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WHAT IF THE SUN WENT OUT


	Disasters are in fashion these days, and  somehow I have been
led to think about  a really big one - what if the sun went out?  The
first question to ask before  writing our tale of panic and  paranoia
is this.  How many people could survive how long?

	Not many and not long is  the obvious answer, and we envisage
the  scene in the  movie a  last survivors in  the underground bunker
shiver and draw lots as  to who will be eaten next and  secretly plot
to fix the lottery.

	Unfortunately  for you fans  of disaster movies,  the obvious
answer is  mistaken.    The  more  one  thinks  about  it,  the  more
possibilities for survival come  to mind, and my final  conclusion is
that most Americans would die of old age, and their descendants would
survive almost as long as they would without the disaster - for a few
billion years.  I  have not so far been able to find  a way to save
most of the inhabitants of India.

	The  first problem that comes to mind  is that it would begin
to  get cold.    How  cold  and  how  soon?   During  the  winter  in
Antarctica, it  is dark all the  time, but it takes months  to get to
-100F even at the pole.  At  the coast, it doesn't get anywhere  near
that cold because of the sea.  The facts seem to be as follows:

	The thermal time constant  of the atmosphere is a  few weeks.
However,  the time constant of  the ocean is many  years.  Because of
convection in the  ocean, the  surface can't freeze  until the  whole
ocean  reaches 4  degrees  Celsius.   Because  of  convection in  the
atmosphere,  the atmosphere  can't get  much below freezing  near the
coasts or much  below Antarctic temperatures  inland until the  ocean
surface  freezes.     Therefore,  we  will  have   very  cold  winter
temperatures near  the  coasts and  had  better evacuate  the  inland
areas.

	We will be unable to heat our  houses, because we already use
40% of our  energy for that purpose, and we couldn't even get through
one year with our available  energy production.  Therefore, we  would
start dying off in  a few months, right?  Wrong,  we just wouldn't be
able  to afford so much  housing.  In fact, we  would have to abandon
90% of our  housing and live  in the remaining  10% and insulate  the
walls of that 10% by  piling up dirt.  At barracks levels of crowding
and good insulation, we could get by on body heat if we  could
find the food to generate the body heat.

	However, if insulation is too good, it is necessary to provide
specifically for ventilation, and simply pumping in fresh air loses
the heat content of the air that is pumped out.  Therefore, it is
necessary to use heat exchangers that warm the incoming fresh air
with the heat of the outgoing stale air.  These are in commercial use
in Europe and could be manufactured quickly.

	The next big problem is food.
How long would the  initial supplies last, and what would  we do when
they ran out?  Since most crops are annual, we normally have a
substantial fraction of a year's supplies of most foods.  Some foods
are in surplus and larger supplies are on hand.  We have larger
supplies just after a harvest than just before.  We would stop
feeding cattle to make our grain last longer, and we would ration
food severely.  We would keep the cattle going as long as there 
was hay, and then they would be slaughtered and the beef frozen.
  Probably this would give us two or three years to
get a new food supply.

	There are several long range possibilities, but the main
short range one is petroleum.  We presently produce about
500 million tons of petroleum per year, and processes are in use
for feeding it to bacteria that produce proteins that are used
for animal food supplements.
  These processes would have to be
used on a very much larger scale.  It would be more pleasant to
feed the bacterial products to chickens and eat the chickens, but
quite likely we would have to eat the bacterial products ourselves
for quite a few years.

	The 500 million tons of petroleum would produce more than
enough food for 200 million people.  A person eats about three
pounds per day, but three quarters of its content is water, so
one can estimate that our population would use only about
160 million tons per year of the petroleum.  Our ten year's reserves
would then stretch to thirty years.

	The most critical problem may be the freezing of the
atmosphere.  How long this would take is hard to calculate,
because it depends on the exchange of heat between the oceans
and the atmosphere.  The easy calculation is that the ocean
can supply several hundred times the amount of heat in currently
in the atmosphere before the surface freezes.  This would
probably give us a breathable atmosphere for about ten years.

	After that the oxygen we need to breathe will still be
around, but it will have to be vaporized to be used.  It will
therefore be better to recirculate what we use in our buildings,
and this mainly means separating out the carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere and splitting it into oxygen for breathing and
carbon for food.

	This separation and splitting is now performed by
green plants with the aid of sunlight.  This is a possibility,
but it would require enormous underground rooms and an
enormous amount artificial light used at an efficiency of
around one percent.  More likely, we would use electrochemical
processes to do the splitting and get food for our bacteria.
Some products like sugar and some basic edible starch would
be synthesized directly from water and carbon dioxide.

	All this requires electricity, and the solution is
nuclear fission reactors.  We would build standard fission
reactors very fast.  At present we spend 12 years building
a reactor, but Taiwan builds them in 5, and experts think
it could be done in two and a half years with a crash program.
My bet is that we would discover that we could turn them out
in six months if we had to.  We might have to postpone some
of the safety facilities such as the pressure vessel.

	Unfortunately, in order to conserve uranium, we would
have to switch to breeder reactors as quickly as possible, and
we don't have a good design.  Parallel crash programs, one of
which would copy the French Super-phoenix design would be required.


Mobilization

	The above is a general description, but what happens
first when the scientists announce that the sun, which went
out yesterday, may not go on again.  Since I know no mechanism
that would extinguish the sun, there is no reason to ask how
they would know.  However, I suppose it could be considered part
of this exercise to ask what would happen if some said it would
come back and others said no.

	The first step is for scientists to convince the President
to go on TV with the above scenario for survival in the above
amount of detail and introduce whoever is taking technological
charge.  There is no doubt a difference of opinion about how
the public would react.  Perhaps some people would thingk that
the public would simply panic and refuse to pay attention to
any plans for survival.  There are certainly people with a death
wish, but I think a large enough majority would be willing to
mobilize for survival so that the irreversibly panicked would
be merely a police problem - albeit a serious one.

	The first physical step is to start crowding and rationing
food and fuel.  It might be best to start in a decentralized way.
Every city mayor and council is told to form a survival authority
with a scientific advisory committee.  Centralized national control
would be established later.

	The buildings that will be used for housing are designated
by the local authorities.  Where there are subways, they might be
used.  One or two story factories producing non-essentials, shopping center
buildings and schools might be best because they can be insulated
quickly.  They have to be filled with improvised bunks, and kitchens
have to be improvised.  As soon as this is done, utilities are cut
off to residential areas, so the holdouts have to move in.  Probably
people could move in in less than a week, but refitting would have
to continue much longer.

	Industries must be divided into essential and non-essential.
The essential go on three shifts and the non-essential are abandoned.
More than three quarters of our present activities would be found
non-essential, and the people working in them would be available to
put the essential activities on 24 hour days.

	For example, all educational activities are postponable,
and all high school and college students and teachers would be
mobilized for essential work.  Even junior high school students
might be used.  Grade school activities would be moved into the
buildings taken for living, but class size would be doubled.  Almost
all commercial, entertainment and legal activity is postponable.
Manufacturing would change its emphases as at the beginning of
World War II.

	Here are some of the essential activities.

	#. Building insulation and going underground.  This alone
would put the construction industry on working around the clock.
It can absorb much unskilled labor transferred from inessential
activities.

	#. Design and manufacture of heat exchangers so that ventilation
won't cost heat.  Existing models would be chosen and factories
making things out of sheet metal would go on 24 hour days.

	#. The telephone industry must figure out the effect of
cold on communication lines and make sure communication will survive.

	#. The chemical industry must scale up the bacterial production
of protein from oil.

	#. The oil industry must figure out how to keep oil flowing.

	#. Clothing for extreme cold has to be made on a large scale.
Present down clothing is good down to the -125 Celsius met in Antarctica if
piled on.

	In preparation for the time when the atmosphere freezes,
several steps are necessary.  Probably we would have some years to
prepare.

	#. The living and working places need to be made airtight and
to stand an internal atmospheric pressure.  We might have to use
oxygen at 5 pounds per square inch rather than the normal nitrogen
oxygen mixture in order to reduce the pressurizing required.

	#. A pressure suit for working outside with a self-contained
oxygen supply.  Provision for replenishing the supply every few hours
from larger tanks.

	#. A system for collecting oxygen and distributing it.

	#. A system for modifying vehicles to operate at extreme low
temperatures and with oxygen tanks as well as fuel tanks.  It isn't
obvious whether present vehicles could be modified or whether new
designs would be required.  Railroads might become more important
than trucks, because they might be easier to keep operating.  This
might mean extending tracks into the areas with lots of buildings
for people to live and work and choosing buildings near railroads.


Remarks:
.item←0

	#. Until the atmospheric pressure dropped substantially, airplanes
would remain usable.

	#. Less developed countries would not be able to save everyone,
and this might cause fighting.  We would probably have to be able to
fight off or accept a Mexican invasion.  Most likely, we could save
most of the Mexicans too.  The Canadians could probably save themselves
and so could most European countries.  The Russians might have organizational
difficulties and are behind us in deployed nuclear plants.

	If there were transferable resources that would make a large
difference in survival, there might be wars when countries would fight
others for them.  The only resource I can think of that has this
property is oil.  The amounts of oil required for conversion to food
is very much less than is currently being consumed for fuel, so the
U.S. could be independent again.  However, countries like Japan would
have to put a major part of their effort into keeping the oil transportation
system working as long as see conditions would permit.  Coal could
also be used as a feedstock for bacterial conversion.

	The point of this exercise is to show that the present dangers
that cause many intellectuals to express panic are minor compared to
dangers that our civilization could actually survive.  Our interdependent
society is easily annoyed because of the interdependence, but it is
very survivable because most people are in occupations that can be
abandoned in emergency.