We're coming for you, humans....

A couple of years back, before the H1N1 swine flu was all the rage, all of us disaster obsessed types were focused on H5N1 bird flu, which in addition to being 4Hs worse than swine flu, had a human death rate of 60%.  Then swine flu came along (underwhelming us as far as global pandemics are concerned) and we all went back to worrying about people with explosives in their underwear.  Well, it seems that the birds and pigs have been plotting behind our backs, coming up with a new hybrid bird-pig flu, which in one case described in New Scientist magazine, developed a mutation which gives it the ability to bind to receptors found in the noses of pigs… and humans (cue ominous music, please).  Just a reminder that virii (like the rest of nature as far as I can tell) is out to destroy the human race.  And that we need to keep an eye on the flu.

Yes, Cisco did fix the bug which caused this particular outage, but I think that this incident points out some questions that really need to be answered:

Should researchers be conducting experiments on the Internet with potential for widespread negative impact on a shared business resource? If someone ran this type of potentially disruptive testing on my company’s network during business hours, I’d be looking for them to be fired, sued, arrested and forced to listen to this album for the rest of their lives.  Researchers need to realize that the Internet is the planet’s “production network” with no “maintenance window” and that the same best practices we follow in the enterprise (separate test environment, for example) need to be followed when tinkering with its innards.

Had someone experienced significant financial losses due to this experiment, what would its recourse be? No one expects the Internet to be free of glitches and outages, but in this case, a conscious decision was made to do something which could reasonably be expected to cause problems.  Could there be lawsuits here?  Are the researchers exposing their organizations to potentially ginormous liability?  If the damaged party was in, say, Asia, who would have jurisdiction over the case and where would it be tried?

In an era where cyberspace is increasingly recognized as a “battlespace,” could an experiment such as this (on a larger scale) be mistaken for a cyber attack and possibly lead to real world hostilities?

Researchers and governments should take this opportunity to stop and think about the “rules of the road” for the global Internet.  Long ago, we all recognized that the oceans are a common resource and that we need a Law of the Sea to allow us to agree on what is and is not acceptable on the bounding main.  It seems to me that the Internet is the sea of the 21st century and needs a similar set of supranational rules to ensure that it accessible to all.  Are you listening, UN?

It turns out that

Currently, there is no commercially viable way to make more helium – our supplies here on Earth are the result of radioactive decay, and extracting helium from the air would result in prices many thousands of times higher than today (think $100 for a single party balloon).  And I shudder to think how much a big screen TV would cost in a helium poor world (now we are talking an emergency the public can understand).

Seems to me that Congress screwed up here and we still have time to fix the problem – simply raise the price of helium to a point where it makes sense to conserve the stuff.   It seems to me that the need for helium is going to grow over the coming years and we are setting ourselves up for a totally avoidable problem – time to write the congress-creatures…

“Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the undersea communications infrastructure. The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathere by simply googling and transcribing as much data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded format. I hope you find the resource useful and any constructive criticism is welcome.”

Wanted - for destruction of society as we know it?

The subtitle of this blog promises reading to keep you up at night… so, here goes…  aside from creating hot weather and giving us skin cancer, our Sun threatens our technological society in yet another, even scarier way.  Solar activity can have a real effect on the Earth’s magnetic field, which in turn, can wreak havoc with such technological niceties such as GPS, radio communications, transpolar air travel and, the electrical grid which makes our way of life possible.

And depending on whom you ask, the Sun may be preparing to get pissed… or maybe not… but if it is, we could all be affected.  Read on if you dare…

In March, 1989, Canada’s Quebec province was plunged into darkness for 9 hours as a result of disruption to Earth’s magnetic fields caused by a coronal mass ejection (CME) occurring 93 million miles from us.  While this was a dramatic event, it was not the largest on record.  Back in 1921, another solar storm caused took out the New York Central railroad’s switching and signaling infrastructure and interfered with intercontinental communications.

The grand-daddy of all solar storms on record happened in 1859.  The so-called “Carrington Event” was three times more powerful than the storm that put Quebec in the dark.  This storm caused the failure of telegraph systems (the Victorian equivalent of the Internet) all over North America and Europe and sparked fires as currents surged through overloaded wires.  While the impact of the storm was impressive, times were simpler back then – folks did not rely on the satellites, power grids and other electric and electronic gewgaws that we are so dependent on today.  The fires were extinguished and telegraph service was restored.  However, had the 1859 storm happened today, things would be quite different.

We would have somewhere between 30 and 72 hours notice of a significant solar storm heading towards Earth, thanks to a number of space based instruments which keep a wary eye on the Sun.  Not a very long time…

I am going to limit my discussion to the effects of a super sized solar tantrum to the electrical grid… after all, without the grid, most of the things we take for granted in modern life (light, heat, airconditioning, media, refrigerated food, transportation, internet porn, you get the picture) would not be available if the power grid were to be offline for a significant amount of time.  Researchers from the National Academy of Sciences here in the USA did a study of the projected societal effects of space weather back in 2008 and their simulations came up with a scary scenario, electrical grid-wise speaking.

See those areas outlined in the map of the US above?  Those are areas where the US power grid would be “susceptible to collapse” in the event of a solar storm similar to the one experienced in 1921 (not the monster of 1859, which is thought to be a once in 500 year event).  The report goes on to predict that in such a situation, more than 300 high voltage transformers would need to be replaced after such an event.  These are not items you can buy at Home Depot – they are complex, custom designed and built items which are only available from a small number of suppliers.  Restoration of the grid in the affected area (where 130 million people live) could take months or years and power shortages in the affected area could could last for years.

Looking at the map, I noticed a few things.  First, the entire eastern third of the US and the Pacific Northwest would be the most heavily affected areas.  Buh bye, DC, Boston, NYC, Seattle.  Farewell, financial system!  Should this scenario come to pass, we are looking at a disaster on a scale dwarfing anything we have dealt with in the past.  Depending on the areas affected worldwide, the global balance of power could shift drastically – he who has the electricity has quite an advantage of he who does not.

So why worry about this now in particular?  Well, the Sun has been very, very quiet lately, and NASA is predicting that the level of activity is going to ramp up dramatically between now and 2013. In response, a number of experts got together in Washington, DC on June 8th to discuss how we can improve our ability to detect risky space weather and to harden our critical infrastructures to protect them from the effects of solar storms.

Now, not everyone is buying NASA’s raising of the alert level, but it seems to me that this type of a low-probability, very high-consequence event deserves some attention from the powers that be.  Even if we don’t get slammed by a once in a century event during this solar cycle, smaller events could produce severe localized effects and depending on the locality, dramatic systemic effects on the economy.  Personally, I see efforts to learn more about solar storms, how to better predict them, and how to protect our electrical, communications, GPS and other critical infrastructure are deserving of some serious attention and investment.  I mean, think of the Internet cat videos and porn!  And society at large.