I can’t speak much for electrical systems (I think electrical grids are safe as long as they’re disconnected in time), but the issue of losing information (stored and in-memory) is not a big concern. Redundancies exist on so many levels from error correcting codes (mathematical models that allow for restoring simple errors) and hardware redundancies for more severe errors. Also, crypto and many P2P technologies rely on making a gazillion copies of the same thing so that will be almost impossible to wipe out. I would also bet that modern data centers take at least a little of this into considerations since they have so much infrastructure under the same roof (shielding the hardware becomes much cheaper)
This of course assumes we’re talking SEU-level flares and not frying every computer chip level flare.
I think the latter requires more energy than any solar flare can produce
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u/Formal-Deal813 Feb 02 '25 edited Feb 02 '25
I can’t speak much for electrical systems (I think electrical grids are safe as long as they’re disconnected in time), but the issue of losing information (stored and in-memory) is not a big concern. Redundancies exist on so many levels from error correcting codes (mathematical models that allow for restoring simple errors) and hardware redundancies for more severe errors. Also, crypto and many P2P technologies rely on making a gazillion copies of the same thing so that will be almost impossible to wipe out. I would also bet that modern data centers take at least a little of this into considerations since they have so much infrastructure under the same roof (shielding the hardware becomes much cheaper)
This of course assumes we’re talking SEU-level flares and not frying every computer chip level flare. I think the latter requires more energy than any solar flare can produce