Suppose one day, in fair weather and not during a brutal
heat wave, all the power shuts out. The
first thing to do is make sure your car starts.
If it doesn’t and you didn’t leave the lights on, that’s big trouble.
The same thing will have happened to your neighbors.
Or, imagine you are driving in a city’s trendy nightclub
district, and suddenly all the lights go out, and your car dies. And so does everyone else’s. It’s “Pitch Black” (like the 2000 movie).
Of course, your cell phone won’t work. In fact, if you have a laptop or iPad handy,
it won’t boot up, either, even to work offline.
The grim reality would be that a major portion of the
country has suffered an EMP attack from an electromagnetic pulse. A likely
cause could be a high altitude nuclear weapon (with minimal actual blast),
launched from an offshore missile by a terrorist, or possibly a rogue state
(like North Korea or Iran). Maybe this is the way an extraterrestrial
alien invasion would start! In fact, conventional microwave-based military weapons
than can do this exist and are in use by our Army in Afghanistan, and could
disable whole cities or neighborhoods, should they fall into the wrong
hands. There’s a fictitious scene in the
2001 film “Oceans 11” where one is used in Las Vegas to enable a heist; and,
no, the lights would not come back on as they do in the film. (NBC's "The Revolution" this fall from J. J. Abrams gets it more or less right.) The conservative newspaper “The Washington
Times” has warned about these possibilities for a long time, and so has former
presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Issues blog, Sunday July 15).
It’s also possible that a massive, very prolonged blackout
could happen because of an unusually large “Class X” solar storm – a solar
flare emitting a gigantic coronal mass ejection, such as what happened in 1859,
before we had a power grid (the Carrington Event). It’s unlikely that cars and consumer
electronics themselves would be damaged (unless plugged in). But – it’s at least possible. And, it looks like we dodged a bullet late
this Spring; the Earth had revolved out of the way of a major explosion just in
time.
As Newt Gingrich pointed out recently, we cannot afford to “blow
our infrastructure” just for short-term profit gains – something utility
companies have been accused of since the widespread outages caused by the
derecho. We’re familiar with this sort
of rhetoric already in the debate over nuclear power safety, and the horrors
that happened in Japan in 2011.
There is a lot that can be done to “ground” properly major
parts of the civilian power grid to protect it from EMP or solar storms. But it looks like we haven’t even started
doing it. The Pentagon has indeed
protected its own.
What about other modes of “The Purification”? We could probably deflect most asteroids and
comets, as long as we saw them in time.
(We could do better there.)
Remember the movies “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”? We couldn’t do anything to stop the
Yellowstone (or Mono Lake) supervolcano from
exploding, but that’s orders of magnitude less likely than a Carrington-style
solar storm. A dangerous sword for the East Coast sits across the Atlantic in
the Canary Islands in the Cumbre Vieja volcano which, if it erupted big-time,
could cause an underwater landslide that could hurl a 300-foot tsunami to the
US East Coast, with about eight hours’
notice for evacuation. Maybe
underwater engineering projects can be conceived to prevent this possibility.
When I was “coming of age” and a patient at the National
Institutes of Health in 1962 for my fake “reparative therapy”, I learned about
the October Cuban Missile Crisis when I went to GWU classes at night. I knew about this, but it seemed as though
the other patients and staff had no clue.
It struck me that a post-nuclear world, even if survivable, would make
all of us into burdens. It would not be
worth living in.
And there is little doubt in my mind that the severity of
recent extreme weather events (the tornadoes, derechoes, and wildfires) are
related to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. We are starting to see exposure to
uninsurable levels of risk from superstorms in areas that normally don’t see
them.
That brings me to my own “Big Point”: I do work “on my own”; I am “solo”, but my
independence might be illusory, because it’s becoming increasingly apparent
that my own capability to “succeed on my own” depends on an infrastructure
which others “sacrifice” to maintain (I could not do a utility lineman’s job),
and about which we are becoming increasingly (if understandably) careless.
I didn’t worry about this much in times past. When I lived in a modern high rise in
Minneapolis from 1997-2003 (The Churchill, downtown, on the Skyway), the power
went out only once in six years. I never
gave severe storms a thought – and they are common in Minnesota in summer. (Cable
and newer high speed Internet sometimes went out for a while simply
because it needed to be maintained and was not as stable in those days.) I did give terror a lot of thought after
9/11, simply because of what seemed to be the existential nature of the threat.
But, in other cities where I’ve lived – like Dallas and
Minneapolis – power stability seemed not to be so much an issue. The utilities’ systems are newer (I very
nearly got IT employment with one in Dallas). Another reason was that most
newer residential neighborhoods in heartland cities had few trees.
On the other hand, when I lived in New York City, I endured
a 24 hour blackout in 1977, and six weeks without telephone service that year
after a NYTel facility fire.
I think when people buy property in the more distant suburbs
or in rural areas, they expect more risk (than city people) and expect family
and neighborhood “social capital” to tide people over in hard times. They tend not to expect the absolute autonomy
of single people in large cities or modern suburban centers. There is not the expectation that you can leave
“adaptive” concerns on the rest of the world and just stay in your own
world.
In fact, it strikes me, as I think back to my upbringing,
that a lot of “moral training” was not simply about the narrow idea of personal
responsibility as modern libertarians see it, it was about socialization and
fitting in to the adaptive needs of a family and community. Choice and responsibility weren’t seen as
corollaries as they are today; they were seen as opposites (as with a curious
script line in the latest “Spider-Man” movie).
A man protected women and
children because that was his natural (or “God-assigned”) responsibility, not
just because he made a choice to have children.
In my own life, “personal autonomy” became salvation. I avoided many conventional relationships
(most heterosexual courtship, after a brief period in the early 1970s) because
I saw it as potentially humiliating. My
independence would, like a chess gambit, take on a moral double edge. I could be wasteful in my use of resources as
a singleton, but so could many families that escaped to the exurbs and endured
long commutes. I could avoid
conventional (“soap opera”) jealousy and rivalry, but make other uncomfortable
with the visible face of my fantasy world (an issue at William and Mary and NIH). My writing, as I noted, could help “keep
them honest” and counter corruption, but sometimes (as I noted yesterday)
others would resent my visibility and confront me with questioning why I didn’t
show more “compassion” for them and wasn’t more interested in being a personal role
model for others anyway.
I do have a sense that “socialization” meant a positive
expectation: that, despite my own “competitive” shortcomings (as a youngster),
I would find satisfaction in a relationship with someone with needs visible in “my
neighborhood”. It was a demand for
complementarity. (Whether it needs to be
heterosexual is another discussion.) I
certainly “walked away” and signed on to the idea of “being your own man”
before expecting a “relationship” of any kind.
That’s also double edged:
self-definition outside of family can lead to more innovation (and
jobs), but can make families and communities less cohesive and less able to
sustain themselves or survive external calamities (or to survive the sacrifices
that sometimes get demanded of people, as in war). In more recent years, we’ve seen that
socialization, committed marriages and
tight families are necessary not just for lineage, but for supporting the
recent challenges of long lifetimes and (as Dr. Oz points out) enabling people
to survive medical events in much better shape than before. And now we see the idea that social structure
is necessary to recover from public catastrophes that perhaps don’t have to
happen. I have always taken exception to
such ideas (particularly the commitment that gets someone to “love you back” in
case of hardship that could be caused by others).
I do have a compound project to finish. To be successful, and to get my screenplays
and books into a successful commercial space, I need to travel (to get “data”)
and then spend a lot of subsequent time at home holed up to “do the work”. I cannot succeed if continually distracted by
“adaptive” problems. The infrastructure
around me needs to stay up and work.
And, yes, I depend on other companies to provide reliable customer
service. I had to supply it myself when
I was working in a conventional job before “retiring”, and now, I see the
“customer service” issue from the other side – it’s essential for me (and
anyone who works largely alone) to succeed.
I don’t have the economy of scale to survive destructive events. And I don’t have the social support to survive
any major medical challenges or to recover from destruction caused by
others. (I realize that I can, of
course, cause my own undoing; that is true for anyone, always.) Mishaps and failures that don’t have to
happen can have real consequences, particularly in my age and
circumstances.
Infrastructure and global stability – these are all big time
policy issues that go beyond usual libertarian thinking, and we must address
them. And some of them can indeed affect
our own personal habits and even the execution of our own goals.
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