Thanks so much. Yes, I also just surpassed 200K followers on all my socials together so I am a bit in awe of it all. I just hope this means we, as a community, are raising the visibility of space weather in a more approachable and logical way than the darker, more fearmongering way so many have used to gain popularity.
@@TamithaSkov I 100% agree. I noticed a few years back it became more about being right and arguing. What it should be about is constructive criticisms in an effort to get things right and at the same time present it in a way that everyone can understand and do it with respect of each other. That way we can spread the importance and beauty of our star and how it effects everything and i would add the effects are almost always positive. I do my best to "Nowcast". I've learned so much from watching you. I hope you know how much you have touched our community. Im very greatful for you and your channel and I try my best to get as many here as I can. You deserve more then just 100kn you will get that million soon. CONGRATS AND YAAAAAYYY
So what we can take away from this lession is that we've become too cocky with our technology. Just like when people put off purchasing a home security system, we tend to put off changing our pet ways of doing things until AFTER a disaster. We should have geomagnetic alerts just as we now get severe weather alerts. So many different folks rely on radio signals. If they're scintalating madly or the sun is screaming, people will know not to use drones or to be careful with GPS. And cell compunenies can advise users of potential disruptions to service. That would save on vexatious litigation. Another lesson from this lesson, not to lessen the first point, is to know that Carrington events aren't a rare thing but neither are those big storms always the end of the world. Those who make doomsday predictions know little about the COMPLEXITY of space weather. I'm glad that you're teaching such fascinating material. My hope is that more folks migrate to your channel and vacate the doomsday prophets' channel. As I've said before, armageddon tired of them. I love your space weather announcer too. News people shouldn't just report when auroras might happen but warn GPS and drone flyers. People rely on smart phones too much too. If they start getting fewer signal bars or lose the signal, they should be warned of that possibility. I think it makes the most sense to worry about what's most likely to happen rather than what's least likely to occur. For example, we don't get earthquakes here in Alberta like California does. But we do get wildfires and power blackouts in winter in rural areas. The grid nearly collapsed on January 13th due to two plants going offline and extreme demand. The temperature plummeted to -43 degrees that night. Had the government not put out a warning to reduce use of power, a huge disaster would have happened. So we need to be more worried about drones going off course and missing something exciting on our smart phone's social media feeds. I also disagree with that comment about science opening the mind but religion closing it. So many scientists close their minds to anything beyond the natural world. How do they know there isn't a spiritual dimension?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. You make some extremely valid points, and I agree with you. Loved the "armageddon tired of them" phrase. That made me laugh out loud. As for concerning ourselves with what is more likely to happen, even if it is less catastrophic, I am totally with you on that. One doesn't need a cataclysmic event to have serious impacts. All one needs is an unfortunate set of minor incidents to occur simultaneously to create a real disaster. Hopefully, people are beginning to understand that even minor space weather events can be the "straw that broke the camel's back," so to speak.
@@TamithaSkov I love your point about small things building up to a big thing. The more storms shock the grid, the more wobbly it becomes. So it can withstand a big one-time blast but not many of those over a few days. It's like that proverbial straw breaking the poor camel's back.
Thank you for sharing that info with me. If you worked alongside those people you must be extremely knowledgeable about those old systems. I would have loved to see them at work. It still amazes me what we could do with vacuum tube technology back then. Did the system have old mechanical relays and bulky circuits? Do you know what voltages and currents it used? I would appreciate anything you could share about those systems!
@@TamithaSkov Thanks for your interest, it allows me to reminisce for a while. The tubes that would have been used in 1950s were almost the size of a common light bulb. They had a 6 or 12 volt heater filament and that current was applied continuously. The heater produces a cloud of electrons around the cathode that is needed for the tube to function. Think of each tube as one digital logic gate. Equipment using tubes generates a lot of heat even when idle and we used to refer to a device with a lot of tubes as a "space heater". The cathode and the anode each have their own voltage requirements and a lot of it was in the 60 to 100 volt range I think. A radio station output tube could stand 3 ft tall and produced the 1000 to 10,000 watts and more. I imagine a 10kw radio or TV station still uses vacuum tube for the output power because it's difficult to scale transistors to that much power. Radio stations had large cooling systems just for the transmitter. I think you get the idea about power requirements of vacuum tubes. If you contrast that to today's microprocessor, well it's so enormous it's difficult to do. The ENIAC had 18,000 tubes and required 150kw of electricity and could perform 5000 instructions per second. The original IBM PC 8088 processor had 29,000 transistors and perform 1 million instructions per second using 2 watts. Today's CPUs have on the order of a Trillion transistors and use maybe 90 to 150 watts. I think it's interesting to note that the ENIAC 1 originally had no storage. You turn it off and you lose all your data. They did install a magnetic drum storage device that could store a few thousand characters of data. Univac bought out the drum memory company and one Univac 1100 system I worked on in the late 1970s still had an original drum they kept as a museum piece. Actually I think no one wanted to remove it because it weighed 100s of pounds. The drum was something like 3 ft long and rotated at maybe 30 or 100 rpm and had to be extremely stable to read correctly. Even the rotation of the Earth affected it and had to be compensated for during installation. And yes, I can warranty that mechanical relays were used. I had several "contact files" in my toolbox that were used to file off oxidation on relay contact points.
Incredible stuff! Thank you. 🙏 Apparently I need to find another 12 hours to watch the rest of the series. 😀 Curious as to how the Solar panels fared? We had a KP9 locally, and I had a 3rd hand report that a farmer had lost some solar panels.
That is wild. Do you know what the failure was from? Did he get any power surges from the local utility during the storm? If so, it may not be the panel but rather some of the storage capacitors as they are much more susceptible to voltage irregularities!
Thank you for the careful and cheerful way you show us how to evaluate scientific information. I hope some parents can use some of your presentations in hone schooling. Would that be OK with you?
What's more concerning is our GPS guided missiles being easily jammed by the enemy. Maybe the signal should be stronger and encrypted for the public. You know, like a continuous randomized transmission that makes sense only with a key
Yes, jamming and spoofing are center stage. This is one of the ongoing concerns in space weather, being able to tell the difference between an adversary doing those things and the Sun doing those things. It's an ongoing issue.
Its not just weather to my family. We're full of radioactive TENORMs from contaminated well water living outside a natural gas facility. Now solar storms and radiation storms make us go crazy. It feels like we're standing in front of a microwave for days straight without a break. Its miserable. We all feel it and we're all feeling bad and on edge with scratchy headaches and more pains for days. We know when it passes becasue we all stop fighting and hurting as much. Then I check your channel and yep. It passed. I really appreciate your channel. Thank you. Now I have to figure out how to block the radiation out of our home because this is miserable. We have 2 little girls. They're miserable during these storms.
Lol tinfoil it doesn't work anymore since they boosted up the cellular network.. Cook on low and now from above with skynet... And the sun I guess.. What it's doing to the swimmers well you know the answer. To many people..
I agree with @peterraymond1853 . You'll have to give me more than that, if you actually want to engage in a rational debate. But I'll wager that isnt what you want or even why youre here.
@@TamithaSkov Haha You're absolutely right; I was being absurd in the extreme. You're, like... a friggin PhD in planetary & space physics - literally, one of the top experts in the world that other scientists refer to for facts. And I admire you for your incredible knowledge on all things space! I was totally kidding. Thanks for responding though!
