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Satellites are essential to modern life. So essential, in fact, that plans have been drawn up on how to cope with a situation in which we could no longer rely on them. A UK government document entitled the Space Weather Preparedness Strategy may sound strange, but when so much of modern communications, transport and the financial system relies on satellites, you can imagine why one would want a Plan B in place.
The reality is that we depend on satellites in more ways than we realise. The concept was popularised in a 1945 letter to Wireless World written by science fiction writer and inventor Arthur C Clarke – and from then satellite services has grown into an industry worth US$100 billion a year.
This highlights the extent to which satellite services pervade modern life. A fleet of several hundred communications satellites encircles our planet in geosynchronous Earth-orbit, with hundreds more at lower altitudes. Rapid satellite communications enable the global markets underpinning our economy, and the emergency and defence services that keep society safe. Satellites provide GPS global navigation services for transport on land, sea and in the air. Modern agriculture, manufacturing and logistics chains, that supply virtually everything you consume – from the milk in your coffee to the screen you're reading this on – rely on information provided by satellites.
But you'd be forgiven for never noticing some of the subtle influences of satellite technology on your life. After all, who'd have thought that some trains use GPS data to control which doors open at platforms of different lengths? Or that banks uses high-precision timing of satellite navigation systems to time-stamp its financial transactions?
We could survive without satellites, but their influence and benefits are so widespread that it would require concerted effort and massive investment to do so. Which has led some to consider the risks satellites face, and what to do about them.
One threat is the impact of "space weather". This can be solar flares – powerful bursts of radiation – or explosions of high-speed, high-energy protons ejected from the sun which scythe their way though near-Earth space. During periods of disturbed space weather, the region circling the Earth's equator, the Van Allen radiation belt, swells with greater numbers of high-energy subatomic charged particles.
These can disrupt satellite operations by depositing electrical charge within the on-board electronics, triggering phantom commands or overloading and damaging sensitive components. The effects of space weather on the Earth's upper atmosphere disrupts radio signals transmitted by navigation satellites, potentially introducing positioning errors or, in more severe cases, rendering them unusable.
These are not theoretical hazards: in recent decades, solar storms have caused outages for a number of satellites services – and a handful of satellites have been lost altogether. These were costly events – satellite operator losses have run into hundreds of millions of dollars. The wider social and economic impact was relatively limited, but even so it's unclear how our growing amount of space infrastructure would fare against the more extreme space weather that we might face.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 03 2015, @04:12PM
When technology fails people wait for technology to come save them. That is when there is standing still*. As people realize they will not be saved by anyone except themselves attitudes change, plans are formed and civility goes out the door.
For an excellent take on technology as a trap watch the first episode of "Connections." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/ [imdb.com]
Hopefully I will either get enough notice to get home or it will be night time so the other side of the earth will get blasted instead of me.
*of course there are other less civil people who immediately go steal TVs waiting for the power to come back.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 03 2015, @06:47PM
I'm affraid the magnetosphere and Van Allen belt doesn't work this way - see some brief explanations with diagrams [tufts.edu] - your computer will fry even on the night side due to the currents induced by the variations in the magnetic field.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday August 03 2015, @07:51PM
You can watch the first episode of Connections here [youtube.com].
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:14PM
yeah, i've posted about this before without any sort of prompt from a 'researcher' or 'book author'. just using common sense. we are too dependent on satellites. space 'weather' is not the only concern. how do you defend a vital piece of infrastructure in space from an attack? currently, you can't. let me leap-frog past any suggestions of arming satellites with lasers (for defensive purposes lol) or developing gee-whiz anti-missile tech...how do you protect a satellite from someone on the ground firing a powerful laser or some other directed energy weapon? you can't. luckily, an earth-to-satellite directed energy weapon would be incredibly expensive to build and operate. it would probably get noticed from space while being built. how do you know there aren't any sort of directed energy weapons in other satellites put up by other countries? you don't. even if you did, one could just send up lots of satellites for redundancy and command some unnecessary ones to kamakasi into enemy satellites.
satellites are great. we just depend on them TOO much for infrastructure. high-altitude, dirigible-stations (like those being looked at by tech companies to spread the internet) are the future and far wiser. fast and cheap to build and deploy - which makes redundancy and recovery from destructive events almost painless.