Having a Hot Flash By Momus http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71491-0.html?tw=wn_technology_5
Last week's extensive power cuts across the United States -- the result of soaring temperatures and a heavy demand for air conditioning -- came as a reminder of just how vulnerable our increasing dependence on technology has made us. Almost without noticing it, we've added a whole new level of needs to our basic requirements. Once upon a time we just needed air, food, shelter, clothing and security. Now we need all that, plus all the stuff you plug in and switch on. The stuff you're using now to read this column. Joni was right: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." And in 100-degree heat, it's gone. "My PC broke because my room was so warm that condensation formed inside the tower," gasped one sweltering man on a bulletin board thread entitled "I CAN'T STAND IT THIS HOT!" He added: "I had to get a new processor and motherboard." Others weren't so lucky. As temperatures in California last week soared to 118 degrees Fahrenheit, some 54,000 Angelenos were left without power. Around 50 died. Similar conditions prevailed in Europe. It was spookily reminiscent of 2003, when almost 30,000 Europeans died as a direct result of extreme summer temperatures, and a chain of North American cities from Ottawa to New York were blacked out for two days by a series of rolling power failures. I was in New York that August, and something about the scenes I witnessed -- stripped bodies dancing wildly by firelight in Tompkins Square Park, processions of people carrying torches, an eerie moon floating over dark streets -- reminded me of William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, with its message that a frail, thin line stops us from slipping suddenly back to a much more primitive form of social organization. While it was heartening to see how little public disorder resulted from the 2003 New York blackout (in stark contrast to the 1977 outages, in which arson and looting left the city with a damage bill of $60 million), it suddenly became evident just how much we depend on electricity for the complex stuff we do. And for electricity to function properly, we depend on a relatively narrow band of "normal" conditions to prevail. The trouble is, due to global warming, these "normal" conditions can't be taken for granted any more. Weather is set to get more extreme. According to Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, England, the exceptional summers of 2003 and 2006 will be the norm by the 2040s. Maybe by then we will have learned not to take our electric safety blanket so much for granted. There are various ways we can do that. One is to create our own homemade backups. Last week's heat wave saw a rash of amateur technical ingenuity. On LiveJournal (perhaps because MySpace crashed from the heat) people rushed to demonstrate how to build a homemade air conditioning unit by rigging up a fan to water in a picnic cooler or connecting a garbage can filled with ice water to a fan with copper tubing. More ecological, long-range solutions come in the form of buildings with "passive air conditioning." Sir David King, the U.K. government's chief scientific adviser, told The Guardian newspaper about his ideas for the future of house design. They range from thermal chimneys, which use hot air trapped at the top of a house to pull cool air up from a basement equipped with a cold water tank, to the simple addition of external shutters to reduce the sun's impact. Chemistry can help. The Food and Drug Administration approved a new, much more efficient sunblock cream last week. Even etiquette can play a part. Last year, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi introduced a campaign called Cool Biz, which encouraged overdressed businessmen to strip down to their shirt sleeves, open their collars and turn down the office A/C. The campaign managed to reduce Japan's carbon-dioxide emissions by 460,000 tons in 2005. Despite these attempts to wean us off electricity and electronics, we seem to need the stuff in ever-increasing quantities. If Abraham Maslow were still around in the 21st century, he'd probably have to add a sixth level to his famous five-tier hierarchy of human needs, a level dedicated to the electrical and electronic gadgets that, increasingly, sustain us. But where exactly to put that new level? Between Safety and Belonging perhaps? According to Canadian philosophers Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, it needs to go right down to the most basic level, the level of our physiology. Ten years ago, the Krokers predicted that humans would become "digital flesh" -- a melding of machines and humans -- sometime in the 21st century. What would be the first sign that we really were starting to become "digital flesh," I wonder? How about a tendency to die when the power goes off? Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
