Speaker 1 00:00:01 Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture with the finest minds in computer networking. Speaker 2 00:00:20 Hello everyone. Today we've got Russ White, Uribe and Yap. Russ. Hello. Speaker 3 00:00:31 Hey, George. How are you this morning? I don't think it's morning for you. Is it? It's afternoon or evening, eh, or midnight. It's evening, it's midnight or so Speaker 2 00:00:39 It's, it's, it's evening, but it's okay. It's a pleasant evening. Russ, can you just give people some context? Who are you? Speaker 3 00:00:46 I, I am just a routing geek. Nothing else. I don't, I don't, I don't. I'm, no, I've never written any books, done nothing. Just Speaker 2 00:00:54 So you are a routing person, person, and a podcaster and an author. Speaker 3 00:01:01 I'll just say that. . Speaker 2 00:01:03 Oh, Rick, welcome. Speaker 4 00:01:06 Thanks, George. Um, well, who am, I'm . I'm a, uh, a, formerly speaking. I've senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Um, and, uh, in terms of my, my background, um, I've done a little bit of everything and a lot of nothing, um, as people might say. Um, so I've been interested in communications for a long time and been working on various aspects, uh, of it all, all over the al Stack and, um, and, uh, things are around and, um, uh, more likely on satellite communications. Speaker 2 00:01:43 And, ya welcome, ya, aka Speaker 5 00:01:47 Hi. Uh, yes, I'm from Amsterdam and I'm actually doubling in the internet for the last 40 years or so in various positions, and now still working for, uh, D out, things like that. I do that two days a week, but still trying retire, although it doesn't work out that well and, uh, . Speaker 3 00:02:23 So that's just because there's always more stuff to stuff in D N Ss. Now. Speaker 2 00:02:27 You are, you are hiding, you're hiding your light under a bushel, as we say, because I have visited your office at NL Net Labs and up on the top of the bookcases, you have antenna that appear to have been made by stripping, wiring flex out of the wall and wrapping it around cardboard boxes. You are a radio astronomer, aren't you? Speaker 5 00:02:50 Well, kind of, it's, uh, how that happened is that I was, uh, I mean, I've got friends in satellite astronom, the day shift. Uh, uh, that's a problem. Getting some stuff working and asked me to help out, and that's how I got involved into all this solar business the last 20 years or so. Speaker 2 00:03:31 So this is specifically solar astronomy? Speaker 5 00:03:35 Yeah, yeah. This is, uh, specifically, uh, yes, it's, uh, and this is, uh, uh, this has to do with weather predict, predict the is, uh, blasting and of the universe. Speaker 2 00:04:03 So I was stupid enough to write a blog piece called Good Day Sunshine. I just couldn't go past the Beatles song. And here we are, and I've called this one on my side. Here comes the sunspot, because I couldn't go past the Beatles thing. The point was that I was really intrigued by a post I saw back in May that was from the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, Noah, who run a space weather prediction center. And I like to imagine someone like Bill Murray floating in front of a green screen showing signs as the solar wind approaches us. But solar weather is actually a really serious thing, isn't it? Speaker 5 00:04:48 Yes, kind of. It's, uh, it's also surrounded by myths mean people are, uh, people make a lot of about weather and happens again. But yes, it, but being so much unpredictable for the real, uh, exciting explosions, uh, mean people tend to overestimate what happen and also to, uh, you know, because it's so random tend to make a lot of noise. So, Speaker 3 00:05:48 So maybe we ought to, maybe we ought to like back off and talk about just for a second, like what we're talking about, right? Like what impact will a solar storm have? We don't matter how bad it is, or it could be or may not be, but like, what does it cause like for people who don't know? Speaker 5 00:06:04 Well, what's happening is that, uh, the sun is, uh, uh, kind a violent place to be there, but, uh, it's this, uh, and what happens is that, uh, often there are what you call corona, suddenly its out a lot of, uh, ions and, and so, and, uh, most of that actually notice on earth, the magnetic field on earth actually. But you see, see as that's part of it. But sometimes these are, they're very, uh, heavy and on where it's pretty and it's always followed by days, sun ions on radio traffic and also electrical. There's lot weird things happening there. It has to do with, uh, how the, and so which kind get influenced by this. Speaker 2 00:07:55 So Ulrich, you also wrote about this on an apnic blog, and you observed that there's a differential effect on different orbital planes of satellites. So we kind of mentally now dividing them up into Geom and Leo, and there would be a general sense, the lower is safer, but to some extent, all of these systems are potentially at risk from this kind of event. Speaker 4 00:08:22 Um, short answer, yes, because all of them pretty much run outside the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is where a lot of the, um, actual attenuation, um, happens in a lot of the charged particles that the sun throws our way, uh, get absorbed. Um, but let me step back for a moment. If we look back at where the first sort of, um, incidences of, um, uh, technical interference, um, by SolarWinds, um, charge particles, um, uh, uh, cmis and so on, were, uh, on, uh, uh, installations on Earth. Uh, were observed, we're going really back to the 1950s and beforehand. And when we look at, for example, the impact on com, uh, on communication systems at the time, uh, we're looking mostly at things like telegraphs and, uh, overland telephone lines. And if you go back to these days, you're looking at very, very, very long wires. Speaker 4 00:09:16 Um, so telegraph wire strung along literally telegraph poles. Um, you know, same with telephone wires and this sort of thing. And, um, you know, obviously a lot of, um, you know, radio communication sort of from a bot, um, the, you know, the first third of, uh, the 20th century onwards. And when you look at, uh, look back at that time, you see that all of those technologies are in a particular place where they're particularly vulnerable, um, uh, to charge particles. So for examples, uh, you know, yep. Already mentioned, um, uh, uh, where, uh, you know, we're going back, um, you know, say for example, I think just says on the chat here, actually, it goes back to the 1850s. This is where it was first sort of shown, uh, shown to exist. But where we first had the really sort of bad impact on, uh, you know, bad impact on communications that came along with a communication technology, obviously, um, or, or the widespread use of communication technology, and also with the widespread deployment of power grids. Speaker 4 00:10:14 And we didn't have that all that much in the ni in, in the 1850s. So it was really the mid, you know, 20th century when, when it really took off where, when it, when it started to badly hurt people. Um, and the, the, there's really two common factors. One common factor is extremely long wires. And, um, the thing with the long wires is basically, you know, the longer you make a wire, the more when it's exposed to a stream of charge particles, um, the more current you get induced into the wire. And, uh, you know, the, the, and, and that, that's really proportional to the amount of damage you can do at the, at the end of the wire where your, uh, your, um, uh, communications equipment sets, you know, similarly with, uh, power grids, um, the, uh, longer the power grids are the, the more interconnected they are, you know, the, the more they run, uh, you know, overground, uh, the more they're susceptible, uh, to problems. Speaker 4 00:11:07 Um, but, uh, you know, when you're then going into radio communications, again, in that day and age, a lot of it was on shortwave. Um, and again, uh, there you are aligned on stuff like, um, you know, propagation in the ionosphere. And, you know, again, that's very, very susceptible to what's happening on the sun. If you fast forward to today. Now, a lot of our long range communication networks are actually fiber based. Um, that's pretty much immune to, um, you know, any kind of solar interference. Uh, you are looking also at, you know, maybe problems with, you know, say in equipment. But again, a lot of that's no longer transformer based. It's now switch mode, power supply based. Um, so again, this is a more robust, you know, kind of, kind of system that's, uh, not as susceptible to, uh, uh, to interference. You know, computers basically live off very, very short connections and very short virus. Speaker 4 00:12:04 So again, we've moved the opposite way here a little bit. And, um, so, um, so, so we're not as susceptible as we used to be. Um, but power grids are to an extent, still an issue. Also, countries, for example, that still run a lot of, uh, overhead power grid, especially at a local level, they tend to be a bit more susceptible. Um, you know, for example, I've recently visited Japan where, uh, overhead power lines are still extremely common. Um, even in, you know, in the big cities, that's a bit more susceptible than, you know, say the country. I'm, you're, you're currently talking to me and I'm happen to be in Germany at the moment where there's very, very little, uh, uh, you know, overland, uh, you know, uh, uh, in the local distribution network, very little overland, um, uh, uh, you know, power lines, most of it's undergrounded here. Speaker 3 00:12:51 So the length of the wire also impacts the frequency, right? And because longer f uh, lower frequencies or actually pick the frequency it picks up, right? Or is that not, I would think that the lower the frequency of the longer the wire, the lower the frequency, it picks up long, lower frequencies carry farther, therefore the power is more. Whereas with shorter wires, you know, you're, it's just a, it's just a wavelength thing. Speaker 5 00:13:17 No, no, doesn't really matter. The problem is caused by differences parts of, uh, and that causes a lot of electricity, and actually very, can be very, if you power going down west, northeast, uh, America. And nobody knew what really happened, but nobody asked me, uh, a local disturbance of, uh, exactly that. So that was Speaker 4 00:13:58 89, Speaker 5 00:14:00 Yeah, yeah. That, yes, that's famous one, but it happens all the time. 2003 or four, I forget. Uh, South Africa blew happen. A and, uh, even in big powerades, like European powers, I do remember disturbance on Powerade, which happens 12 years ago, something like that. It was kind of interesting because one of the main in Germany was switched off for, uh, maintenance. And, uh, the other one was, it was taken off by the other, by another one, also moving a, a ship on the, and, uh, they didn't realize that they would hit the big power line, power line, and so, so out, uh, the, that kind a weird, uh, ripple effect of Europe, because these things are combined together because everywhere felt up into, uh, Morocco. But that brings you towards something. Uh, also mentioned having, uh, to having, uh, isolation parts of actually helps in this case because you won't, uh, you don't have these problems. Speaker 5 00:15:50 Then same with, uh, the fiber optics, uh, do help as well, although the fiber cables also have power, uh, next to it have amplifiers on the ocean, giving power, so doesn't really always help, but fragmentation helps in this case of the kid, the dependencies. But it just happens all the time. They actually, just today I saw a study published where they look at the differences of the yellow layers because they're not now in political and what influence has on and, uh, what how they have to not only itself also has to do with theological, uh, uh, the earth itself, when there's a lot of, uh, irony in things are different because it's not only, it's also, uh, geomagnetic storms, which is caused by this. Because when all eyes, what happens is the magnetic field of the earth is actually biting. Magnetic fields always cause problems in other things like electric fields. Speaker 2 00:17:26 So spacecraft, there's two qualities here that would be concerning. There's the sort of more physical aspect. This stuff presumably causes arcing in technology that's up there, which means there's potential for it to actually interfere with computer systems or with solar cell arrays, or with antenna systems that must surely shorten the life of the devices. Speaker 5 00:17:54 Yeah, that is a problem. That's why all these chips are so much higher. But there are two things. One is big, which are actually, these are very hard to predict. And if you can predict, you tell the people in the international space, uh, to behind water, uh, tank don't that much this short. And that's what, when people, you often see it coming mean, uh, the speed it goes is five to 15 kilometers per second. So, and what you can do is turn antennas away from, uh, where it comes, of course, if it really hits the earth, might go everywhere, these things, and, uh, it can miss the as well. So you can do, but yes, it can blow up satellites because of at least disturbance, uh, the when it passes for a couple of days. Speaker 2 00:19:11 So, Ulrich, does it also have an influence on the drag aspects of the satellites? Does it perturb their orbits and materially affect their duration in space? Speaker 4 00:19:21 Um, not really. Um, mostly what you're getting is you're getting these streams of charge particles, but it's, it, it's not like it's a huge density. It's not like somebody's throwing a, you know, bucket of water or something like this with a, um, what, you know, what you get obviously is, um, you get, for example, uh, if you have to reorient a spacecraft in order to position it, so it's gonna weather a storm like this, this is gonna have an effect on the fuel, uh, you know, balance, uh, you know, on the spacecraft. And so it, it, it does shorten the lifetime from that perspective because it means that, uh, it can't do, uh, you know, station keeping for quite as long into its life if you're always having to reposition it in order to, uh, dodge, uh, solar storms. So that has a bit of an effect. But, um, that's, that's relatively minor. Speaker 2 00:20:12 So it's solar events. We're observing the sun all the time. We understand the mechanics here. So we have lead time, which means we can adjust certain behaviors, but then there's the non-deterministic aspects of how it interacts with the earth and the effect it has on systems. It's a warning, but with no strong ability to state exactly what it's going to do. I, I get that it's not exactly game over at 11 o'clock. I can understand you're saying that it's been big up into some idea of a massive worldwide problem if we had a huge C M E event, but nonetheless, it doesn't exactly sound good. Speaker 4 00:20:56 No, of course. It doesn't exactly sound good. . Um, I mean, you know, as, uh, uh, you knows, pointed out the, um, uh, you know, the, the, the, the big problem area still tends to be power grids and, you know, anything that gets fed with power now, you know, again, we're in a much, much better position there than we used to be, you know, say 50 years ago when everything was directly fed, you know, from transformers. Now we tend to have things like UPSs and, you know, other, other devices sort of in the system and all that. All of that sort of tends to add to resilience. Um, the, the other thing, you know, of course, um, that, uh, you know, we're at least in parts of the world, you know, also dealing with is we're having in some places very, very large, uh, you know, large long power grids where there's a, you know, a lot of wire between the place where the power is generated and the place where the power is being used. Speaker 4 00:21:46 Um, so all of that basically makes it rather difficult to regulate a generation, you know, versus use. Um, then in other places, you know, you know, it's fairly close by and, you know, for example, the, uh, south African, uh, you know, uh, examples, one of those where a lot of generations actually happening far away from the, from the big cities. Um, basically, you know, the poll stations tend to be where the, where the coal mines are. Um, and, uh, the, uh, consumption tends to be where the gold mines are , um, uh, sort of, sort of, uh, flippantly speaking. Um, but, um, you know, in terms of communication systems, uh, you know, you know, it's, it's really mostly satellites that tend to be, you know, affected by it. And, um, you're literally looking at a bit of an avalanche effect there. You're sort of seeing the avalanche, you know, being, you know, triggered up the hill somewhere and you know, it's coming and you know, it's gonna, uh, you know, uh, show some snow on you, but you can't really tell how much snow it's gonna be, and you know, what, what exactly it's gonna hit, because that's gonna de you know, uh, gonna depend on what it's gonna hit, when it's gonna get down. Speaker 4 00:22:50 And, um, uh, you know, similarly, we're seeing, you know, those eruptions on the sun, that's, that's the observable, but we have nothing really in between that can tell us, you know, how, you know how many particles were released and you know, how it's all, uh, you know, how it's all behaving. And so we kind of have to wait until it gets here, until we can, you know, tell what the impact is. But by that point, it's a bit too late. Speaker 2 00:23:13 So the situation we've had in Australia that is not solar event related is that we had storm perturbation of the long line grid that connects our states together, and we had isolating, I, I don't know what the jargon is in Europe, but here it's called island. So some of the states had to deliberately cut because they couldn't maintain frequency stability, and they were islanded. And then with loss of transmission systems, they'd been depending on interstate connectors to provide the resiliency. So in effect, it was the, we can protect against one fault, but not two problem. But then the third fault emerges, we call it black start, powering up a power network from nothing. You need electricity to excite components of the mechanism to make it possible to make electricity. And there are scheduled suppliers of Blackstar capability who are meant to be able to turn on. Speaker 2 00:24:12 It's kind of a bit like when you have a diesel generator, a spare power in your data center. And the thing is, if you don't turn the diesel system over every now and then, it doesn't start when you want it to. And that is precisely what happened to us. The gas turbine black start facilities in South Australia didn't work. They weren't able to fulfill the obligations. So this power network thing is kind of a weird combination of cascading effects. It's got qualities that it could be a very small break and it could have quite wide ranging consequence if it hits enough pieces and you start to get things stacking up together as a system-wide effect. I know that is to some extent, catastrophizing. So I get that this is, to all intents and purposes are hypothetical more than a current problem, but I can't help thinking if there was a sufficiently large event, we might be surprised at how long it took us to come back from it. Yeah, Speaker 3 00:25:12 Well, I think we're looking at like three different systems of four different systems here, right? The one is electrical, right? Because electrical is, has a lot of exposed wiring, um, although a lot of it's buried now and would be less acceptable, but still, there's still a lot of overhead wiring in the world and in houses, we can't forget that in houses and stuff, that wiring is not necessarily gonna be perfect, uh, as far as protected from these kinds of storms. The second would be satellite systems and satellite communications. The third would be just straight calm systems, right? Just like long wire ethernet sitting in building walls and stuff like that. So you have like three or four different things here that all interact. And if you get a big enough storm, you don't really know what that interaction's gonna look like until it actually happens, right? You, you can postulate, oh, well, this system will do this, and that's it. But they interact, you know, they're, they're not independent things as much as we like to think they are. Speaker 5 00:26:11 Yeah, there's a history in the world as well, because people radio says, oh, we can use the radio for emergency. Well, if it's store radio stopped working as well because disturbance, at least locally, where locally means of, so like, happens again in, uh, 1920, uh, in Mongolia. So only in hindsight construc down more things going on and people know and can match it. But that's why you have to know our satellite mean looking at this, and people, uh, in the soil astronom, trying to predict when and where these explos will take place and, uh, whether they go beyond, uh, the Corona or fall back again. So this is, and that's hard. Speaker 2 00:27:36 So do they relate to sun sunspots? Speaker 5 00:27:39 They do relate to sunspots in terms of, uh, carrying, uh, uh, ces, actually, we're now a two, and you see that there are more and more, uh, uh, things, uh, more and more sun weather, uh, events. I mean, I say two weeks ago actually in Colorado, you could see Aurora, which you normally don't see. And I saw this winter in, uh, here in the Netherlands, which I, which you, and, but, uh, so yes, we're predict that around two years, but how happy that will be. Nobody knows because they actually predicted weaker than last, uh, cycle, but it seems to be active, less weaker than they thought it was. Speaker 2 00:28:49 So, so we're two years off the predicted peak in an 11 year cycle Yeah. Is just, we are just at the point of starting to achieve maximum saturation we have ever had in low earth orbit of many, many devices. We have starlink, we have the European communities initiative, we have Baidu, we have growth in the media orbit because we have the, um, the second tier of Starling that are meant to be providing the inter satellite connectivity grid to provide satellite to satellite rather than just bent pipe. We might have normal levels of geo, and we probably have less dependency on geo, but that's treating this as a comms problem. We are actually really dependent on remote sensing these days. Yeah, it's important, Speaker 5 00:29:40 But you have realize that those satellites are actually moving much, much away. These, uh, uh, these storms are pretty local. They don't, parts of the will be, uh, hit at the same time. I mean, unless it's getting really gigantic, but then probably nothing will help. But, uh, Speaker 2 00:30:09 But for some duration, there would be an isolation point in the earth's magnetic geomagnetic system. As satellites move through it, people would be experiencing disconnection if they depended on that technology. Speaker 5 00:30:23 Yeah. But that's what happens all the time. I mean, the, uh, radio silence happening, uh, on a regular because, which people, but that's, uh, happening all the time. And Jewish, uh, what I always say, there's no reason for panic. And, uh, that's, uh, well Speaker 2 00:30:52 Muted panic. I might, I might drink my tea a little bit quicker. . Speaker 4 00:30:59 Yeah. In fact, talking about, you know, talking about, um, catastrophic events and drinking tea, um, this reminds me of a situation that we had in Auckland, uh, roundabout 20 years ago, um, when our entire central business district, uh, was without power for quite a few, uh, weeks. And that also reminds me of what you said, uh, George, about sort of, uh, you know, various capacities sort of falling over like Domino's. And, uh, on that particular occasion, the, uh, local, uh, grid company had a, um, number of lines running into the C B D. Uh, two or three of them were out of ma, uh, out for maintenance. And, um, then there was another one that got damaged by a digger. And, um, then they had about three of them left. And the damage to, um, uh, one of, uh, one of those, um, was subsequently then done, uh, by their own communications department, um, because they, Speaker 4 00:31:55 No, no, I'm, I'm, I'm talking about their, their media people because, uh, they sort of, uh, uh, uh, decided that a good way of, uh, saving energy was to tell people to, um, turn off their PCs and have a cup instead. But of course, um, uh, what, uh, you do in New Zealand when you have a copper, you go to your, uh, uh, zip device with, uh, Russ and, uh, yeah, probably won't know about, but it's essentially an electric hot water heater that sits on the wall. So, uh, your whatever, a hundred, 150, uh, watt of power consumption of your PC was immediate, immediately replaced with about 2000 watts, um, uh, you know, running, running off your wall. Um, and so as a result of that, people all, all made themselves a copper, uh, very, very urgently, and they managed to blow the next cable. And so they had only one or two cables, uh, uh, left going into the central business district. Speaker 4 00:32:44 And at that point, it was basically load chatting and powering essential services only, um, the, uh, uh, university where our work, uh, you know, has its biggest campus in the, the central city, the entire campus by the computer center were shut down. And everybody, uh, was told to go home and work from home. And I was working at a satellite campus at the time, and every spare, um, you know, square meter of room, um, and on that campus was made available for people who literally had to, um, you know, take refuge, uh, from, um, uh, the central city from their mail room to to, to everything else. Um, and, uh, so, uh, and that, and that whole thing went on for about, you know, three weeks until they could very hastily construct an overland, uh, power line along a railway track, uh, you know, into the city. Speaker 4 00:33:32 And, um, until it was fully resolved, uh, was, was was several years, um, until they had a new tunnel with new cables, uh, built into the city. Yeah. So it, it, it, the effect can be quite substantial. It can be quite long lasting, especially when you get into, um, a situation where you have power lines blowing up. And this is, again, where having something that's overhead is easier to fix because it's accessible than something that you have below ground. Yeah. If you have a below ground power line, um, these aren't just wires. Um, these are actually wires that sit in an, uh, in a pressurized inert gas environment, and they need to be pressurized in order to operate. So, um, and, and just re pressurizing those, and even just getting enough of them and laying them and, um, you know, all of that, that took, that took a long time to get right, . Speaker 2 00:34:20 Yeah. But I, I would be worried that the resiliency of a supply chain for things like replacement transformers and transformer fluids and cables of this spec would be a significant problem. I mean, ever given, kind of made us just a little bit sensitive to the resilience of supply chains. Speaker 4 00:34:39 Yes, very much, very much so. And we saw this in fact, firsthand earlier in the year with, uh, cyclone Gabrielle in, in New Zealand, where in fact, both power and communications, uh, were lost to large parts of the New Zealand, New Zealand, north Island, uh, especially the Hawkes Bay and, and, and Northland. So Hawkes Bay is the areas of, between Napier and discipline and up, up to East Cape. And, uh, were basically the same bridges that were carrying, you know, power, uh, you know, and, and, uh, you know, back haul fiber, uh, you know, got washed away and roads got washed away. And so we ended up in a situation where the civil defense people didn't realize how important communication was. And, uh, so when the local, uh, uh, the local mobile networks, for example, wanted to go and recommissioned cell sites that had been disconnected, uh, you know, both from power and from backhaul, uh, com connectivity, they were met with civil defense officials, uh, who basically didn't realize that, that their radios, which in in those areas are literally just mobile phones, didn't work because these people were wanting to restore the sites that made them work. Speaker 4 00:35:45 And, um, so they ended up in a situation where, you know, once that, that, that, that sort of had been realized, uh, that a lot of helicopter capacity that would've been needed for search and rescue was actually needed not only to fly people to, uh, to cell phone sites, remote cell phone sites in order to start them back up again and to fly generators into those sites because that run out of battery power, because their, their, their mains got disconnected, but also they then had to, in, in the, in the following days, they had to go and actually refuel these sites by helicopter because the, the, the, the generators didn't last that long either. And so a lot of helicopter capacity was tied down, um, you know, uh, by the need to keep the communication network going because it didn't have the power resiliency that it should have had. Speaker 4 00:36:30 And so it's a lot of, there's, there's been a lot of debate around this, um, in the last few months. And, um, a lot of finger pointing from, you know, various parties involved, um, as to, uh, you know, who's to blame and, you know, what we might do in order to avoid or repeat. But then, you know, people suddenly realize, and again, talking supply chains here, that, um, when you don't have communication, one of the things, for example, that, uh, disappears is your ability to make electronic payments. Now, you know, electronic payments aren't just internet banking transactions. They're also, um, point of sale, uh, things. And in New Zealand, for example, very few people still use cash. So we had the situation where people would, uh, go to their local building supply store and say, Hey, you know, we need a few pieces of wood in order to, you know, fix things around the house or the farm that got damaged by the floods. Speaker 4 00:37:18 And the building supply store said, well, we're terribly sorry. We can't sell you anything because you haven't got cash, and we can't take electronic payments, and supermarkets couldn't take electronic payments, and everything depended on this, and everything then started interlocking. And that's, that, that's really what you've been, been, been, you know, hinting at, uh, you know, there, George, because it's, um, you know, it's just one of those things that, you know, tends to make life really, really difficult if you haven't planned for it in advance. And this is where sort of small effects, so banks can sort of mushroom a little bit. Speaker 5 00:37:54 Yes, I do. Uh, people don't realize that, and that's why I, people ask me's happen here and there, it's combination of stuff makes, it's not just, uh, the internet down, just, it's all connected. And that's actually a now we way more connected years. If, if you don't indeed don't, haven't prepared for it. Speaker 2 00:38:40 I wonder if we can make one of these solar cycles line up with the 2038 Unix time field problem and have Y two K combined with, no, I don't think that would be a sensible idea. So Yelp, how, when you say we get notice, it's, it's days, it's weeks, it's hours, Speaker 5 00:39:06 It's days for the, you see, you've got explos, easily satellites watching the so is one another one, the s another one. And do people see that immediately? What you also see is, uh, that, uh, satellites, uh, continuous measuring, uh, accidents and all stuff, and these go very fast. That's second. So they see that something's coming. And so then often you can see whether or not, uh, which direction it takes, because these are bundles. It's not necessarily that everything around them be touched a, but so people highly notice except from some radio fallouts, and you see that more or less coming, what is that also generated by certain spots? Speaker 5 00:40:43 Spots. And you see these coming, these are continuously being watched, and when they, uh, turn from the back of the sun to the front always, which way will the sun? So that's what people can do. This actually interesting sun weather, which is a site and which continuously tells you about this and also actually find, deal with this. And so that's, uh, if you more information, there's wealth, how these things, this, another thing is that one of the things happens an how well the work. And so these are continuously methods as well. And, uh, you can, and, uh, so there's a lot more measurements going on than you actually Japanese see from behavior of the, and the gps when North Korea is loing yet another rocket. I mean, this thing, that's how close they watching this stuff. So if there's really going on, people will notice the only thing is don't want, uh, solve it and the media gets halt on it and start to panic and make stuff worse. That, Speaker 2 00:42:40 So there is of course, the other potential source of disruption to the telecommunications network, which Ulrich has gently reminded me about, which is not solar in origin, Speaker 4 00:42:59 But indeed uses pretty much the, uh, , the, the, the same effect. And these are nuclear electromagnetic pulses. And, uh, those are in effect that was, uh, that was observed quite widely, uh, during the nuclear, uh, tests, especially in the Pacific, um, in the 1950s and 1960s. And, you know, even, you know, uh, you know, into later decade, uh, decades. And so the idea there is that you basically, um, you know, have a, have a nuclear bomb, and, uh, you make it go off and, um, that causes a very, very strong electromagnetic pulse. Um, and the effects there are quite similar to what you'd normally expect in the solar storm in a, in a quite bad one. And so people were starting to notice that, for example, teletypes were, uh, you know, starting to play up and, um, and, uh, telegraph equipment and telephone equipment was getting fried, you know, even hundreds or, uh, you know, even thousands of kilometers away from those, uh, specific, um, uh, test sites. Speaker 4 00:43:56 Um, and, um, you know, up to the point where people sort of started speculating that, um, this might be used as a weapon against, um, you know, grids, um, you know, worldwide and, you know, rather than nuking people, um, you know, send the weapon into space and, uh, nuclear, uh, and, uh, namp their infrastructure, so namp and nuclear electromagnetic pulses that's there abbreviation for it. Um, and so, um, uh, what happened in response to this is that a lot of the militaries around the planet, uh, who realized that they were using electronics, they started hardening their electronics against nuclear electromagnetic, uh, pulse interference. And, you know, this is obviously something that's, uh, you know, still being done. Um, but at the same time, the question is, you know, how susceptible, you know, would civilian infrastructure be? And you know, again, we're probably ending up at, you know, you know, at the park or greatest the most, uh, uh, uh, most vulnerable, you know, piece of equipment there. Speaker 4 00:44:53 And, um, um, you know, of course, you know, these days, uh, you know, the specter of nuclear war isn't, you know, isn't as far away anymore as it was maybe, you know, 15 or 20 years ago. Um, but uh, you know, at the same time, um, uh, again, what sort of made us more resilient against space weather in the last few decades is also what's making us a bit more resilient against this sort of thing. Although, you know, obviously if it were to happen, it would probably be quite a substantial escalation, uh, you know, on the international, uh, you know, scale and, um, um, Speaker 2 00:45:27 I think we might have other problems to worry about. Yeah, Speaker 3 00:45:31 . Yeah. Yeah. So that's all very interesting. Um, yeah, I was a little, the whole optical thing was a little confusing for a minute there, but yeah, it's all very interesting and I think it is something that, particularly I think where we started this George, which is the low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, higher earth orbit or GeoSyn stuff are really probably where we're gonna see a lot of the impact for the immediate future. That would be my guess of anything like this. And then, you know, secondarily it's gonna be in power lines. And then perhaps, I mean, I, again, I still see, you know, in-building wiring is still a problem in some cases, I would think, because you still get, like radio signals still pass through or high voltage or, uh, wireless signals can still pass through walls and stuff. So, but that's, Speaker 4 00:46:29 Yeah, yeah, you, you generally need very, very long wires in order to pick up sufficient voltage to cause to cause a problem. Ah, and typically Watson buildings, you know, won't, won't be quite long enough in order to cause you serious issues because I mean, with buildings you have other, you know, sources of, uh, pulses as well. Um, lightning for example, uh, is a very common one. And, um, most systems are designed around, uh, you know, at least some level of resilience against that. And when that said, if you, if, if your building gets hit by lightning, chances are that there will be damage, um, to electronic equipment in, in inside the building. I mean, the very building I'm sitting in here in the mo, uh, at the moment has been hit by lightning. The neighboring buildings here have been hit by lightning because of the, uh, it's at the top of a hill and there's been damage in every single incident despite the fact . Well, Speaker 2 00:47:16 Ulrich, you are on the lowest bandwidth, coincidence, I don't think so. , Speaker 4 00:47:21 Um, that's, that, that's got, that's got other reasons , uh, which have more to do with German telecoms regulations, uh, than, and, um, and just administrative district boundaries than anything else, . But, uh, that's a longer story. . Speaker 6 00:47:38 Yeah. Speaker 2 00:47:41 Well, ya, Ulrich Ross, thank you very much. That was really fascinating. Speaker 4 00:47:49 Thanks for having us, George. Speaker 5 00:47:53 I hope shed some light on what's happening and one, don't get into because that's what people tend to do. And, uh, if you see, uh, every last time we reading, uh, you saw b news outlets making a lot of noise about it and without actually explaining what's happening. So you have to watch that, especially, Speaker 2 00:48:35 I, I think, I think we're probably more in be alert, but not alarmed, but the potential, the potential lies there for an event to be larger than we planned for. And the consequence lies there for it to be more widespread than we thought, but perhaps we should be more prepared than concerned. Speaker 4 00:48:56 Mm-hmm. , that's a, that's a very, very important point. I mean, you know, resilience is something that you need to plan for and that you need to invest in and, um, that you need to design into the systems that you build. I mean, you know, going back to the Cyclone Gabriel thing for a moment, um, there was actually one particular telecoms provider in New Zealand that was almost unaffected in the area by, by any office, except that they were a consumer provider. And this is the former, um, uh, broadcasting New Zealand, um, um, uh, bcn z uh, uh, success Accordia. And they're basically a backhaul inter, uh, internet service provider, and they use mostly wireless, um, uh, connections between Hillside and they were originally building these hill sites in order to keep the radio New Zealand broadcasting network, uh, working. And that's always been the emergency broadcaster for New Zealand. Speaker 4 00:49:46 And, uh, so they've, they've built sites that you can literally run for months completely, uh, autonomously and unattended. And they've been doing this for decades and they had no significant alters in the entire area because they, they were basically sitting on a network that was designed to deal with events like this. And, um, everybody else was basically just putting, you know, consumer grade vulnerable stuff in that relied on the local, um, uh, mains power to come in almost continuously. And that was designed for only sort of small outages like, you know, car running into power pole type stuff where, you know, you're back up and running, you know, eight hours later. Um, and, uh, so if you plan for it, if you de design for it, and yes, it does cost a little bit more under some circumstances, uh, circumstances at least, and one, in other cases it's just a matter of, you know, keeping parts dive worse and having one cable running this way and the other, you know, cable, you know, running, running a completely different route, um, to give you resiliency and stuff like that. Speaker 4 00:50:46 You know, when when, when you put this in at the design phase, um, then that makes a grow, uh, you know, a communications grow, a power growth much, much more resilient. And this is the sort of solutions that we really need to start looking for. It's not the solutions, um, you know, along the lines of, oh, you know, we're gonna panic with the space weather, how we're gonna all put a tinfoil hat on, you know, on top of Mother Earth this is not gonna work. Right. Uh, we need to make sure that, uh, we design for, uh, resiliency and that we also, uh, have a look at what the knock-on effects are, where, where it hits the supply chains and, uh, where that, uh, where, where that, uh, causes trouble further downstream. And that's clearly something that, uh, that New Zealand's just learned very, very hard as a lesson and very publicly so.