Denamic said:
A powerful electromagnetic storm would probably kill a lot of electronics, but that's hardly enough to set us back 300 years. Even without electronics, we still have the knowledge and means to rebuild. Worst case scenario, even if all electronics die, which is completely impossible, we would have a global economic collapse. Nothing even close to an apocalypse.
Okay well the problem isn't that they could just kill electronics a big enough storm will actually destroy power grids, it would destroy all the converters, current regulators and transformers because of the currents it induces in them. That kind of equipment is actually fairly delicate and there is a lot of it, seriously a lot of it and if enough of it failed there can actually be dangerous and uncontrollable chain reactions that jump from facility to facility. If enough of it was damaged there are simply not enough spare parts to repair it (which takes a while at the best of times) and there are not enough factories in the world to build replacements fast enough, it would take
years to repair it all. We are not talking about a few offline computers and cell phones here. Every part of the network that brings power from the power stations to homes and businesses could literally be destroyed and repairing it would be a monumental task, maybe an impossible one.
Then you have the effects of that, think of a big city like New York. It uses over 1,000,000,000,000 gallons of water a day, consequently it needs to dispose of 1,805,000,000,000 gallons of sewerage a day during dry weather.
The system is so complex and parts of it are so old that its boarding on failure at the best of times despite billions of USD invested into it because there are tens of thousands of miles of pipe and hundreds of pumps, overflows, catch basins and all the other engineering needed to operate it.
Where do you think the power that runs all comes from? Its true parts of the network have diesel and gas turbine backups as well as connected to the power grid but they are reliant on fuel, in a long term nationwide blackout getting the fuel to those plants would be problematic. Resources would be spread thin and the infrastructure that provides that fuel would be suffering and maybe knocked offline.
How do you provide water for millions of people? Bring it in on trucks in bottles or tankers? Good luck with that even at rationing levels, then keeping the trucks running would be difficult too as there are only so many trucks and the road network would be congested with refugees and where do you get the fuel for the trucks? Then what do you do with the waste? Trucks? I don't think so, so do you throw it in the river? Okay, the people during the 19th century learned the results of that the hard way and as people became desperate enough to drink river water you would have countless thousands of sick people.
I will not even go into food and civil disorder because I should have made my point by now.