Environmental Engineering Reference
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off than others. After another few years, unless governments and utilities could muster the needed
effort, electricity might increasingly be seen as a luxury. Reliable, ubiquitous, 24/7 power could be-
come just a dim memory. If the challenges noted above are not addressed, many nations, including
the United States, could be in such straits by the third decade of the century.
In the best instance, nations would transition as much as possible to renewable power, main-
taining a functioning national grid or network of local distribution systems but supplying rationed
power in smaller amounts than is the currently the case. Digitized data would still be retrievable part
of the time, by some people. Yet even distributed renewable energy systems and commercial-scale
fuel cells (already being used as backups for major buildings) would be vulnerable to lack of spare
parts and thus might leave communities without power for extended periods. While the Internet is
designed to survive if sections of the network are destroyed, the server farms that are its backbone
require enormous amounts of electricity, as do the countless servers hosting private websites. Thus
even if your own forward-thinking neighborhood manages to stay powered 24/7 with solar panels
and methane digesters, the servers that had once stored years of your email correspondence, family
photos, and financial records may be sitting dark and dead in buildings thousands of miles away.
(Indeed, if you want to know the future of the Internet, don't look to Google or Microsoft; look
instead to Greece, Spain, Nigeria, or Kenya, where people with little money make the most of lim-
ited online access. Maintaining the benefits of global communications in a time of scarcity will
depend, not on our willingness to constantly update hardware and software, but on our ability to
maintain the functionality of an aging set of devices using as few energy, financial, and other re-
sources—and as little bandwidth—as possible.)
In the worst instance, economic and social crises, wars, fuel shortages, and engineering prob-
lems would rebound upon one another, creating a snowballing pattern of systemic failures leading
to permanent, total blackout. It may seem inconceivable that it would ever come to that. After all,
electrical power means so much to us that we assume the officials in charge will do whatever is
necessary to keep the electrons flowing. But, as Jared Diamond documents in his book Collapse ,
elites don't always do the sensible thing even when the alternative to rational action is universal
calamity.
Altogether, the assumption that long-term loss of power is unthinkable just doesn't stand up to
scrutiny. A permanent blackout scenario should exist as a contingency in our collective planning
process.
Remember Websites?
Over the short term, if the power were to go out, loss of cultural knowledge would not be at the top
of most people's lists of concerns. They would worry about more mundane necessities like refriger-
ation, light, heat, and banking. It takes only a few moments of reflection (or an experience of living
through a natural disaster) to appreciate how many of life's daily necessities and niceties would be
suddenly absent.
Of course, everyone did live without power until only a few generations ago, and hundreds of
millions of people worldwide still manage in its absence. So it is certainly possible to carry on the
essential aspects of human life sans functioning wall outlets. One could argue that, post-blackout,
there would be a period of adaptation, during which people would reformulate society and simply
get on with their business—living perhaps in a manner similar to their 19th-century ancestors or the
contemporary Amish.
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