Spruance Del Curtin was winding up the day’s work for Dr. Doorne. Now that he knew what the data represented, and why certain types of data tended to move in tandem, what he was seeing was very worrisome.
If this goes on, what will even be left? Already some countries were no longer reporting data, and were having to be dropped from the analysis. Most of them were small countries in Africa, but there were some in South America and in Asia.
Others were hanging on in spite of taking a beating. The US was a big country, with lots of depth of field to absorb blows, but Japan and even Israel remained functional, albeit struggling under the weight of enormous losses.
Sprue recalled his conversation with Cindy Margrave — when had that been? — about Colonel Hearne’s discussion in class about trust, and about how levels of trust were so critical in determining how well a society would function, particularly when under strain. Of course the colonel was recalling the Energy Wars — although he was already a veteran astronaut by that time, he knew more than a few people who’d served in the Middle East during that time — but current events were certainly playing out that argument in real time.
Just as he was doing the final checks on the data, Dr. Doorne walked in. “Statistics class is canceled for today. I just got word that Engineering and IT are beginning a special effort to increase the hardening on our electronics in the upper levels against a worst-case solar storm.”
Not surprising when one considered she held an advanced degree in electrical engineering as well as astronomy — one of the big reasons she was up here, rather than down on Earth. “Do you really think we’ll have a storm bad enough to do that kind of damage?”
“It’s hard to say. However, we are clearly moving into a historic solar minimum, and there is strong evidence both from history and from studies of other G-class stars of similar age in the galactic neighborhood that the incidence of these sorts of events actually increase during these periods. There’s a lot of speculation about stellar dynamo magnetodynamics, but to put it in layman’s terms, we think that sunspots actually serve to relieve the strain, rather like small earthquakes on a fault line.”
Sprue recalled some things that Juss Forsythe and Spencer Dawes had said about studying in California. “And if there aren’t any for a long time, when the fault does move, it’s a big one.”
“Exactly. Although we have a much better grasp of the mechanics involved in earthquakes, for the simple reason that seismologists have a lot of faults to study, and we astronomers have only one Sun. Until recently, we simply didn’t have the technology to study other stars at the level of detail we needed to even make educated guesses at how their internal dynamics compared to that of our own.”
It sounded very much like she was about to launch into a story of the state of astronomy when she was working on her PhD. Sprue didn’t need to be told to know the technology she was talking about would be the radio and optical telescopes right here on Farside.
Not to mention that he couldn’t linger here. “Um, Doc, I’ve only got an hour to get down to the dining commons and grab lunch, and then get to the station and start my air shift.”
“Right, of course. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He could hear the unspoken assuming we don’t have further schedule changes as the situation develops. And given that his work with Engineering was now having him liaison with IT, there was a good probability he’d be roped into this task too.