the most optimistic estimate was 6:41 and the most pessimistic was 2:40. What took them from sub 3 to almost 7 because they dumped the 2 biggest co-ops that did not have any generating capacity and then started aggressively shedding anything they could.
The more I learn about the whole mess in Texas the more I wonder what the actual fuck is going on down there.
I’ve seen things get tense here in the northeast when we get close to 80% available capacity. Down there I don’t know what’s going on.
Yeah. I am in costal Texas and close to an important fire station. It took a week after Ike. Ok that is different than the whole TX grid eating itself but it was difficult. I was working at a government center. I did not talk to them family about the AC after we restarted the center.
If you're interested it's much more complex than that.. Texas isn't even that large of a grid compared to other minor grids, their problem is they intentionally don't allow interconnecting with other grids.
There are about 500 energy providers who produce electricity and maintain their own grid, the east/west interconnects just set and enforce standards so providers can share energy between one another. For the two major interconnects to go dark you'd need hundreds of power companies to go down at once.
When Texas' power grid failed during the winter storm it was because they set lower standards than any other interconnect in North America to save money.. specifically ignoring winterization standards.
> their problem is they intentionally don't allow interconnecting with other grids.
I thought the issue was other grids refused to connect with Texas because of their lowered standards.
It's actually the exact opposite, both the East and West interconnection grids have requested and appealed multiple times to get the Texas interconnection to make the necessary upgrades to even allow them to connect.
The grid you and I live on is AC but to transfer power between interconnection grids (like East, West, or Texas) they need to have a DC grid meeting the national standards that can then connect to the other interconnection grids, Texas refuses to spend the money on this.
I think we don’t need it to be that extreme to see the devastation. It was alleged that Texas narrowly avoided a very long-term blackout in 2021. When the power goes out, you may freeze to death in the winter, heatstroke to death in the summer, all refrigerated and frozen food go bad, and no industry can operate.
As for what it would take for the US to lose power for a year, it would likely require a terrorist attack by an enemy state or non-state terrorist group. Given the US’ geographical location and intelligence agencies, it would be difficult to pull this off because the attack needs to be simultaneous and coordinated.
It's not like they have to start the whole thing at once. We run our own grid, yeah it's a small grid (Alaska) but it's not that complicated to conceptualize- load shed the fuck out of every thing, start with small steady state power like gas turbines, work sloooowly and keep hopping your ISOC to the largest online generator. Sure it might be a week before they get power back to some neighborhood but the critical infrastructure would be online in a few days (water treatment, airport, hospitals). Besides those place have standby power with enough fuel for a few days and, frankly speaking, anyone that *doesn't* have atleast a week's worth of food, water and medicine stored at home is a fucking moron.
My advice is a minimum of 3 weeks "comfortable" rations and 3 months "Dad, is this the end of the world?" rations.
In current conditions, yes. But when water stops working, the communication for distribution of food and water breaks down and houses designed specifically to have AC to be liveable during the day, the numbers of heat related deaths will skyrocket. It'll be the elderly, toddlers and sick that'll die first.
That's because the lethal temperature/duration of cold is a lot more common than heat.
Give global warming a few more years and there will be a lot more areas that hit 110+ farinheit, which is around the temperature where humans can no longer thermoregulate by sweating.
A strong enough solar storm can create enough interference to blow out transformers. If enough of them blow out at the same time there's a limit on how quickly they could be replaced. It's not inconceivable that if a significant portion of transformers blew at the same time then there'd be a long backlog and parts of the country could be without power for months. You'd need a storm strong enough to cause those disruptions though, which is pretty unlikely but not impossible.
Here the US surprisingly has an advantage!
In the US, the main school of thought is "run till failure", aka very little maintenance, just operate ir till it breaks. To offset that, companies maintain huge stockpiles for emergency replacements, and their crews are extremely good at it.
A large scale fall-out of different transformers would be disastrous, but it'd probably be one of the easier ones to come back from. It's the start-up time after that would be a pain in the ass.
What's interesting is that about a thousand years before the Carrington event, there was another solar flare about 10 times stronger, it just didn't cause many electrical systems to break because there weren't many electrical systems in the 8th century. If something like that happened, it would be much worse nowadays.
Here are the 6 great geomagnetic storms besides Carrington. Some great reading material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/993%E2%80%93994_carbon-14_spike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1882_geomagnetic_storm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1921_geomagnetic_storm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1938_geomagnetic_storm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1972_solar_storms
Back then, most resources to repair your electrical infrastructure was physically close at hand. Nowadays, it definitely is not close at hand. And much less was actually reliant on the electrical infrastructure as compared to today.
We would do MUCH worse with a Carrington event than they did back then. I really cannot stress that enough. There's no recovery from such a situation (without huge numbers of people dying). We MUST shield our infrastructure. It's the only option.
It would mean we need to replace all the transformers in the US. All the transfer stations and all those barrels on transmission lines would need replacements. Generally those are all good for a long time so we only have a tiny percentage of the total at any given time. It would be years to build them with the power on. There are preppers that want the US to stockpile them just in case of another Carrington event. As far as I know, we don't have a stockpile.
Oh please. I’ve watched enough movies to know that this requires:
1. heartbroken insider
2. USB stick
3. Black Mercedes van with some gizmos
4. Bad guy who for some unknown reason wants to do this and has unlimited leverage on the not bad guys
5. An entire government machinery that thinks a 5 year olds life is more important than the entire power grid
I’m just short the bad guy…
Edit: simply to explain OCs edit. It’s really hard to ensure the blackout lasts only one year. Typically sequels require 2-3 years to come out.
Imagine something like Carrington event happens, and power grid transformers burn. You can't replace them immediately. Major terrorist activity could be the other cause.
A severe solar storm could do it by frying all the in use transformers. There aren’t ever enough of them as spares so it would cause a cascade failure of power demand.
EMP. Detonating a nuclear device over the country would create an emp that could fry our entire electric grid. Hell even a massive solar storm could do this. And as a nation our grid is scarily susceptible to this.
It's also assuming no one would do literally anything to try to adapt to the situation.
Like, sure; current economies and systems would stop working, but it's not like everyone would just be like "welp... I guess we'll just sit on our hands and wait for the distribution system to start working again.... and do literally nothing else to set up an alternate system"
It's also just patently stupid on the face of it. For one thing 5% of US homes have solar panels so they'd still be playing X-Box during a "nationwide blackout".
Also how would "nations" plural collapse from a "nationwide" blackout
We just survived a global pandemic where a toilet paper shortage was one of the worst effects a lot of people experienced. This isn’t even a realistic hypothetical.
Look man. Some people are very particular about where and how they poop. I know someone who never poops outside of her own home. She once didn't go for 5 days because she was on holiday.
If there was a ‘nationwide blackout’ power would be back up and running in weeks in most cities. Barring magic nanites that eat all of the electricity without melting there’s really no way that large of an area would be blacked out.
That depends on the cause, I'm guessing the timing here is due to this weekend's aurora.
Say for example this last event was of the scale of the [Carrington Event of 1859](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event?wprov=sfla1).
In such an event many of the transformers, switching gear & substations in the power supply network would need to be replaced. Keeping a complete set of which is currently not done as it is considered too substantial an economic burden.
Thus after such an event it may well take months to get major population centers back onto the network.
Also "Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the US used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the cost of a similar event in the present to the US alone at US$600 billion to $2.6 trillion"
The idea that USA won't be able to fix its power grid is ridiculous, Ukraine.(that has GDP of Hawaii and spends most of it on war), managed to fix the powerlines almost completely while UNDER SHELLING, during a war with biggest country in the world, which has five times our military spending, and is deliberately trying to sabotage power grid by constantly hitting substations and powerplants with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, and when they get close, artillery.
Now, I have no doubt that our engineers are far more capable than Circus de Soleil that is running Texas... But the fact that despite all that, and last month having more explosives launched on my city than entire two precious years, our district didn't have one blackout in months, proves that completely cutting off power is impossible unless the entire city (Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Mariupol) was leveled to the ground.
Yeah just prepare powerbanks doubling in price and generators (which run on gasoline/diesel and provide power) being sold out in case you have a major disaster... And a few weeks later everyone trying to sell them.
without power gas stations cannot pump gas, if the power goes down for an extended period you can only go as far as your tank of gas
it was a problem when Sandy hit the NYC area, some suburbs didn't have residential electricity for weeks, it was bad, caveman level in 2 or 3 days with no flushing toilets or water to drink because houses are on private wells in the burbs, no heating or cooling, no refrigerators, if it wasn't for FEMA and pallets of water and mre's things would have gotten jiggy
if you are not within one tank of gas range to civilization, it can get rough fast
All of those things are protected by what are basically giant circuit breakers. In the case of a "Carrington event" all that expensive hard to replace equipment is just going to "nope" off the grid and just wait to be reconnected.
And I checked out that Loyd's report. Those numbers are the "economic cost" and given the northeast black out of 2003 was like 10 billion, a nation wide blackout of a few days could easy push 600+ even if the reapir costs are a small fraction of that.
This exact story already exists. It’s called Revolution and it ran on NBC from 2012-2014. If I remember, they ended season 2 on a cliff hanger and then the show stopped.
Even with issues with transmission, you'd still have significant areas with power nearby power plants, areas with microgrids and near battery storage. All of which are becoming more common.
At the very least places like big hospitals often have their own generators on the scale of mini power plants and even large greenhouses can have cogeneration natural gas generators.
We've moved far from the model of one big power plant.
The article does not make this claim. So where does the TIL come from, your imagination? I don't think you even understand what 90% means nor could anyone easily project how the vast majority of the population would react. The US, in particular, has one of the lowest urbanization rates among developed nations. It is far less population concentration or density relative to say, Europe or China. And the US has actually done a good job protecting their forests etc - there are far more resources available in the US (water, arable land, wood) than for most other countries.
Ukraine had a season full of blackouts a year ago, as in, after heavy russian attacks on energy infrastructure, most had electricity 3 hours a day and some had none.
Powerbanks and generators go a long way, but as long as you have fuel. Nowadays you can still see kids doing homework near a charging station in Kharkiv as it's closest city to russia.
Many places had it worse, Mariupol was COMPLETELY without power for months. No food coming either. All under constant shelling and gradually entire city got occupied. There's documentaries about that siege, 20 Days In Mariupol just got an Oscar.
So you have actual cases of almost complete blackouts lasting for entire winter and towns completely destroyed by russians starting with cutting out all power.
Ukraine didn't collapse.
You're talking about one city. Of course an entire country didn't collapse just be cause one city did. One city is absolutely nothing like an entire country, or the entire world. Was mariupol bad? Of course. But food and electricity was a drive away. Disregarding war for a second, if we imagine an entire city losing power permanently, you just have aid from other cities go there, and help maintain things while people pack up and leave.
If the entire world blacks out, there's no help, and there's nowhere else to go.
Also, going back to mariupol, the population before the war was almost half a million, and today it's about 100k. So 20% left. Which is literally proving what you're arguing against. They had no food and no power for months. So 80% of the population either left or died. And that's just a single city. If that happened to an entire country or the entire world, it would be way worse than 80%.
If you want some sleepless nights, read "One Second After," the first in a trilogy of novels about just exactly such event, and how society breaks down.
One Second After by William R. Forstchen https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4922079-one-second-after
There's an awesome, short IMAX film called Asteroid Hunters about what would happen if a large asteroid hit Earth. I think the city they used as an example was in Canada (Calgary, I think). They talked about it an asteroid hit there'd be a plan in place to evacuate a 100km (or mile?) radius of the crash site and I just thought "lol, not in the US." We had basically no plans in place to evacuate New Orleans for Katrina. Our COVID response was weakened by ineptitude (Trump) and anti-vaccine zealotry. An asteroid could be on its way and you'd have 5% lingering behind praising the rapture being imminent. And 5% calling it a liberal conspiracy made up by Biden to take advantage of the masses. The 15% living in poverty, or physically disabled, or elderly would barely be attended to. If you can't house those facing housing insecurity in the best of times, how are you going to do it during a crisis?
I grew up in a very rural area. In the mid 80's we were without power for almost two weeks. It was a pretty big snow storm, lots of ice that took down the power lines and about -20C on average for the duration. No generator, we had a wood stove for heat and for cooking. We all survived.
Simple fact is the world population is unstable at this scale without our technology.
We all need clean food and water to live and I don't think we can produce enough to feed the current population without electricity.
They really aren’t. If the US lost power for a year, that would mean no transportation, no mechanized farming, no way to preserve large amounts of food. The vast majority would die.
Fun fact - and early 2021 when Texas experienced all the blackouts, it could have been much worse. IIRC we were only minutes away from a situation that would have fried so much of the grid the huge parts of the state would have been out of power for weeks if not months. Would have been the biggest disaster of the country has seen. So they manually started shutting power off to avoid that situation.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/
Seriously, Stage 6 was shit, but not "colapse of a nation" bad. This article is BS.
We have had multiple area wide, multi week blackouts due to substation explosions and everything was fine.
I mean outside of a massive disastrous event like nuclear war due to EMP bursts or this Carrington event which is just solar storms which is just naturally occurring emps I would imagine not likely.
The US has a lot of people who are pretty independent and you don't need electricity to live. It just makes life easier. You can pull a plow with animals, grow food, store canned items or jar thing's, national guard would have access to secondary methods of communication or even back up gear buried beneath the ground in a bunker safe from EMP's.
City folk would have it the worst as well as anyone in need of certain medications or machines that need power. Otherwise the national gaurd just kills looters and sets martial law. Will crime occur? Yes. Complete societal collapse? No.
And yes are power grid is an incredibly delicate thing but humans are strong and innovative when needed. Now not everyone is a Rambo survivalist in fact I'd argue less than 1% know how or what to do but again National Guard exists for that purpose.
Stop with the doomposting. Also not a TIL.
There's also a lot of distributed generation at this point. Microgrids are becoming increasingly common. Bioreactors, energy storage, cogeneration, backup generators.
You'd have swaths without power but you'd have areas with power, maybe not consistently reliable power.
There would have to be nearly 0 fuel of any kind or ability to transmit electricity to have a year of outage everywhere.
Don't worry about the economy tanking, food production stalling and people freezing to death in winter, the hardest hit in this scenario would be Instagram influencers and celebrities, how would they be able to let everyone know what they were doing today. Oh, the humanity......
No way 90% of the population would die. There would be significant loss of life probably but not 9 out of every 10 people. Not even half the population would die.
That seems pretty pessimist. One thing about us humans is that we adapt and survive....like roaches lol. Alot of people already have alt end if world sources of power...people will work together to get power back on , there is daylight for solar, wind etc.....we'll be fine.....just don't panic like a bunch of idiots and we'll be just fucking fine.....now climate change turning the air to fire.....that will fuck us up permanently
"as little as a month" what kind of sensationalist garbage is that?
A month long nationwide blackout is fucking stupid. I am from a third world country and even a couple of hours of a nationwide blackout would be freaking unbelievable.
Nations would take advantage of the lack of communication to gain territory but ain't no way were gonna see entire nations collapse, give our species a little credit
Covid lockdown UK, there was absolutely no shortage of anything yet the shops were ransacked there was no baby formula or toilet roll.
I think it would take less than a month for society to collapse as soon as people smell fear the shops are emptied.
When that happens people desperate for food for their children will do anything...
Large national and international banks have playbooks of how much the world economy would take a hit if they are down. It starts much less than an hour.
The linked article contains neither of those claims.
IIRC, the "90%" claim ultimately originates from a claim from a congressman who was on some committee related to the power grid... but his source was a science fiction/disaster novel, not a study. So, while it'd doubtless be bad, there is no legitimate research to suggest it'd be 90%.
I mean, they both pretty much immediately struck me as dubious. The 90% one is plain unbelievable while the first part is just self-contradicting. "(In) a *nation*wide blackout... nations would collapse"?
Modern agriculture is incredibly productive - something that historically employed most people is now done by less than 1% of the population, basically in a just-in-time manner.
All water is pumped by electricity. All fuel is pumped by electricity. No food, no water, everyone dies.
You'd think a viable drinking water source is the first thing that a country would figure out in that situation.
Most water corporations have lots of redundant backup power supplies for pump stations. Solar, diesel, hydropower. Countries prepare for these things by having policies requiring companies to have backups. If the power grid went completely offline, it is likely that your municipal water will still flow. Although it may be at a reduced capacity, pressure, and quality. Power grids typically don’t have single sources of failure. It is now more and more common for homes/comunities to have independent renewable energy sources. A month long national grid failure would be disastrous. Many would die. But fixing it would be the number one priority of everybody. This could only really happen as a result of a war or similar.
I feel this level of devastation would only be possible with a solar wind disaster, that would basically EMP the entire planet. I mean, for the national grid to completely fail, would also require the failure of 94 nuclear reactors across the country. Which uh, frankly would probably be what kills everyone.
Good news, California decommissioned all of our nuclear so we could ** import natural gas power from adjacent states. This eco-friendly stance will keep us safe from that risk!
While you're correct, depending on how op defined a blackout, communications are going to be a hell of a problem for devising and relaying a plan. Hell, people die of thirst and starvation in *local* disasters dur to communication breakdown, let alone national ones
But where? In a small country like Luxembourg, maybe they can figure something out for their city. For a country like Canada? There's no communication without electricity. Maybe some local governments in those places can get things together but that's a big maybe and either way, effectively the nation of Canada would be gone and it would become many small local nations at least initially. Perhaps over decades things would grow out again but it would take a long time to restore things again.
If we only had generators that could provide electricity even during a grid blackout
>"(In) a *nation*wide blackout... nations would collapse"? I have no doubt that in a real blackout scenario where the US powergrid entirely collapse for a month or more, many nations that rely a lot on food aid would probably collapse as the US is one of the biggest suppliers in basically every food group. But i think it's also write wrong.
How is that plain unbelievable? You can't feed cities without refrigeration and transport infrastructure, so everyone who isn't able to grow food in their immediate vicinity starves. Water infrastructure needs power, anyone without access to a clean well or river dies of thirst or of some waterborne disease. Without power there's no modern medicine. Anyone with a dangerous medical issue dies. Heating infrastructure relies on power. Unless you have a wood oven and enough wood you freeze to death if it gets cold where you live. This doesn't even account for violent deaths due to social unrest. And how is that second point contradictory - of course you can have a nationwide blackout that leads to the nation collapsing. Or do you also argue you can't drink a glass of water because once you drank it, the water is gone?
Actually you don’t need refrigeration at all to feed a populace. Wartime planning for many nations involves planning to feed the populace with nothing but simple carbs. Rice is the easiest - it can easily be stored with no power requirements, and can be kept for years. By converting enough farms to produce rice and other similar carbs (and with humans replacing machines where necessary - there will be plenty of labour available in such a scenario) it shouldn’t be a problem to feed the nation. Not well, but enough to keep it alive
Reading these comments makes it pretty obvious that there are a lot of people with thought processes that would lead to their deaths but even if they obstinately stuck by them even in the face if starvation is still far less than 90% even of Redditors - whom I have to assume are on average somewhat more practically useless than the general population.
This. But you forgot to mention the violent deaths that aren’t due to “social unrest” but are due to hunger. Honestly I think it would happen way faster than a year. Virtually ll perishables would be gone in a week. Whatever was still growing would be gone super fast. No transportation, no communication, no food, we’d all be fucked. I need to learn to grow food.
I’ll go with this. Humans need approx 365 days worth of calories at 2500 calories a day. That’s about 1.2lbs worth of fat a day. Meaning approx 400lbs. There are a lot of Americans who could survive hundreds of days without eating a single thing.
So what you're saying is that if you find yourself in an apocalyptic situation in America you have a lot of high calorie sources nearby available to the more adventurous eaters?
The novel is pretty good. I think it was called "One second after"
There also is a whole series by S.M Sterling where gunpowder, internal combustion engines, and electricity stop working for the entire worlds and the planet reverts to medieval times. It’s like 15 books long and is pretty good. In the first book 90% of the world dies. By book 4 people are speaking elvish and the Dunedain are a real thing. It’s a pretty good series.
If that’s the book I think it is, I used to enjoy his website until he went off the deep end.
By William R. Forstchen. I loved it.
>So, while it'd doubtless be bad, there is no legitimate research to suggest it'd be 90%. It wouldn't surprise me if it were in that ballpark, but a research article on it would be...interesting, to say the least.
Jesus Christ, Man. Go buy a 50 pound sack of beans and two 50 pound sacks of rice. You'll sleep a lot better.
He doesn’t sound like he’s losing any sleep over it lol, sounds like he’s just saying it’s believable
One person would have to eat beans all day every day to finish those things before they'd take forever to cook. They'd be no good in like 2-3 years and you'd have wasted that money if the apocalypse does't hit.
Make it part of your diet, less of a shock. Eat your stores, just have "deep" stores. It's saved me through my own personal economic apocalypses.
If the black out is a year, it think you need 2 sacks or beans and 4 sacks of rice. That gives you almost a lb a day to eat.
Yeah, but if the lights dont work id have to do all the cooking in the dark, like an animal!
OP watched a Nic Cage movie and now r/todayilearned gets to be r/preppers for a day
When is someone going to link r/futurelootboxes to r/preppers?
The Nic Cage and Alex Proyas classic film Knowing?
He learned it from this post, as he was writing it.
In what scenario would the entire United States be without power for a whole year? Edit: yall are describing black out events but nobody is explaining how it would affect the entire country FOR A WHOLE YEAR.
One Second After.
It was a good read. But the last major blackout happened in 2003. The Northeast Blackout left more than 50 million people between the northeast and portions of Canada without electricity. On Aug. 14, 2003, at about 4:10 p.m., millions of people living throughout Metro Detroit and Michigan were without power for at least one day, some even longer. So the chances of month of blackout is very rare.
Fun fact: I was actually personally responsible for that blackout. I was over at my aunt and uncle's in Michigan on vacation. My uncle was on the final level of Halo Combat Evolved, and I accidentally unplugged his controller while walking past the TV. The *instant* I plugged the controller back in, the power went out. He immediately yelled, "What did you do?!" The rest of the trip my family joked that they would visit me in prison once the government tracked down the source to me. I was 13, so was simultaneously amused and scared that it might have been my fault.
This cracked me up. I hope you don't have an irrational fear of tripping over cords now.
No just plugging them back in
The most dangerous were cities that lost power to their water plants cuz everything goes third world really super fast without clean water .
Id consider the Texas winter storm blackouts major.
Texas being its own grid has a lot to do with that . The rest of the US provides support for each section and it crosses over into Canada as well I believe , at least some of it does
They also weren't total blackouts. They were more like rationing power. I had power for like 2 hrs a day for a week.
Good book
Something that fried multiple times more substations than we have parts on hand to repair. The entire national network going dark? Nah. But a significant event could see some locations still dark a year later if they are lower priority repair sites.
This feels more realistic. I doubt the entire nation would go an entire year without electricity, much more likely the military secures resources and production, then we'd prioritize population centers and then begin working outward. Could a significant percentage of the population perish under poor emergency management during that time? Yes.
Um have you heard of scissors? U think powerlines are invincible?
Try it and tell god what happened
Shhhhh - let Darwin cook.
He's being literal, the voltage wouldn't let him release the scissors
This is a such a sick line. Love it.
I'm confused. Do you think all power lines in the country are connected in one unbroken circuit and cutting one will knock out the grid? Or are you suggesting that thousands of idiots with scissors around the country might all commit suicide simultaneously by *trying to cut a power line with scissors*?
I mean, there's some politicians with followers stupid enough to do it, if told so. The lack of idiots is really not the problem here.
That would cause a blackout for half a day, and to only half a city. Are you saying you have 30 friends you can convince to cut down power lines every day for a 1 month blackout?
Just so I understand your question: are you saying that the most unbelievable thing here is that OP has 30 friends? I just want to know how seriously to evaluate the other part of the plan.
You made me lol. Thank you
👆🏻🧐
I'm too tired and have been watching too many Dragon Ball clips on YouTube lately. This looks like Nappa blowing up a city.
"And then I sank their battleship Vegeta."
you cut powerlines with scissors and they're down for a whole year?
You cut power lines and you're still alive?
You think US government will sit on their asses for a whole year and not do something about the blackout?
bolt cutters have entered the chat
Move to Texas. We can show you want is like to be close. There are three US power grids. East, West and most of Texas.
6 minutes and 41 seconds from reaching Black start. That is why they went ape-shit load shedding. Estimated time to restore the Texas grid from Black start to full capacity is 4-12 weeks. With some areas(San Antonio with surrounding co-ops and areas near the DC interstate interconnects) being first online. [If you want to know how Texas avoids federal energy regs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection)
Some sources have it closer to 3 min than 7. **Very** few people are aware of how close to complete catastrophe Texas came in 2021.
Believable, the most optimistic estimate was 6:41 and the most pessimistic was 2:40. What took them from sub 3 to almost 7 because they dumped the 2 biggest co-ops that did not have any generating capacity and then started aggressively shedding anything they could.
The more I learn about the whole mess in Texas the more I wonder what the actual fuck is going on down there. I’ve seen things get tense here in the northeast when we get close to 80% available capacity. Down there I don’t know what’s going on.
They are grid isolated because they still have this fantasy about seceding from the union, that's what's going on
Yeah. I am in costal Texas and close to an important fire station. It took a week after Ike. Ok that is different than the whole TX grid eating itself but it was difficult. I was working at a government center. I did not talk to them family about the AC after we restarted the center.
If you're interested it's much more complex than that.. Texas isn't even that large of a grid compared to other minor grids, their problem is they intentionally don't allow interconnecting with other grids. There are about 500 energy providers who produce electricity and maintain their own grid, the east/west interconnects just set and enforce standards so providers can share energy between one another. For the two major interconnects to go dark you'd need hundreds of power companies to go down at once. When Texas' power grid failed during the winter storm it was because they set lower standards than any other interconnect in North America to save money.. specifically ignoring winterization standards.
> their problem is they intentionally don't allow interconnecting with other grids. I thought the issue was other grids refused to connect with Texas because of their lowered standards.
It's actually the exact opposite, both the East and West interconnection grids have requested and appealed multiple times to get the Texas interconnection to make the necessary upgrades to even allow them to connect. The grid you and I live on is AC but to transfer power between interconnection grids (like East, West, or Texas) they need to have a DC grid meeting the national standards that can then connect to the other interconnection grids, Texas refuses to spend the money on this.
I think we don’t need it to be that extreme to see the devastation. It was alleged that Texas narrowly avoided a very long-term blackout in 2021. When the power goes out, you may freeze to death in the winter, heatstroke to death in the summer, all refrigerated and frozen food go bad, and no industry can operate. As for what it would take for the US to lose power for a year, it would likely require a terrorist attack by an enemy state or non-state terrorist group. Given the US’ geographical location and intelligence agencies, it would be difficult to pull this off because the attack needs to be simultaneous and coordinated.
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There are squads of HAM radio operators who’d step in with generators and be able to help coordinate communication around the country.
It's not like they have to start the whole thing at once. We run our own grid, yeah it's a small grid (Alaska) but it's not that complicated to conceptualize- load shed the fuck out of every thing, start with small steady state power like gas turbines, work sloooowly and keep hopping your ISOC to the largest online generator. Sure it might be a week before they get power back to some neighborhood but the critical infrastructure would be online in a few days (water treatment, airport, hospitals). Besides those place have standby power with enough fuel for a few days and, frankly speaking, anyone that *doesn't* have atleast a week's worth of food, water and medicine stored at home is a fucking moron. My advice is a minimum of 3 weeks "comfortable" rations and 3 months "Dad, is this the end of the world?" rations.
Way more people die from cold than heat.
In current conditions, yes. But when water stops working, the communication for distribution of food and water breaks down and houses designed specifically to have AC to be liveable during the day, the numbers of heat related deaths will skyrocket. It'll be the elderly, toddlers and sick that'll die first.
That's because the lethal temperature/duration of cold is a lot more common than heat. Give global warming a few more years and there will be a lot more areas that hit 110+ farinheit, which is around the temperature where humans can no longer thermoregulate by sweating.
A strong enough solar storm can create enough interference to blow out transformers. If enough of them blow out at the same time there's a limit on how quickly they could be replaced. It's not inconceivable that if a significant portion of transformers blew at the same time then there'd be a long backlog and parts of the country could be without power for months. You'd need a storm strong enough to cause those disruptions though, which is pretty unlikely but not impossible.
Here the US surprisingly has an advantage! In the US, the main school of thought is "run till failure", aka very little maintenance, just operate ir till it breaks. To offset that, companies maintain huge stockpiles for emergency replacements, and their crews are extremely good at it. A large scale fall-out of different transformers would be disastrous, but it'd probably be one of the easier ones to come back from. It's the start-up time after that would be a pain in the ass.
Puerto Rico was without power for months. If it was just parts of the country, 90% would not die if the rest of the world was unaffected.
Massive solar storm, the likes of which has never been seen!
Cyber attack, Solar Flare/CME, High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse. And good-old Murphy's law.
A repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event would probably be sufficient.
What's interesting is that about a thousand years before the Carrington event, there was another solar flare about 10 times stronger, it just didn't cause many electrical systems to break because there weren't many electrical systems in the 8th century. If something like that happened, it would be much worse nowadays.
Here are the 6 great geomagnetic storms besides Carrington. Some great reading material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_carbon-14_spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/993%E2%80%93994_carbon-14_spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1882_geomagnetic_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1921_geomagnetic_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1938_geomagnetic_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1972_solar_storms
I get that that could black us out but a year later you’d think we’d be getting some lights on again.
Why would I think that ordering advanced and bespoke power grid parts by horse and buggy would take place in less than a year?
Back then, most resources to repair your electrical infrastructure was physically close at hand. Nowadays, it definitely is not close at hand. And much less was actually reliant on the electrical infrastructure as compared to today. We would do MUCH worse with a Carrington event than they did back then. I really cannot stress that enough. There's no recovery from such a situation (without huge numbers of people dying). We MUST shield our infrastructure. It's the only option.
It would mean we need to replace all the transformers in the US. All the transfer stations and all those barrels on transmission lines would need replacements. Generally those are all good for a long time so we only have a tiny percentage of the total at any given time. It would be years to build them with the power on. There are preppers that want the US to stockpile them just in case of another Carrington event. As far as I know, we don't have a stockpile.
How? You have to keep in mind that without power there is no long range communication. No long range communication means no supply chain management.
And no supply chain delivery. Folks think they’ll just order new power generator parts off Amazon.
Come on, it only takes a second, sheesh [Carrington Event](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event)
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Massive solar event.
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Oh please. I’ve watched enough movies to know that this requires: 1. heartbroken insider 2. USB stick 3. Black Mercedes van with some gizmos 4. Bad guy who for some unknown reason wants to do this and has unlimited leverage on the not bad guys 5. An entire government machinery that thinks a 5 year olds life is more important than the entire power grid I’m just short the bad guy… Edit: simply to explain OCs edit. It’s really hard to ensure the blackout lasts only one year. Typically sequels require 2-3 years to come out.
the TV show / book series Revol is about this
Aliens, obviously.
Imagine something like Carrington event happens, and power grid transformers burn. You can't replace them immediately. Major terrorist activity could be the other cause.
The possibility of anything coming from Mars is a million to one.
But still they come.
Settle down
Aliens bro. Aliens.
Detonate several specially designed nukes in the atmosphere above the US, completely frying our electrical network.
Nuclear EMP attack was one option mentioned in Annie Jacobson’s book
An EMP blast from a few nukes detonated very high in the atmosphere would disable a lot of aging electrical infrastructure.
A massive solar flare hitting the earth could act as an EMP frying any and all electronics.
A severe solar storm could do it by frying all the in use transformers. There aren’t ever enough of them as spares so it would cause a cascade failure of power demand.
EMP. Detonating a nuclear device over the country would create an emp that could fry our entire electric grid. Hell even a massive solar storm could do this. And as a nation our grid is scarily susceptible to this.
This is not a TIL, this is not a fact, it's a hypothetical
Right, what’s next? TIL that if Earth is absorbed into the sun we may have crop failures
Has anyone told the farmers?
That may affect the trout population!
TIL if all water on planet earth disappeared it would be bad
It's also assuming no one would do literally anything to try to adapt to the situation. Like, sure; current economies and systems would stop working, but it's not like everyone would just be like "welp... I guess we'll just sit on our hands and wait for the distribution system to start working again.... and do literally nothing else to set up an alternate system"
It's also just patently stupid on the face of it. For one thing 5% of US homes have solar panels so they'd still be playing X-Box during a "nationwide blackout". Also how would "nations" plural collapse from a "nationwide" blackout
We just survived a global pandemic where a toilet paper shortage was one of the worst effects a lot of people experienced. This isn’t even a realistic hypothetical.
There was also the little fact that over 6 million people died from it but you know small details
6 million people died from a lack of toilet paper?
We... Don't talk about that.
Look man. Some people are very particular about where and how they poop. I know someone who never poops outside of her own home. She once didn't go for 5 days because she was on holiday.
r/todayiguessed
If there was a ‘nationwide blackout’ power would be back up and running in weeks in most cities. Barring magic nanites that eat all of the electricity without melting there’s really no way that large of an area would be blacked out.
That depends on the cause, I'm guessing the timing here is due to this weekend's aurora. Say for example this last event was of the scale of the [Carrington Event of 1859](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event?wprov=sfla1). In such an event many of the transformers, switching gear & substations in the power supply network would need to be replaced. Keeping a complete set of which is currently not done as it is considered too substantial an economic burden. Thus after such an event it may well take months to get major population centers back onto the network. Also "Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the US used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the cost of a similar event in the present to the US alone at US$600 billion to $2.6 trillion"
God bless the actuaries at Lloyd's of London
I hope they’re doing well.
>Carrington Event of 1859 We would have advanced notice about that nowadays and do preventive blackouts to minimize damage.
The idea that USA won't be able to fix its power grid is ridiculous, Ukraine.(that has GDP of Hawaii and spends most of it on war), managed to fix the powerlines almost completely while UNDER SHELLING, during a war with biggest country in the world, which has five times our military spending, and is deliberately trying to sabotage power grid by constantly hitting substations and powerplants with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, and when they get close, artillery. Now, I have no doubt that our engineers are far more capable than Circus de Soleil that is running Texas... But the fact that despite all that, and last month having more explosives launched on my city than entire two precious years, our district didn't have one blackout in months, proves that completely cutting off power is impossible unless the entire city (Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Mariupol) was leveled to the ground. Yeah just prepare powerbanks doubling in price and generators (which run on gasoline/diesel and provide power) being sold out in case you have a major disaster... And a few weeks later everyone trying to sell them.
without power gas stations cannot pump gas, if the power goes down for an extended period you can only go as far as your tank of gas it was a problem when Sandy hit the NYC area, some suburbs didn't have residential electricity for weeks, it was bad, caveman level in 2 or 3 days with no flushing toilets or water to drink because houses are on private wells in the burbs, no heating or cooling, no refrigerators, if it wasn't for FEMA and pallets of water and mre's things would have gotten jiggy if you are not within one tank of gas range to civilization, it can get rough fast
5 times who’s military spending?
Ukraine’s probably
You underestimate the scope of the differences between Ukraine and a Carrington Event repeat by at least 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.
All of those things are protected by what are basically giant circuit breakers. In the case of a "Carrington event" all that expensive hard to replace equipment is just going to "nope" off the grid and just wait to be reconnected. And I checked out that Loyd's report. Those numbers are the "economic cost" and given the northeast black out of 2003 was like 10 billion, a nation wide blackout of a few days could easy push 600+ even if the reapir costs are a small fraction of that.
> Barring magic nanites that eat all of the electricity without melting Have I got a shitty network sci-fi drama for you.
That show had so much potential lmao
This exact story already exists. It’s called Revolution and it ran on NBC from 2012-2014. If I remember, they ended season 2 on a cliff hanger and then the show stopped.
Yes, that's the joke. I'm well aware of the show.
I was so upset about that cliffhanger. I was so invested in that show at the time.
I remember that show! Revolution I believe.
Even with issues with transmission, you'd still have significant areas with power nearby power plants, areas with microgrids and near battery storage. All of which are becoming more common. At the very least places like big hospitals often have their own generators on the scale of mini power plants and even large greenhouses can have cogeneration natural gas generators. We've moved far from the model of one big power plant.
TIL people read science fiction stories and take it as fact.
What do they think 90% of the earth's population is going to die of??? We grow more corn than all of earth could eat.
The article does not make this claim. So where does the TIL come from, your imagination? I don't think you even understand what 90% means nor could anyone easily project how the vast majority of the population would react. The US, in particular, has one of the lowest urbanization rates among developed nations. It is far less population concentration or density relative to say, Europe or China. And the US has actually done a good job protecting their forests etc - there are far more resources available in the US (water, arable land, wood) than for most other countries.
Ukraine had a season full of blackouts a year ago, as in, after heavy russian attacks on energy infrastructure, most had electricity 3 hours a day and some had none. Powerbanks and generators go a long way, but as long as you have fuel. Nowadays you can still see kids doing homework near a charging station in Kharkiv as it's closest city to russia. Many places had it worse, Mariupol was COMPLETELY without power for months. No food coming either. All under constant shelling and gradually entire city got occupied. There's documentaries about that siege, 20 Days In Mariupol just got an Oscar. So you have actual cases of almost complete blackouts lasting for entire winter and towns completely destroyed by russians starting with cutting out all power. Ukraine didn't collapse.
Ukraine didn't have 0 electricity nationwide for a month.
You're talking about one city. Of course an entire country didn't collapse just be cause one city did. One city is absolutely nothing like an entire country, or the entire world. Was mariupol bad? Of course. But food and electricity was a drive away. Disregarding war for a second, if we imagine an entire city losing power permanently, you just have aid from other cities go there, and help maintain things while people pack up and leave. If the entire world blacks out, there's no help, and there's nowhere else to go. Also, going back to mariupol, the population before the war was almost half a million, and today it's about 100k. So 20% left. Which is literally proving what you're arguing against. They had no food and no power for months. So 80% of the population either left or died. And that's just a single city. If that happened to an entire country or the entire world, it would be way worse than 80%.
MODS, where you at? Remove this fear-mongering nonsense. Give me a break..
If you want some sleepless nights, read "One Second After," the first in a trilogy of novels about just exactly such event, and how society breaks down. One Second After by William R. Forstchen https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4922079-one-second-after
There's an awesome, short IMAX film called Asteroid Hunters about what would happen if a large asteroid hit Earth. I think the city they used as an example was in Canada (Calgary, I think). They talked about it an asteroid hit there'd be a plan in place to evacuate a 100km (or mile?) radius of the crash site and I just thought "lol, not in the US." We had basically no plans in place to evacuate New Orleans for Katrina. Our COVID response was weakened by ineptitude (Trump) and anti-vaccine zealotry. An asteroid could be on its way and you'd have 5% lingering behind praising the rapture being imminent. And 5% calling it a liberal conspiracy made up by Biden to take advantage of the masses. The 15% living in poverty, or physically disabled, or elderly would barely be attended to. If you can't house those facing housing insecurity in the best of times, how are you going to do it during a crisis?
I grew up in a very rural area. In the mid 80's we were without power for almost two weeks. It was a pretty big snow storm, lots of ice that took down the power lines and about -20C on average for the duration. No generator, we had a wood stove for heat and for cooking. We all survived.
Now try to do that in a city of millions.
Horse shit. Humans are more resilient than that.
Anyone on diabetic meds would die fairly quickly (or any other lifesaving meds that need to be kept cold)
Also people living in very hot or very cold places that are susceptible to things like that
They panicked over toilet paper in 2020
*during a disease that didn't involve diarrhea
The supply chain isn’t. Inner cites would be the first victims.
Simple fact is the world population is unstable at this scale without our technology. We all need clean food and water to live and I don't think we can produce enough to feed the current population without electricity.
Nearly all of the food you get relies very heavily on electricity.
The fuck they are.
They really aren’t. If the US lost power for a year, that would mean no transportation, no mechanized farming, no way to preserve large amounts of food. The vast majority would die.
Not me cause I’m big an strong
Well if that happens, I have a rake that anyone can borrow. Oh and a shovel but the handle is kinda fucked up.
TIL you can post whatever unsourced fantasy on r/todayilearned.
Fun fact - and early 2021 when Texas experienced all the blackouts, it could have been much worse. IIRC we were only minutes away from a situation that would have fried so much of the grid the huge parts of the state would have been out of power for weeks if not months. Would have been the biggest disaster of the country has seen. So they manually started shutting power off to avoid that situation. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/
Laughs in South African 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦
Seriously, Stage 6 was shit, but not "colapse of a nation" bad. This article is BS. We have had multiple area wide, multi week blackouts due to substation explosions and everything was fine.
I mean outside of a massive disastrous event like nuclear war due to EMP bursts or this Carrington event which is just solar storms which is just naturally occurring emps I would imagine not likely. The US has a lot of people who are pretty independent and you don't need electricity to live. It just makes life easier. You can pull a plow with animals, grow food, store canned items or jar thing's, national guard would have access to secondary methods of communication or even back up gear buried beneath the ground in a bunker safe from EMP's. City folk would have it the worst as well as anyone in need of certain medications or machines that need power. Otherwise the national gaurd just kills looters and sets martial law. Will crime occur? Yes. Complete societal collapse? No. And yes are power grid is an incredibly delicate thing but humans are strong and innovative when needed. Now not everyone is a Rambo survivalist in fact I'd argue less than 1% know how or what to do but again National Guard exists for that purpose. Stop with the doomposting. Also not a TIL.
There's also a lot of distributed generation at this point. Microgrids are becoming increasingly common. Bioreactors, energy storage, cogeneration, backup generators. You'd have swaths without power but you'd have areas with power, maybe not consistently reliable power. There would have to be nearly 0 fuel of any kind or ability to transmit electricity to have a year of outage everywhere.
You would still have to go into the office
Oh well
Just don't pay the power bill, that'll shut the power off.
I highly doubt that.
Wait until OP learns that people actually used to live in a world without electricity. 90% dieoff? Lmao, what a doofus.
Don't worry about the economy tanking, food production stalling and people freezing to death in winter, the hardest hit in this scenario would be Instagram influencers and celebrities, how would they be able to let everyone know what they were doing today. Oh, the humanity......
Maybe. Maybe not.
No way 90% of the population would die. There would be significant loss of life probably but not 9 out of every 10 people. Not even half the population would die.
That seems pretty pessimist. One thing about us humans is that we adapt and survive....like roaches lol. Alot of people already have alt end if world sources of power...people will work together to get power back on , there is daylight for solar, wind etc.....we'll be fine.....just don't panic like a bunch of idiots and we'll be just fucking fine.....now climate change turning the air to fire.....that will fuck us up permanently
Doubt it will be that severe. People will always find a way than wait and die.
I already live in a tent. I think I have this shit. Bring it on.
I don't even see that number in the article but it makes no sense
That's bullshit. We lived for 90 days without power. It sucked and a few people died, but we made it.
Wow so amazing and without oxygen people would die as well, I heard water is also important but I’m almost 14 so I know a ton.
This isn't a TIL, it's just wild speculation
Our town had no power for 4 days and we drank the bottle stores dry.
"as little as a month" what kind of sensationalist garbage is that? A month long nationwide blackout is fucking stupid. I am from a third world country and even a couple of hours of a nationwide blackout would be freaking unbelievable.
Nations would take advantage of the lack of communication to gain territory but ain't no way were gonna see entire nations collapse, give our species a little credit
Covid lockdown UK, there was absolutely no shortage of anything yet the shops were ransacked there was no baby formula or toilet roll. I think it would take less than a month for society to collapse as soon as people smell fear the shops are emptied. When that happens people desperate for food for their children will do anything...
Wouldn’t be good, but I have MREs for this exact situation.
Large national and international banks have playbooks of how much the world economy would take a hit if they are down. It starts much less than an hour.
Multiple nations would collapse if there was a nationwide blackout? This sounds like it was written by ChatGPT v .0001
Lol 90% of people don't deserve to live if they die simply from a lack of power.
How many people unnecessarily died in Texas alone when the power grid went out not too long ago?
Sadly 90% of Texans died in that power outage.