Benjamin Dancer's Blog, page 5
July 18, 2016
Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER)
As you might know, Population Media Center(PMC) and I are partnering together during my upcoming book release to help get their message out about the issues we face from the exploding population. They sent me this amazing picture book, and I wanted to share some of it it with you. Should you feel the need to have a copy of the book on your coffee table, it is available here.
From the book's description:Every problem facing humanity, from poverty to violent conflict over resour...
July 16, 2016
Ted Koppel: Devastating Cyberattack On America’s Power Grid Likely
Ted Koppel released his book Lights Out in October, 2015. Lights Out is the non-fiction version of my novel Patriarch Run. It details why we are so vulnerable to a cyberattack on our power grid. In my novel the bad guy wants to take down the grid as a means to commit mass murder on a scale never seen before in human history.
In this brief video, Koppel states that a cyberattack on the grid is likely, that such an attack would devastate our civilization and that the government has no plan to de...
July 14, 2016
How Many People Should There Be?
There is an important question I've recently started asking. It's a question of such importance I wish I could figure out how to get every one on Earth to ask it, too. I think the future depends on it.
How many people should there be?
I know the question sounds strange. But what's even stranger, at least to me, is that it's something we don't talk about. It's taboo, even.
If we don't ask the question "how many people should there be?"I doubt we'll be able to decide the answer, and losing the ini...
July 11, 2016
The Near Miss of 2012
This NASA video describes the near miss of July 2012, when two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) almost knocked Earth "back to the 18th century." It was the most powerful CME Earth has experienced since the 1859 Carrington Event.If it had hit, researchers say we could still be picking up the pieces.
Pete Riley published a paper titled On the Probability of Occurrence of Extreme Space Weather Events,which calculated the probability of such a catastrophe occurring as 12% per decade.
If Earth were to...
July 7, 2016
U.S. Air Force Warns Power Grid Is Vulnerable
A U.S. Air Force official leaked a briefing to the Washington Examiner,March 2016,to warn Americans of the growing threat to our power grid. The briefing indicates that the military is taking the threat to the grid seriously.
The leaked slide below is titled Our grids have become vulnerable. It catalogued potential threats to the grid including aging infrastructure, determined adversaries and severe natural disasters.
The briefing emphasized that there were a "growing number of cyber incidents"...
July 5, 2016
A Super Solar Flare
Trudy E. Bell and Dr. Tony Phillips wrote an interesting article for NASA in 2008 titled A Super Solar Flare. Their piece detailed the history of the 1859 Carrington Event and discussed the potential for a space weather disaster today.
A giant arch of plasma rose up out of the Sun. Courtesy of NASA.
The article included a powerful photograph of a transformer that was physically damaged in 1989 by a geomagnetic storm.
Power transformers damaged by the March 13, 1989, geomagnetic storm
"More tha...
July 3, 2016
Are There Too Many People?
Let’s take a look at the math. It is estimated that the human population is growing at a relatively low rate: 1.14% per year. But as long as the population is growing, it doesn’t matter how low the rate is. The math tells us that a growing population will eventually double.At the current growth rate, a doubling will take about 61 years.
Is there anyone who believes that 15 billion is a good number for our population? What would it take to feed that many people?Even from among those who argue t...
July 2, 2016
NY Times: Hundreds of Transformers Could Be Lost To A Geomagnetic Storm
Matthew L. Wald wrote an article, 14 March 2012, for the The New York Times titled A Drill to Replace Crucial Transformers (Not the Hollywood Kind).The article stated that there were about 2,100 high-voltage transformers spread throughout the country. These transformers are pieces of electrical hardware about the size of a one-car garage.
Engineers in the electric business and officials with the Department of Homeland Security have long been concerned that transformers are vulnerable to disrup...
June 30, 2016
Would We Have Survived?
Jason Samenow wrote an article for the Washington Post, 23 July 2014, titled How a solar storm two years ago nearly caused a catastrophe on Earth. The coronal mass ejections (CME) discussed in the article took place on 23July 2012. It was a near miss that some scientists say could have knocked our civilization back to the stone age.
If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces.
A solar storm photographed by NASA.
If the CME didn't miss the earth by one week it would have crippled satel...
June 25, 2016
What Is The Most Cost Effective Way To Power The Country?
The video illustrates the most cost effective way to power the county in 2030.The time elapsed represents one winter month. Each circle denotes a power plant in the U.S.The circle sizes represent the amount of power a particular plant supplies to the grid.
Red=solarGreen=windBlack=nuclear and fossil fuelsBlue=hydroelectricChris Clack designed this revolutionary model while working on Sandy MacDonald's research team at NOAA. I'm currently writing a piece about that team's work.
What's noteworthy...
