- Joint Chiefs chair responds to claim US is unprepared to face China threat, says NATO ‘stronger’ than ever Fox News
- Top US General Warns Everyone Should Be ‘Worried’ About War With China Newsweek
- Opinion | Sen. Dan Sullivan on How to Deter a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan The Wall Street Journal
- After Israel and Ukraine, Taiwan business leaders fear Taipei-Beijing tensions may trigger the next geopolitical conflict Fortune
- Why Taiwan is a ‘life-or-death question’ for China: Cui Tiankai on US-China tension South China Morning Post
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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Taiwan ex-conscripts say they feel unprepared for potential China conflict
Taipei, Taiwan
CNN
—
Rising concerns over increasingly aggressive military maneuvers by China have prompted Taiwan to extend the mandatory military service period most of its young men must serve. But former conscripts interviewed by CNN say Taipei will need to do far more than that if it is to make the training effective.
Outdated, boring and impractical. That was the verdict of six young men who spoke to CNN about their recent experiences of mandatory service in Taiwan’s military.
They describe a process that was designed decades ago with a heavy emphasis on bayonet training, but lacking instruction in urban warfare strategies or modern weapons like drones. Some say there were too few rifles to go around, or that the weapons they trained with were too old to be of use. Others recount “specializing” in cannon, grenade and mortar units, but never receiving any ammunition to train with.
Their criticisms come at a crucial time for Taiwan’s military. President Tsai Ing-wen announced recently that the period of mandatory service for men born in or after 2005 will be extended from four months to a year, saying that the present system “no longer suits the needs” of the island’s defense. The military says the rethink follows comparisons to the militaries of other democratic jurisdictions that have longer conscription periods – such as South Korea (18-21 months), Singapore (24 months) and Israel (24-30 months).
Strengthening the island’s military has become a key concern for Tsai, who has spoken of the need to highlight Taiwan’s determination to defend itself amid increasingly aggressive noises from Beijing. The ruling Chinese Communist Party claims the self-governing democracy of 23.5 million people as part of its territory, despite never having controlled it, and has sent record numbers of air and sea patrols to harass it since former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited in August. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly refused to rule out the use of force to “reunify” the island with mainland China.
“No one wants war,” Tsai said in announcing the lengthening of mandatory service periods in December. “This is true of Taiwan’s government and people, and the global community, but peace does not come from the sky, and Taiwan is at the front lines of the expansion of authoritarianism.”
But former conscripts are skeptical, telling CNN the problems with mandatory military service go beyond the short time frame and will only be fixed by a more thorough revamp.
Tsai herself has acknowledged that many citizens feel serving in the military is “just a waste of time.”
“In our company, we had more than 100 assault rifles, but only slightly more than a dozen could be used for shooting practices,” said Frank Liu, a 26-year-old auditor from the central Changhua county who served in 2021. He said about 140 conscripts received training in his company.
“A lot of those assault rifles were made many decades ago, and many were too worn out to be used in training. The weapons had to be rotated among ourselves.”
Paul Lee, a factory manager from Taipei who served in 2018, had a similar experience.
“We didn’t fire many rounds during the military training,” Lee said. “I was practicing with the T65 assault rifle, and I only shot about 40 rounds during the entire training period.
“I’m concerned that many people who underwent the training with me won’t even be able to operate a rifle with confidence.”
Under the current rules, the four-month service period is normally divided into two parts: five weeks of basic training, and 11 weeks of ground training at a military base.
During the ground training period, conscripts are often assigned specialties – but even then some say they receive only the most cursory of insights.
Dennis, a 25-year-old engineer from Taichung city who served last year, said while he was assigned to specialize in cannons, he never learned how to fire them because trainers were worried the recruits might get hurt. He asked only to be identified by his first name because he remains a reservist.
“We were assigned simple tasks, and we spent most of the time helping with cleaning and washing the cannon carts,” he said. “If war breaks out today and I am told to work as an artilleryman, I think I will just become cannon fodder.”
Adam Yu, a 27-year-old designer from the northern Keelung city who served in 2018 and specialized in mortars and grenade launchers, said while he had been shown how to prepare the weapons, he had never been given any ammunition or practiced firing them.
“I’m not sure if I can even operate those weapons,” said Yu, adding, “I still don’t know how those weapons are supposed to be used in the battlefield.”
That sentiment was echoed by another former conscript surnamed Liu. The 28-year-old salesman specialized in data processing with the air force and received training in the southern Pingtung county in 2015. He too asked for his first name to be withheld, saying he may still be called upon for additional reservist training.
“Our commanders barely taught anything during our ground training, because they felt we would only be here for a few months and it wouldn’t make much of a difference for them,” he said.
Taiwan has a professional volunteer military force that as of last year was made up of 162,000 full-time troops, according to a report by the Legislative Yuan. On top of this, an estimated 70,000 men complete a period of mandatory military service every year.
Conscripts must undergo a period of physical training and are taught to shoot rifles and use bayonets.
Several of those who spoke to CNN questioned the amount of time spent on bayonet training, arguing it was outdated, although some militaries continue to teach it in recruitment training programs.
“I think bayonet training was just a waste of time, because I really couldn’t think how we could put that into practice,” Frank Liu said.
“Just look at the Russia-Ukraine war, there are so many types of weapons used. When does a soldier ever have to resort to a bayonet to attack their enemy? I think that was really outdated.”
Yu, from Keelung, said his commanders had put huge emphasis on bayonet training because it made up part of the end-of-term examination.
“We were ordered to memorize a series of slogans,” he said. “When we were practicing bayonet, we were required to follow the instructions of the squad leader with a specific chant for each movement, and we had to repeat it in the exam.”
Some of these criticisms were acknowledged, tacitly or otherwise, when Tsai announced the lengthening of the conscription period and in the subsequent news briefing by the Defense Ministry in early January.
The ministry said that when the new policy begins in 2024, all conscripts will shoot at least 800 rounds during their service, and they will be trained with new weapons such as anti-tank missiles and drones. Bayonet training will be modified to include other forms of close combat training, it added, and conscripts may also participate in joint military drills with professional soldiers. Meanwhile, basic training will rise from five to eight weeks.
Su Tzu-yun, a director of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is funded by the government, said he is confident the reform will boost the island’s combat capabilities.
He also thinks there is value in keeping bayonet training in the curriculum.
“It helps boost a soldier’s courage and aggressiveness,” he said. “If soldiers engage in a mission that is not suitable for firing weapons, they may also use bayonet as an alternative option.”
Su added that while modern weapons will be included in the new training curriculum, it would be impractical for every soldier to practice firing them because this would simply be too costly.
“In the US, the training of Javelin [anti-tank missiles] is conducted through simulation, because each missile costs $70,000 and it is not possible for everyone to fire them,” he said. “Usually, the whole unit finishes the simulation, then the commander will pick a few soldiers to practice firing it.”
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said in a statement to CNN that it has invited experts to numerous academic seminars on reforming the conscription system, and that it accepted many of their suggestions to boost training intensity.
Even so, not everyone’s convinced.
“I don’t think the lengthening of service alone will lead to better national defense,” said Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor at Tamkang University’s Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies.
He said the “more important questions” involved clarifying in detail the type of training new conscripts would receive.
And on this point, the former conscripts who spoke to CNN remain skeptical.
“When I saw they wanted to add drones to the training, my question was – are we going to have one drone per person and multiple chances to practice flying it?” Yu said.
“If they stick to their old way of teaching, they will just tell us to follow their instructions and memorize its weight and flight distance, and we will not be able to operate it.”
The fear for conscripts is that the new form of mandatory service might end up looking pretty much like the old form, only longer.
“During my service, most of the time we were just asked to perform tedious tasks like moving weapons around to show our commanders, and we spent a lot of time waiting,” said Dennis, the engineer.
It remains to be seen if conscripts’ time will be spent more fruitfully when the new rules come in next year, but all sides agree the stakes are high.
“Active citizens are the foundation and the bedrock of our will to resist,” said Enoch Wu, founder of the civil defense think tank Forward Alliance and a member of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
“If the public decides our home is not worth fighting for – or that we don’t stand a chance – then you can have the most professional military and it will still be too little too late.”
Angry families say Russian conscripts thrown to front line unprepared
Sokolova, 37, cried for him too, and for their nearly year-old baby son, she said in a telephone interview from her home in Voronezh, in western Russia.
Sokolova is among dozens of soldier’s spouses and other relatives who are voicing remarkably public — and risky — anger and fear over the terrible conditions that new conscripts have faced on the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The soldiers’ relatives, mostly people who would normally stay out of politics, are tempting the wrath of the Kremlin by posting videos online and in Russian independent media, and even speaking to foreign journalists. They say that mobilized soldiers were deployed into battle with little training, poor equipment and often no clear orders. Many are exhausted and confused, according to their families. Some wander lost in the woods for days. Others refuse to fight.
“Of course he had no idea how terrible it would be there,” Sokolova told The Washington Post. “We watch our federal TV channels and they say that everything is perfect.”
The relatives typically do not criticize President Vladimir Putin or even the war, but their videos have exposed the rock-bottom morale of many conscripts, as Russia tries to surmount its recent losses by throwing a claimed 318,000 reinforcements into battle.
Yana, a transport worker from St. Petersburg, was a fervent pro-war patriot until her partner was mobilized.
In a phone interview, Yana confirmed video accounts by other military spouses that the men had to buy their own warm uniforms and boots and had little training. In Ukraine, they were given no food or water.
“They do not have any orders and they do not have any tasks,” she said. “I spoke to my husband yesterday and he said that they have no clue what to do. They were just abandoned and they have lost all trust, all faith in the authorities.”
On the videos, wives recite lists of grievances in tremulous voices. Conscripts pose in body armor that barely covers their ribs or film themselves in Ukrainian forests, listing their dead and complaining their officers are nowhere to be seen.
Details in the videos could not be independently verified but are consistent with accounts that family members provided in interviews with The Post, and with reports by independent Russian media, such as ASTRA, which exposed seven basement prisons for deserters in Luhansk.
Sokolova’s husband was mobilized to fight in the 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiment on Sept. 22. He told her that he received no military training “and by Sept. 26, he was already in Ukraine,” she said.
He phoned late last month, having barely survived a major battle in which his unit was surrounded and many were killed. He and two others escaped without their backpacks and warm gear but were lost and ended up wandering in a forest.
“They were thrown in into the fire, so to speak, on the very first front line, but they’re not military men. They don’t know how to fight. They cannot do this,” Sokolova said, adding that her husband was in severe pain with pancreatitis. “I feel how awful it is for him there,” she said. “My heart is being torn apart.”
Families of other men mobilized to fight in the regiment said their loved ones were sent to the front line near Svatove, a small city in the Luhansk region, on their first day in Ukraine and given one shovel between 30 men to dig trenches. Speaking in a joint video appeal first sent to independent Russian media Vyorstka, they said the commanders “ran away,” leaving the men to face three days of heavy shelling.
Several dozen mobilized soldiers from the regiment walked some 100 miles to Milove, on the Russian border, and demanded to return to their base near Voronezh, according to their video account on Nov. 3.
They were taken briefly to nearby Valuyki in Russia, but their request was ignored. “We wrote applications. We wrote reports. We did everything, but no one listens to us. Nobody wants to hear us,” a soldier, Konstantin Voropayev, said in the video, in which he also requested legal help.
Sokolova’s husband called her in a panic the same day from Valuyki, saying he and others were being sent right back into battle.
On Oct. 28, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told Putin that early problems equipping and training mobilized soldiers were resolved.
Military analyst Konrad Muzyka, of Poland-based Rochan Consulting, wrote in a recent analysis that despite the “abysmal morale” of conscripts the sheer volume of them could help Russia on the battlefield.
As the videos proliferate, Russian authorities appear to be losing patience. One mobilized soldier, Alexander Leshkov, faces up to 15 years in prison after swearing at an officer in a video, pushing him, and griping about the unit’s low-grade flak jackets, said his lawyer, Henri Tsiskarishvili.
“This is a profanation, an imitation of shooting, an imitation of exercises, an imitation of a formation,” Leshkov raged.
Yana and her husband, who have a 4-year-old son, were married with 43 other couples right before the men were sent to war. The Post agreed not to use her full name to shield her from arrest and prosecution.
In the couple’s apartment, the television was always on, pouring out the Kremlin’s line that Russia is fighting the United States, not Ukraine. “We don’t know anything else,” Yana said. “We are so used to believing in what we are told.”
But after her husband was drafted, she gave the television away because it was making her “aggressive.” She said she fears for her husband’s life but said she does not blame Putin, “because he is a smart person.”
“We are absolutely confused, at a loss, and we feel abandoned,” she said. “We’re crying from morning till night.”
Andrei Kolesnikov, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Kremlin’s propaganda is working — for now — with the video protests not directed at Putin, or even at the war.
“Putin wants people to share responsibility for the war with him,” Kolesnikov said. “He wants their bodies and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of the struggle against NATO, the West, and global evil. This strategy of glorifying cannon fodder and heroizing death is risky, in a more-or-less modernized society which wasn’t ready to be involved physically in the trenches.”
After repeated military setbacks and high casualties, support for the war is waning. Levada Center independent pollster reported on Nov. 1 that 57 percent of Russians want peace talks while 36 percent want to keep fighting.
Sokolova said that the relatives of mobilized men “realize what is going on, but people whose relatives were not mobilized see the world through rose-colored glasses. They have no idea what’s going on, and they’re not interested.”
Yana told her son that his father is a superhero, fighting evil. The fairy tale matches Russia’s imperialist propaganda, yet deep down, it does not ring true. At heart, Yana said she is terrified her husband will never phone again and her son will grow up with no father.
“I am just an ordinary woman and I want to live in peace,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
NASA Is Shockingly Unprepared for a World-Ending Asteroid
It was a typical February morning in Chelyabinsk, a large city sitting in the shadows of Russia’s Ural mountains. People bundled up to get into their cars to drive to work through the snowy Siberian town. Around 9:30 a.m, though, something surreal happened: A massive streak of light seared across the sky.
For a moment, it even grew brighter than the sun as it silently bloomed like a burning flower. After a few seconds, though, an explosion followed—shattering glass windows in buildings and cars, and rupturing peoples’ ear drums. The boom was so large that the roof of a nearby zinc factory collapsed entirely.
The explosion sent nearly 1,500 people to the hospitals for injuries including glass cuts, flash blindness, and even ultraviolet burns due to the light. It also damaged more than 7,200 buildings. The culprit, as researchers later found out, was a comet roughly 20 meters wide. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about it aside from the damage and injuries it caused to the city was that it went largely undetected by astronomers and asteroid surveyors on the ground.
Dmitry Rogozin, the former chief of Russia’s space program, called on the international community to create an early warning system for “objects of an alien origin.” The then-Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said the meteor showed that the “entire planet” was vulnerable to asteroids.
Throughout all of the chaos, one thing was clear: that the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor incident had taken the world by surprise. For a moment, the planet was caught entirely flat-footed to a potentially deadly near-Earth object that injured people and damaged a city of more than 1 million people. If it was bigger—say more than 100 meters across—it could have wiped Chelyabinsk off the face of the map.
Unfortunately, nine years later, the world is still unprepared for a deadly asteroid.
It’s not as if there’s been no progress whatsoever, but in the grand scheme of a death and devastation we can hardly imagine we’ve only made baby steps. NASA launched the Planetary Defense Coordination Office in 2016 to identify and respond to any potential comet or asteroid impact endangering Earth. It was tasked with complying with a congressional mandate to the agency issued in 2005 to identify at least 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids that are 140 meters wide or larger. NASA was supposed to finish that task by 2020. Thus far, it’s only been able to find 10,000 such objects out of an estimated 25,000.
Workers repair a power line near the wall of a local zinc plant that was damaged by a shockwave from a meteor in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, on Feb. 15, 2013.
AFP via Getty
“We’re only at about 41 percent complete with what Congress tasked us with,” Lindley Johnson, the PDCO officer, told The Daily Beast. NASA’s inability to find the asteroids even led to a damning Inspector General Report in 2014.
But things are starting to ramp up. At 7:14 p.m. on Sept. 26, NASA’s DART mission successfully slammed a spacecraft into the Dimorphos asteroid roughly 7 million miles away—marking the first ever test of a kinetic impact device to change the trajectory of a space rock.
The idea is that if we can nudge a potentially deadly asteroid by just a tiny bit, we can move it on a path that avoids a collision course with Earth.
The PDCO is also planning to launch a probe dubbed the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor in 2026. The orbital telescope will be tasked with spotting and cataloging all near-Earth asteroids within the decade of its launch, and finally accomplishing the mission that Congress tasked NASA with in 2005.
The DART mission is NASA’s first test of a kinetic impactor to try to deflect the orbit of an asteroid.
Jim Watson/Getty
But the fact remains that we still don’t know where nearly 60 percent of world-threatening, near-Earth asteroids are in the cosmos. And as we saw in 2013 in the skies above Chelyabinsk, it only takes one big object to slip past our detection to cause massive destruction. That’s why it’s imperative that the NEO Surveyor get up and running as soon as possible. “Finding them is a big part of what we do,” Johnson explained. “We can’t do anything about an asteroid unless we know if they’re coming.”
If we do manage to spot one coming, the only tool in our arsenal currently are kinetic impactors like DART. While the PDCO is working on other solutions such as a gravity tractor that can “tow” an asteroid away using gravity, and an ion beam deflector that uses an ion engine to push the asteroid away, those are still in the design concept phase. The latter two solutions would also require years if not decades of advance notice in order to move the asteroid enough so that its trajectory no longer poses a threat to Earth.
There is one fact we can take solace in: Based on our current survey of near-Earth asteroids, there is no space rock the size of the ones that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago that “represents any hazards to Earth in the foreseeable future,” said Johnson. “An extinction-level event that could wipe out the species is not something that we need to be concerned with.”
“An extinction-level event that could wipe out the species is not something that we need to be concerned with.”
— Lindley Johnson
However, he added that if an asteroid the size of Dimorphos (roughly 170 meters wide) were to impact the U.S., it would “devastate a state-wide area,” while also throwing enough dirt and debris into the atmosphere to “significantly affect the environment.” It’d be very similar to what would happen if a nuclear bomb was dropped or if a large volcano erupted—as has happened before in the past. Smoke and dust would blanket our atmosphere leading to an incredibly significant drop in global temperatures. This could lead to crop failure, species extinction, and a catastrophic loss of human life. Also, wherever the asteroid impacted would be completely decimated.
Perhaps the most disconcerting part, though, is the fact that we humans can’t seem to work together or agree on anything at all—even when it comes to threats to our very existence. Look no further than how the world at large is reacting—or, rather, not reacting—to the growing climate crisis. This is something scientists have been warning about for decades, and we still can’t agree on basic guardrails to ensure temperatures don’t rise. When a killer asteroid starts barreling its way towards Earth like a cosmic bullet, what makes us think that we actually put our differences aside to do something about it?
Nevertheless, Johnson’s a bit more optimistic about humanity’s chances.
“It is an international effort,” he said. “No one nation should go it alone nor do they have the capabilities to go it alone if we were to get into the real world situation. We want to get the space agencies on the same page about what is the viable thing to do in the future.”
The DART mission and whatever follows are much needed. Future generations will count on whatever it is we do today, whether it be sending ion cannons to zap asteroids out of the sky or identifying near-Earth objects, to set them up for success in the future.
Let’s just hope that, unlike us today, they’ll learn how to work together to prevent our collective doom.
Astroworld Security Guard Felt Unprepared, Training Day Before Festival
Many wonder why nobody working security at Astroworld Fest didn’t do more to stop the show as the tragedy unfolded … and one guard says it’s because they were woefully unprepared.
Darius Williams was one of the hundreds of people who were hired to work security for the festival by a company called Contemporary Services Corporation (CSC) … which appears to have been contracted by either folks running NRG Park, or perhaps by the promoters themselves.
TMZ.com
In any case, Williams tells us he was hired just a few days prior to the start of the festival — and he claims his role was vague and not properly explained. As a matter of fact, the guy says he actually completed his training just a day before Astroworld Fest began — and he tells us he felt inadequately briefed or coached for the task at hand.
As a result … Williams tells us he bailed on the job entirely on the day he was supposed to work — because he was that uncomfortable with the incompetence he says he witnessed.
Here’s just a taste of what Williams says he and other guards were put through (or not rather) in order to pass CSC’s smell test for the gig. For starters, Williams tells us he and the others had to take a licensing exam for a level 2 security officer — but alleges the training for the test was brief, and all the answers they needed were being provided … via open book and even from the instructor themselves, who were blurting out the answers.
Tired and hungry … Williams showed up Friday for his first shift, and says he immediately realized they were understaffed and not equipped to handle the massive crowds. He says he expressed concerns to supervisors, and after they tried moving him from front gate duty to another role … the dude just threw up his hands and left as he felt it was unsafe.
TMZ.com
Williams claims other guards working that day also wanted to up and quit — but he didn’t stick around long enough to see if they did. BTW … he also tells us there was virtually no security experience required to apply for this, evidenced in the company’s own job listing.
With that in mind, he says he doesn’t know which guard might’ve been pricked with a needle — but adds it’s conceivable something like that could happen due to the lackluster security measures.
Humanity is completely unprepared for the next giant solar flare
From the 1600s through the mid-1800s, solar astronomy was a very simple science. If you wanted to study the sun, you simply looked at the light from it. You could pass that light through a prism, breaking it up into its component wavelengths: from ultraviolet through the various colors of the visible light spectrum all the way into the infrared. You could view the sun’s disk directly, either by putting a solar filter over your telescope’s eyepiece or by creating a projected image of the sun, both of which will reveal any sunspots. Or you could view the sun’s corona during the most visually appealing spectacle that nature has to offer: a total solar eclipse. For over 250 years, that was it.
That changed dramatically in 1859, when solar astronomer Richard Carrington was tracking a particularly large, irregular sunspot. All of a sudden, a “white light flare” was observed, with unprecedented brightness and lasting about five minutes. Approximately 18 hours later, the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history occurred on Earth. Aurorae were visible worldwide, including at the equator; miners awoke in the middle of the night, thinking it was dawn; newspapers could be read by the light of the aurora. And troublingly, telegraph systems began sparking and igniting fires, even when they were disconnected entirely.
This turned out to be the first-ever observation of what we now know as a solar flare: an example of space weather. If an event similar to 1859’s Carrington event occurred here on Earth today, it would result in a multi-trillion dollar disaster. Here’s what we all should know about it.
When we think about the sun, we normally think about two things: the internal source of its power, nuclear fusion in its core, and the radiation that it emits from its photosphere, warming and powering all sorts of biological and chemical processes on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. These are two of the major processes involving our sun, to be sure, but there are others. In particular, if we take a close examination of the sun’s outermost layers, we find that there are loops, tendrils, and even streams of hot, ionized plasma: atoms that are so hot that their electrons were stripped away, leaving only bare atomic nuclei.
These wispy features result from the sun’s magnetic field, as these hot, charged particles follow the magnetic field lines between different regions on the sun. This is very different than Earth’s magnetic field; whereas we’re dominated by the magnetic field created in our planet’s metallic core, the sun’s field is generated just beneath the surface, meaning that lines enter-and-exit the sun chaotically, with strong magnetic fields that loop back, split apart, and reconnect periodically. When these magnetic reconnection events occur, they can lead to not only rapid changes in the strength and direction of the field near the sun, but can cause the rapid acceleration of charged particles. This can lead to the emission of solar flares, as well as — if the sun’s corona gets involved — in coronal mass ejections.
What happens on the sun, unfortunately, doesn’t always stay on the sun, but freely propagates outward throughout the solar system. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections consist of fast-moving charged particles from the sun: largely protons and other atomic nuclei. Normally, the sun emits a constant stream of these particles, known as the solar wind. However, these space weather events — in the form of solar flares and coronal mass ejections — can not only greatly enhance the density of charged particles that get sent out from the sun, but their speed and energy as well.
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections, when they occur, frequently happen along the sun’s central and mid-latitudes, and only rarely around the polar areas. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to their directionality otherwise, however; they’re just as likely to occur in the direction of Earth as they are in any other direction. Most of the space weather events that occur in our solar system are benign, at least from our planet’s point of view. It’s only when an event comes directly for us that it poses a potential danger.
Given that we now have sun-monitoring satellites and observatories, they’re our first line of defense: to alert us when a space weather event is potentially threatening to us. That occurs when a flare points directly at us, or when a coronal mass ejection appears “annular,” meaning that we only see a spherical halo of an event that’s potentially directed right at us.
Whether from a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection, however, a slew of charged particles headed towards Earth doesn’t automatically mean disaster. In fact, it’s only if three things all occur at once that we’re in trouble.
- The space weather events that occur have to have the proper magnetic alignment with respect to our own planet to penetrate our magnetosphere. If the alignment is off, Earth’s magnetic field will harmlessly deflect the majority of particles away, leaving the remainder to do nothing more than create a mostly harmless auroral display.
- Typical solar flares occur only at the sun’s photosphere, but ones that interact with the solar corona — often connected by a solar prominence — can cause a coronal mass ejection as well. If a coronal mass ejection is directed right at Earth, and the particles are moving rapidly, that’s what puts Earth in the greatest amount of peril.
- And finally, there needs to be a large amount of electrical infrastructure in place: particularly large-area loops and coils of wire. Back in 1859, electricity was still relatively novel and rare; today, it’s a ubiquitous part of our global infrastructure. The more interconnected and far-reaching our power grids are, the greater the peril to humanity’s infrastructure from these space weather events.
In other words, most of the space weather events that have occurred throughout history would have posed no danger to humans on our planet, as the only discernable effects they would have would be to cause a spectacular auroral display. But today, with the massive amounts of electricity-based infrastructure that now covers our planet, the danger is very, very real.
The concept is a pretty easy one to understand, and has been around since the first half of the 19th century: induced current. When we build an electric circuit, we typically include a voltage source: an outlet, a battery, or some other device that’s capable of causing electric charges to move through a current-carrying wire. That’s the most common way to create an electric current, but there’s another: by changing the magnetic field that’s present inside a loop or coil of wire.
When you run a current through a loop or coil of wire, you change the magnetic field inside of it. When you turn that current off, the field changes again: a changing current induces a magnetic field. Well, as shown by Michael Faraday all the way back in 1831, 190 years ago, the reverse is also true. If you change the magnetic field inside a loop or coil of wire — such as by moving a bar magnet into or out of the loop/coil itself — it will induce an electric current in the wire itself, meaning it will cause electric charge to flow even without a battery or some other voltage source.
That’s what makes space weather so dangerous to us here on Earth: not that it poses a direct threat to humans, but that it can cause enormous amounts of electrical current to flow through the wires connecting our infrastructure. This can lead to:
- electrical shorts,
- fires,
- explosions,
- blackouts and power outages,
- a loss of communications infrastructure,
and many other damages that will appear downstream. The major problem areas aren’t individual, consumer electronics; if you knew a solar storm was coming and you unplugged everything in your home, most of your devices would be safe. The problem is with the infrastructure set up for large-scale production and transmission of power; there will be uncontrollable surges that will knock out power stations, substations, and will pump much too much current into cities and buildings. Not only would a big one, comparable to 1859’s Carrington event, be a multi-trillion dollar disaster, it could potentially kill thousands or even millions depending on how long it took to restore heat and water to those most direly affected.
The first thing we need to invest in, if we’re actually serious about preventing the worst-case scenario for such an event, is early detection. While we can look at the sun remotely, gaining estimates for when flares and coronal mass ejections could be potentially hazardous to Earth, we’ve been relying on incomplete data. Only by measuring the magnetic fields of the charged particles traveling from the sun to Earth — and comparing them with the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field at that particular moment — can we know whether such an event would have a potentially catastrophic impact on our planet.
In past years, we’ve been reliant on the sun-observing satellites we’ve put up between the Earth and the sun: at the L1 Lagrange point, some 1,500,000 km away from Earth. Unfortunately, by the time the particles streaming from the sun get to L1, they’ve traveled 99% of the way from the sun to Earth, and will typically arrive between 15 and 45 minutes later. That’s far from ideal when it comes to predicting a geomagnetic storm, much less engaging in measured to mitigate one. But all of that is changing as the first of the next-generation solar observatories has recently come online: the National Science Foundation’s DKIST, or the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.
The Inouye telescope is extremely large, with a 4-meter diameter primary mirror. Of its five science instruments, four of them are spectro-polarimeters, designed and optimized for measuring the sun’s magnetic properties. In particular, it allows us to measure the magnetic field in all three of the sun’s observable layers: photosphere, chromosphere, and throughout the solar corona. Armed with this information, we can know with great confidence what the orientation of a coronal mass ejection’s magnetic field is from the moment it’s emitted, and can then easily determine what sort of danger that ejected material poses to Earth.
Instead of under an hour of lead time, we can have up to the full ~3-4 days it typically takes ejected coronal material to travel to Earth as advanced warning. Even for a Carrington-like event, which traveled approximately five times as fast as typical coronal mass ejections, we’d still have ~17 hours of warning, far in advance of what we had prior to Inouye’s first unveiling in 2020. Because it functions as a solar-measuring magnetometer, the Inouye telescope, the very first of our next-generation solar observatories, already gives us more advance warning of a potential geomagnetic catastrophe than we’ve ever had previously.
It’s important that we neither exaggerate nor downplay the dangers we face. Under normal circumstances, the sun emits charged particles, and occasionally, magnetic events drive the release of flares and, more uncommonly, coronal mass ejections. Under most circumstances, these particle streams are low-energy and move slowly, taking about three days to traverse the Earth-sun distance. Most of these events will miss the Earth, as they’re localized in space and the odds of striking our precise location are low. And, even if they do hit the Earth, our planet’s magnetic field will funnel them away harmlessly, unless the magnetic fields are serendipitously (anti-)aligned.
But if everything lines up in precisely the wrong way — and that’s truly just a matter of time and random chance — the outcome can be disastrous. Not directly, as these particles cannot penetrate the atmosphere and harm biological organisms directly, but they will do tremendous damage to our electrical and electronics-based infrastructure. Every power grid, everywhere in the world, could go down. If the damage is bad enough, it could all need repair or even replacement; estimates to the USA alone could reach ~$2.6 trillion. Additionally, space-based infrastructure, like satellites, could be knocked offline as well, potentially leading to another disaster if low-Earth orbit gets too crowded: a cascade of collisions, rendered unavoidable if the systems responsible for collision-avoidance are knocked offline.
On June 23, 2012, the sun emitted a solar flare that was just as energetic as 1859’s Carrington event, the first time that had occurred since we’ve developed the tools capable of monitoring the sun to the necessary precision. The flare occurred in Earth’s orbital plane, but the particles missed us by the equivalent of nine days. Similarly to the Carrington event, the particles traveled from the sun to the Earth in just 17 hours. Had Earth been in the way at the time, the global damage toll could have crested the $10 trillion mark: the first 14-figure natural disaster in history; it was only luck that caused it to miss us.
As far as mitigation strategies go, we’re only slightly better prepared today than we were nine years ago. We have insufficient grounding at most stations and substations to direct large induced currents into the ground instead of homes, businesses, and industrial buildings. We could order power companies to cut off the currents in their electrical grids — a gradual ramp-down requiring ~24 hours — which could reduce the risks and severities of fires, but which has never been attempted before. And we could even issue recommendations for how to cope in your own household, but no official recommendations presently exist.
Early detection is the first step, and we’re making great scientific strides on that front. However, until we’ve prepared our power grid, our energy distribution system, and citizens of the Earth to be ready for the inevitable, the “big one” will be paid for many times over, for years and even decades to come, because we failed to invest in the ounce of prevention we so sorely need.
Sean Hannity: Biden administration ‘completely unprepared’ for border crisis
There is a “clear and growing crisis at our southern border”, but President Biden and the mainstream media are “pretending there is no crisis at all,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said Thursday.
“Make no mistake, the Biden administration is completely unprepared and it’s a crisis. We’ve all seen the images of child migrant detention centers,” the “Hannity” host said. “If Donald Trump were president the hysteria would be rampant.”
Instead of managing the crisis, Hannity accused Democrats of taking the same tack they used with violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa demonstrations over the summer.
“They acted like the far-left riots that we were witnessing with our own eyes were actually peaceful protests,” said Hannity, who described the border crisis response as “another political lie of the left.”
Citing leaked federal documents obtained by Axios, the host stated “the U.S. Border Patrol is handing over 320 children each day to the Department of Health and Human Services. The same documents revealed the same shelter system at the border is already operating at almost full capacity, as a record 117,000 unaccompanied minors are expected to cross the border this year alone.”
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“Once again,” Hannity said, “we’re now seeing this is more feigned, phony, moral outrage by all parties, and many on the left are trying to cover up this crisis. After all, their policies are causing this terrible situation at the border. Biden vowed to give amnesty to millions, vowed to expand asylum visas, halted all border wall construction, losing American jobs.”
“As we speak,” Hannity went on, “we have Mexican cartels, they’re getting rich, and they are now trafficking so many illegal immigrants across the border that they’re using a wristband system to keep track of their customers. This is a recipe for disaster, posing incredible risk to people on both sides of the border.”