“But what about this? We’re sitting at home and the power goes off. No big deal. It happens a lot so we wait for it come back on. And we wait and wait and wait....then we try our cell phones and they don’t work. Even with a battery powered radio the airwaves are silent. If there was an EMP how would we know? When would we know?”
A scenario that always makes me think of the excellent PBS series ‘Connections’, which began with the New York blackout of 1977 caused by one small relay.
Anyway, week after week Connections did a fine job of illustrating just how dependent we have become on the technology that we think is our servant.
I’ve thought for years that one of the few good things that the national government could do is to encourage less of a dependency on single suppliers, whether it be electricity, or water, or food. Of course no one in politics has shown the slightest interest in doing anything like that. In fact we have become more dependent upon things functioning without a glitch.
If there is something like an EMP in our future there is going to be mass death. And that mass death will come largely because we have become overly reliant on the technologies that make our usual life possible, and we have no backup plan in case it all collapses.
“And that mass death will come largely because we have become overly reliant on the technologies that make our usual life possible, and we have no backup plan in case it all collapses.”
Some of us have backup plans. I’m okay if it collapses tomorrow.