khat's comment is dead, but replying to it here:

> It's very odd they would assume a typo in the writing but not an error in their calculations or possibly no correlation whatsoever.

They didn't assume a typo, they concluded that a typo makes the most sense if the story is true.

The facts:

- The original story (as published) claims the event occurred on 18 October 1841 on a line that didn't exist at that time (not until 1846).

- The original story was specific about the train (a 10:05 express train) and the month and day (18 October)

- On 18 October 1848 there was an express train with that time and there was a recorded geomagnetic storm

Under the assumption the story is true, given the details that do line up and the one detail that can't line up with anything, a typographical error where one number was changed makes a lot of sense.

EDIT: @khat, if you read this, it seems you've somehow become shadowbanned. Both your comment here and your earlier comment from today are [dead]. This means admin moderation or auto-moderation was involved, these weren't [flagged][dead] which would have indicated users flagged it to death. Nothing in either looks like a reason to get shadowbanned so you may want to reach out to the mods (there's a contact link at the bottom of most pages).

Oh, interesting that we now have evidence of multiple geomagnetic storms in the 19th century. Alfred Russel Wallace (more famous for work on natural selection) has a journal entry about seeing the aurora from Waigeo - near Papua - in July of 1860, and when I looked it up that's almost a year after the Carrington Event.

> On the evening of our arrival at Muka I observed what appeared like a display of Aurora Borealis, though I could hardly believe that this was possible at a point a little south of the equator.

It almost seems out of place having that wording of "Scientists solve" as opposed to "AI solves." Breath of fresh air, really.

> Were a similarly intense geomagnetic storm to occur today, it would likely seriously damage the electrical power grid, causing widespread outages and blackouts, as well as disrupting satellite communications.

Is this really true? I’m suspicious for a few reasons:

1. If it were true, I expect it would be a national security concern, and quickly remedied

2. While there is a lot more dependence on electrical connections, there’s also many more sources of disturbance now. So I suspect some of the failure modes are tested by “normal” human activity

3. EMI is a known risk, in my previous job we actively tested and built for it. I suppose if the limits are inappropriately set , or if this sort of testing isn’t wide spread, it could still be an issue.

4. As long as there’s a neutral line, i think any common mode should be rejected, in which case this should be fine?

>1. If it were true, I expect it would be a national security concern, and quickly remedied

It was known in the early 2000s and they've been working on it for decades. Presumably things are better now.

"Working on it for decades" and "fixed" aren't the same thing. Transformers are custom-built, take a year or more to get, and most of the fleet is 40+ years old. You can't patch that with software. Forecasting warnings give operators time to react, but that's mitigation, not hardening.

We've experienced nothing like Carrington-event scale after that happened. Luckily so, I think.

Then there are things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event which we have located several traces of in geological records. They are at least a magnitude stronger than anything which Carrington carried. And statistically long overdue.

If one of these happened today, that would be a really interesting experience.

Those are two different things, though. Miyake spikes show up as carbon-14 in tree rings, and beryllium-10 in ice cores backs them up, but that's a particle flux signal, not necessarily a Carrington-style geomagnetic storm. Carrington was a CME slamming into us. The 774 one could've been way worse for satellites and radiation exposure than for the grid, honestly.

The real exposure is large transformers, not the grid in general. Geomagnetic storms drive quasi-DC currents through long transmission lines, and that saturates the cores and cooks them. Those units take a year or more to build, which is why utilities now install neutral-point blocking devices and run storm-forecast drills. Satellites are the bigger worry.

Solving problems from the 1840s? That's some serious backward compatibility work. Impressive.

Nature never broke the API, we just lost the docs. Telegraph operators were hitting geomagnetic glitches in the 1840s and had no idea what they were looking at. Same story as every legacy system: the bug's been there forever, somebody just finally read the old logs.

Why would anyone pay for these tokens?

Solving an 1840s bug report. Bet they wished for better logging back then, like some legacy systems I've dealt with.

It's very odd they would assume a typo in the writing but not an error in their calculations or possibly no correlation whatsoever.

and no AI was used!

btw if a enemy of the US was to explode a nuclear weapon high enough in the atmosphere over the continental US to overcome the curvature of the earth

ala a targeted "starfish prime" event

it would take out virtually every power transformer on every pole

exhausting all replacements for years

no specialized EMP needed and no direct strike needed

not sure what would happen to homes hardwired with solar

oh it would also take out every satellite in orbit as they would pass through the new artificial allen belt

doubt China would do this, however Putin could get desperate enough if he starts to lose his war entirely

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

* https://www.science.org/content/article/us-tests-ways-sweep-...

I wonder if we were talking about bog standard ac transformers, what the failure mode could really be. Seems to me that it would have to be winding overspec current, sustained long enough to melt the copper winding. On the one hand, I question. On the other, I can only begin to appreciate the capability of the integral( B dot dA) flux effect , over a very large, city or county-scale, grid-ground loop area.

This seems like exactly the kind of scientific discovery that an LLM would make.

I didn’t see any mention of one, but the work of connecting the different sources seems like an LLM strength.

We're going to see a lot of "scientists solve ___ mystery" and "historians resolve the question of ____" over the next few years, that's for damn sure. Interesting time to be alive.

What gets me is how little we'd have to spend to harden against this. At a small utility I knew of, the whole "storm plan" was one guy with a phone tree. Transformers take years to replace, and nobody budgets for a once-in-150-years event until after it hits.