This post works through the search for hardware compatible with VMware’s ESXi type 1 hypervisor, for the purpose of running virtual machines (VMs) on a desktop computer. That leads to a different post on the matter, speculating on how an EMP attack might actually happen. In short, we would be a small number of people, living with a lot of rust and, soon enough, a lot of Chinese people (or whoever was responsible for the EMP attack) taking over. To get fertilizer to the farms, and food from the farms, someone would have to use tow trucks to clear the roads – which wouldn’t happen because the tow trucks would be as fried as everything else. This damage would extend from the vehicles themselves to the roads, railroad tracks, depots, and ports that would be variously clogged, damaged, or set afire by such events. A certain amount of damage would ensue when cars, trucks, trains, boats, and planes ceased to function, and therefore promptly ran into things, caught fire, rolled over, and fell, sank, or blew up. Of course, our problems with computing hardware would be significantly alleviated when 90% of us died because our agricultural and transportation sectors went bust. In that case, we’d only have to keep those Blu-ray discs safe for a few years, until we could afford a player and a computer to connect it to. The other post suggests that possibly the best we could hope for would be that at least we stored a backup of our data on optical discs, which (unlike hard and solid state drives) would not be affected by an EMP. Anyway, the capacity would simply not be there, for a long time, to build enough electronic devices to put 330 million Americans back into their pre-bomb lifestyles. Even if we did, we’d have to get in line: the rest of the world would still be humming away in fact they’d probably be doing a lot of business, stepping into the vacancies left by now-failed American companies. We would have to order replacement devices from other countries that were still doing OK because they happened to be on the opposite side of the Earth from where the bomb went off – but this assumes that we would have money when, with a wrecked economy, we probably wouldn’t. The worst-case scenario would thus entail the deaths of an estimated 90% of Americans (i.e., about 300 million people) through starvation and exposure.Įven worse, it could mean the virtual end of computing in America.įor one thing, we don’t make most of our own electronic devices – but if we did, that would end if (as it appears) the machines that make such things would likewise be fried by the EMP pulse. This seems worth looking into, as several nations and organizations known to be hostile to the United States appear to have researched the probable effects of an EMP weapon on key elements of American infrastructure.Īt its worst, it appears that explosion of a single nuclear device, at an altitude of a few hundred miles above the U.S., could substantially wreck this country’s transportation, food, and electrical systems, along with most of its electronic devices. For many years, scientists have recognized that these pulses are capable of causing damage far greater than any but the most extreme solar events.Ī separate post sketches what appears to be the current state of knowledge on the risk and extent of the potential damage that an EMP attack could cause. The more worrisome source of electromagnetic radiation is the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) produced by explosion of nuclear weapons. It appears that most of our electronic devices are designed on the gamble that that won’t happen within their lifetime. There have been more severe instances, and there is the possibility of a solar event that could damage electronics across much of the world. Solar flares are a common and, in most cases, relatively mild source of electromagnetic disturbance. By contrast, electromagnetic damage could be a one-shot, virtually instantaneous affair. Depending upon their rate of reproduction and other factors, that could be a very long time. Plastic-eating microbes would presumably survive until they ran out of plastics to eat. The durations of these two threats could of course be very different. This post contributes a brief mention of electromagnetic damage as another existential threat to computing. A previous post observes that efforts to develop plastic-eating microbes could spell the end of computing.
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