Our Fragile Computerized World

It is not just a dependency on computers that makes our increasing technologically intertwined society fragile, but many things.

The ultimate underpinning is electricity. If that fails for more than a day or so, cities rapidly become "unlivable", communications shut down to a large extent, refrigeration, elevators, heating and air conditioning systems, gas pumps and so on don't work. Water pressure drops as only backup power is available for pumps, and once their fuel runs out, there is no water at all. Natural gas follows in a prolonged blackout, as does the conventional phone network.

That the electric grid is fragile has been demonstrated on numerous occasions.

The combination of a major solar flare event causing surges in the grid along with a few equipment malfunctions and/or a wrong decision or two from utility personnel could produce enough equipment damage to result in a regional blackout of many days duration, and brownouts or selective (rotating) blackouts for many weeks afterward.

Nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere designed to produce electromagnetic pulses could damage both the grid and a wide variety of electronics.

Certainly one lesson that we have not learned yet, despite a number of hazardous failures is that the laws should require that cell phone networks have adequate back up power throughout their systems.

Greg

Too much DEPRNDENCE on any thing can make it fragile .

We have built the biblical, Tower of Babel. Our civilization is perched precariously on the pinnacles of technologies that only specialists understand. We speak in jargons that resemble foreign languages. If some catastrophe brought us down, could we rebuild?

Bob

I just hope that our Tower of Babel crumbles sooner rather than later. The higher we build it the harder it's gonna fall.

If any of you have tried to build a home lately you would know how our current mind set is undermining itself. There are so many codes as to what you can and cannot do, self support is getting knocked out at the knees.