Wikipedia article for the Carrington Event
For the sake of the question, "another Carrington Event" is defined as a storm with a Dst of -1000 nT hitting the Earth.
This is estimating the cost to the US government to harden critical infrastructure and improve preparedness enough that a second Carrington Event would cause nothing worse than a severe economic depression, instead of societal collapse. As a rough operationalization of this: at least 95% of the people who were alive in the US at the moment of the event need to still be alive after 6 months have passed.
Assume the storm hits within the next 5 years.
The costs might include things like:
sun observation
broadcasting geomagnetic storm predictions
training AI to predict geomagnetic storms and their impacts
sunspot research
transformer design research
and whatever else accomplishes the goal of keeping 95% of the population alive for 6 months after the event.
The cost would not include things like the cost of political lobbying for the project to be funded in the first place.
This market won't resolve unless the event in question actually occurs (see @robm's comment for issues with this). The phrase "within the next 5 years" should be interpreted relative to when you are reading this, rather than relative to when the market was begun.
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I'm confused: What spending does this include, exactly?
Does it include all spending on sun observation? The costs of broadcasting geomagnetic storm predictions? Training AI to predict geomagnetic storms and their impacts? Sunspot research? Transformer design research? All spending by all transmission system operators? All political lobbying for power grid improvements?
I cannot imagine everyone here would interpret this market similarly, much less try to resolve it in a remotely similar way if hypothetically they were given the task.
Does it include all spending on sun observation? The costs of broadcasting geomagnetic storm predictions? Training AI to predict geomagnetic storms and their impacts? Sunspot research? Transformer design research?
Yes to all of those, if doing that caused 95% of people to survive for 6 months. I'll add this to the description. Edit: Re "All spending by all transmission system operators?" I've also added the phrase "cost to the US government" to make it clear that this would be a government funded project.
All political lobbying for power grid improvements?
This is estimating the cost of the project itself, assuming the project was given the green light.
Even if an event happens, it doesn't give you enough information to answer this question
@robm It's a good point. Maybe a "consensus market" would be a better name for this type of question. The price ideally reflects what the best evidence currently predicts, and incentivizes people to get more evidence.
@singer mmm there is an ante here that the polls don't have, but with loans you get the ante back and never repay the loans because there is no resolution criteria.
Some differring questions which might be resolved empirically:
Will [event] happen by [Date]?
By [Date] how much will [event] have cost the world economy?
If [event] occurs by [Date], how much damage will it cause?
The first one will resolve YES or NO and if well calibrated it should tell you the odds of it happening.
The second one can resolve numerically and if we'll calibrated should tell you the expectation of damages, i.e. zero damage if the odds of event is zero, or something else if the costs are astronomical and the odds greater than zero.
The third being conditional could gage the actual event cost but requires a NA if the conditional is not satisfied.
@ShitakiIntaki I like your ideas for reframing the question in a way that is more resolveable. How would you reframe the current question?
but with loans you get the ante back and never repay the loans because there is no resolution criteria
We still have loans? I couldn't find them anymore after the site updates.
@singer oh I might be out of touch on the loans, maybe they are no longer since they have introduced real money rewards. However if there is no resolution criteria the ante is lost regardless of how accurate your predictions are because no one gets anything back, in which case it may be incentivised for accuracy even worse than a poll.
With respect to the current question, I am not sure that it can be rehabilitated. The question as posed asks for speculation. We could only tell if the system was sufficiently hardened or not if an event happens but we would not necessarily know how much if anything the US government spent specificly on hardening efforts nor would we know if they only what was necessary or if they overspent.
Perhaps the other issue is that many systems are privately owned/operated and the private sector may be expected to do the spending themselves, although probably spent on pasive solutions EMF shielding, and UPS systems rather than something akin to a tornado warning system, but for geomagnetic storms.
You could ask Yes/NO, Is the system hardened enough to not result in societal collapse in the next event or if event happens by date, but this question does not answer what you seem to be interested in..... which is, monetarily how under prepared is the system to prevent falling onto societal collaps as a consequence of event.