The Machine Stops
Sunday, July 11th, 2004 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerToday we had a power cut, which is not unusual. What was unusual was that it lasted for an hour. The university has a back-up generator which usually kicks in after anything from two seconds to two minutes. It also kicks in with the kind of kick you normally only see in kung fu films, which made me glad that my wife picked up a six-way extension with a built-in power surge protector. When you spend a month's salary on an amplifier, you really don't want it to be kick-started by the generator when it's been taking its time about charging its capacitors or whatever it is they do. My computer, of course, has its own power saver, but when the warning beeps finally died, I started to get worried. Not about my computer, which I assumed (correctly) would power itself down with no ill effects, but about the freezer. Having bought a fridge with a decent sized deep freeze a few months ago, we enthusiastically filled the freezer compartment with goodies ranging from chickpeas to chicken wings, from köfte to pizza (the latter being the result of Domino's "buy one mega-pig-out pizza, get one free" offer). What if all this carefully stock-piled goodness were to turn into a pile of salmonella-infested sludge?
Of course this shows my ignorance of freezers (my parents had nothing more than a tiny ice-box until years after I'd left home). An hour later, when the power was back and I got some köfte (Mid-East meatballs) out of the freezer, I still had to whack them hard to separate them. Individually, they could be used as slingshots.
This all prompted the usual musing on our dependence on technology. In fact, most such musings are suspect. Every so often, some hairy person living in a hobbit-hole in Idaho will lament our dependence on technology, claiming that the average city dweller would starve to death in his neck of the woods because schools don't teach useful things like how to gut a deer carcass. So what? You could probably put an experienced !Kung hunter in the woods in Idaho and he would be in a fix because his hunting skills are designed for the Kalahari Desert, and don't include things like how to light a fire when it's raining. With a friendly guide to tell him useful things like "that's poison ivy, don't use it to make a loin cloth" I'm sure he'd be fine in a few days, but then with a few more days, I probably would be too. I might even be better off, since I know wood-lore like "follow the ADSL cables to the survivalist's hideout."
Another dubious argument that is sometimes put forward is that our society and its technology have become so complex and interdependent that a major disaster like a plague or a meteorite hitting the Earth would leave the survivors in the same position as the hypothetical New York accountant in the woods of Idaho. One character in the old British series Survivors asks rhetorically, "Can you make a stone arrowhead?" Since I was about eleven years old and into things like making stone arrowheads, I shouted out "Yes!" However, the question is absurd.
Any disaster that wasn't big enough to kill every human on the planet would not be big enough to get rid of more than a fraction of our technology. We have bombs that can kill people while leaving the infrastructure intact (or so we're told - I don't think the DoD Ethics Committee have got round to approving field trials yet). We do not yet have bombs that can destroy technology while leaving the people intact. Sure, most things wouldn't work for a while, and you wouldn't be able to blog about the apocalypse or order pizza, but, as a character in Eric Flint's 1632 (graciously made available online by the Baen Free Library) says, you can use what 21st century technology you have left to manufacture 19th century technology, then work your way up pretty quickly. And with fewer people around to drain resources, you probably wouldn't have to mine for metals ever again.
Of course it helps if plenty of engineers and scientists survive the catastrophe, but even if most of the survivors were klutzy humanities types, the two most important resources would still be there: literacy and the scientific method (unless of course by some chance they were all postmodernists, in which case they'd starve to death while maintaining skepticism toward meta-narratives and criticising logocentricity). It took us several thousand years to get from agriculture to the idea of testing a hypothesis, and only a few centuries to get from there to microchips. With a fair number of unburnt books and unmelted CDs, and no tricky problems like how to feed six billion people, we'd probably have flying cars within a few generations.
Of course this shows my ignorance of freezers (my parents had nothing more than a tiny ice-box until years after I'd left home). An hour later, when the power was back and I got some köfte (Mid-East meatballs) out of the freezer, I still had to whack them hard to separate them. Individually, they could be used as slingshots.
This all prompted the usual musing on our dependence on technology. In fact, most such musings are suspect. Every so often, some hairy person living in a hobbit-hole in Idaho will lament our dependence on technology, claiming that the average city dweller would starve to death in his neck of the woods because schools don't teach useful things like how to gut a deer carcass. So what? You could probably put an experienced !Kung hunter in the woods in Idaho and he would be in a fix because his hunting skills are designed for the Kalahari Desert, and don't include things like how to light a fire when it's raining. With a friendly guide to tell him useful things like "that's poison ivy, don't use it to make a loin cloth" I'm sure he'd be fine in a few days, but then with a few more days, I probably would be too. I might even be better off, since I know wood-lore like "follow the ADSL cables to the survivalist's hideout."
Another dubious argument that is sometimes put forward is that our society and its technology have become so complex and interdependent that a major disaster like a plague or a meteorite hitting the Earth would leave the survivors in the same position as the hypothetical New York accountant in the woods of Idaho. One character in the old British series Survivors asks rhetorically, "Can you make a stone arrowhead?" Since I was about eleven years old and into things like making stone arrowheads, I shouted out "Yes!" However, the question is absurd.
Any disaster that wasn't big enough to kill every human on the planet would not be big enough to get rid of more than a fraction of our technology. We have bombs that can kill people while leaving the infrastructure intact (or so we're told - I don't think the DoD Ethics Committee have got round to approving field trials yet). We do not yet have bombs that can destroy technology while leaving the people intact. Sure, most things wouldn't work for a while, and you wouldn't be able to blog about the apocalypse or order pizza, but, as a character in Eric Flint's 1632 (graciously made available online by the Baen Free Library) says, you can use what 21st century technology you have left to manufacture 19th century technology, then work your way up pretty quickly. And with fewer people around to drain resources, you probably wouldn't have to mine for metals ever again.
Of course it helps if plenty of engineers and scientists survive the catastrophe, but even if most of the survivors were klutzy humanities types, the two most important resources would still be there: literacy and the scientific method (unless of course by some chance they were all postmodernists, in which case they'd starve to death while maintaining skepticism toward meta-narratives and criticising logocentricity). It took us several thousand years to get from agriculture to the idea of testing a hypothesis, and only a few centuries to get from there to microchips. With a fair number of unburnt books and unmelted CDs, and no tricky problems like how to feed six billion people, we'd probably have flying cars within a few generations.
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-12 11:37 am (UTC)