Life in the Rear-view Mirror

A Frightening Thought

Computer technology continues to make life easier for us. For example, my word processor corrects my grammar and spelling mistakes, which is wonderful. I don’t have to think about them anymore, but I am becoming more dependent on it and less on my mental abilities. As a result, when I write on paper I make a lot more mistakes then I used to. That reliance on technology is allowing me to become sloppy with my writing, but when the word processor isn’t available, I’m stuck.

The other day, while contemplating this situation, a really frightening thought occurred to me, “Without the computer I will be lost; and without electricity all of us will be dead in the water. There will be no computer, no internet and no communication.”

My mind wandered to a time, not long ago, when computers were not around and we had to rely on our mental abilities to solve problems. I am sure that most people can still do basic arithmetic on the back of an envelope, but how many can do square roots or trigonometry by hand. When I went to university, electronic calculators were not around, and we did everything with a slide rule. These days, I suppose that engineering students don’t even know what a slide rule is. It was a simple mechanical device that allowed us to multiply and divide, do squares and square roots, logarithms and exponentials, and other things. It was not as precise as the computer, or the electronic calculator that replaced it, but it worked without electricity. The computer has made us infinitely more efficient, but also infinitely more dependent on electricity.

Knowing how important electricity is to the modern society, the electrical supply grids have been designed to be reliable and robust to most external perturbations, but not all. Moreover, essential service providers, such as hospitals, have backup generators in case of power blackouts. These emergency backups are band-aid solutions, based on the assumption that grid power would be restored after a day or two, at most. There simply isn’t enough emergency power generation for business as usual. Therefore, a solid, reliable electrical system is essential for modern life. Without it, there would be no city life, as we know it today.

Some Torontonians have already experienced what life without electricity would be like after the 2013 ice storm. The lucky ones got power restored within hours, the unlucky ones waited for weeks, in bone-chilling weather. That was a wakeup call. We can no longer take uninterrupted power supply for granted. Yet, our reliance on electricity continues to grow! Just when we need it the most, we can rely on it the least.

What happens if the entire city loses power for one week? The entire city would shut down. Chaos would reign supreme. There would be no banking, no transportation, and stores would be closed. No bread would be baked and no coffee shops would be open. Even gas service stations would be closed. Remember the big concern about Y2K? If Toronto lost power for one week, it would make the then anticipated disaster look miniscule in comparison. The economic losses would be huge. But, what happens, if instead of one week, we lose power for one month, or one year? Impossible! Not as impossible as we would like to believe. It’s probable enough for insurance companies to be concerned!

I started learning about sun flares and magnetic storms years ago, as they are the main drivers of climate change, a subject that interests me deeply. That’s when I discovered that insurance companies take solar storms seriously. They happen more frequently than we know, and with regularity and varying degrees of severity. Most of them cause very little damage, and that’s the reason we don’t hear about them. But every fifty years, or so, there is a big one, like the one that hit Quebec in 1989; and about every 150 years there is a very big one, like the one named after Richard Carrington, who was the first to spot the huge solar flare of 1859.

The Carrington storm happened during an era when the telegraph was considered a high-tech communication system; and when it hit, telegraph systems all over North America and Europe failed. Telegraph operators even received electric shocks. The March 1989 storm caused an eleven-hour blackout in many parts of Quebec. In addition, some space satellites lost control and stopped communicating, but resumed functioning after the storm dissipated.

Researchers have estimated that a storm with the severity of the 1989 one can recur every fifty years, and one with an 1859 magnitude every 150 years. The science of estimating these frequencies is not precise, but insurance companies expect the next big storm to hit at any time. It could be tomorrow, a year from now, or even ten years from now, but it will happen; and when it does, none of us will be prepared for it. Moreover, it will hit us like a ton of bricks. If we are lucky, it won’t hit us during winter because experts predict that blackouts could last for months. Others believe that it could be more than a year. Even if we can dismiss the most dire predictions, living in a city without electricity for one month would give new meaning to the expression, city living. We are so dependent on it that it’s hard to imagine what life would be like without it.

In my mind, this begs the question, has technology taken us too far? It’s a question that each of us should be asking without fear of being labelled a Luddite.

Given the importance of electricity to modern cities, where the majority of people live in large high-rise apartments and condos, why are we not better prepared to cope with an extended loss of electrical power? If one would happen tomorrow, we would not know what to do. Governments spent billions of dollars preparing for Y2K, which turned out to be a non-event, and zero dollars for one with a high probability of occurring in the coming years or decades.

I recently traveled in places where people lived with little or no electricity. In some of the places we stayed at, a small solar panel delivering about 200 watt-hours, was sufficient to light up the house after sundown. Of course, they didn’t have refrigerators, microwave ovens, computers, or forced-air furnaces to heat the house. So, a monster magnetic storm, unleashed by a massive solar flare entering the earth’s atmosphere, wouldn’t have any effects there.

Clearly, we live at the other end of the spectrum, where daily electricity consumption is in the tens of kilowatt-hours; and, as a reader recently reminded me, the objective in life is to find a balance between extremes. Somewhere between these two extremes is a happy medium. To achieve that, we need to reduce our dependence on electricity: we need to consume less. Moreover, we need to reduce our dependence on the power grid: we need multiple sources. That should be Government’s responsibility. They need to fund the research and technology that will give us home or community-based power sources that will be immune to the events that may severely damage our power grids. It’s one thing if one thousand, or even ten thousand, people lose power. It’s quite another if the entire city of three million loses power. When that happens, everything electrical will stop working!

I am not being alarmist. I’m simply reflecting on the fact that electricity has become essential to daily life, and we have no idea what to do, or how to cope, when, for one reason or another, it disappears for a prolonged period of time. Because the consequences can be severe, individually and collectively, we need to be prepared for the possibility. It’s something that we all need to ponder on, including our governments.

I can remember living without electricity when I was a child, and even today, millions of people still live without electricity around the world. So, it's possible. However, their lives don’t revolve around computers and communication devices, as ours do.

I will leave you with another scary thought, what would happen if the Internet suddenly goes rogue? What would happen if one morning we wake up and discover that scoundrels control the World Wide Web? Just food for thought!

You can expect more on these subjects in later chapters.

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