“It’s not for man to interfere in the ways of God.”
If you’re a fan of 1950s mad scientist movies, you’ve heard some variations of that line. This particular one was spoken by a police detective at the end of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” the movie that essentially started Michael Landon’s career.
It was a pretty good example of knowledge outstripping the good sense to know when not to use it.
Another such example poked its ugly head out of a gopher hole recently with the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which runs from Houston to New Jersey and supplies the eastern United States with 45 percent of its fuel.
It’s a serious warning sign telling us we are becoming far too dependent on computers to keep things moving.
I’m not sure how accurate this map is. I’d feel better about it if they at least had been able to spell the names of all the cities correctly.
Spartanburgh?
I do know that I filled my gas tank yesterday, and a station that is rarely crowded had a short line of people waiting to buy gas. I live an hour south of Atlanta., and when I out this morning I saw lines of cars at most of the stations I passed. I didn’t see anyone filling large numbers of gas cans, but that might be next.
The real issue here isn’t gas supply … or prices … or whether we should be building more pipelines.
The real issue is how easy it is for bad people to mess us up seriously by simply introducing malware or viruses into the computers that do so much work for us.
I have written before about EMP, and how an electromagnetic pulse exploded over our country could instantly fry any machinery or devices using electronic or computers.
I’m sure some of you will look at this and think, “Omigosh! No electricity would set us back 150 years.”
Dream on. It would be much much worse than that. In 1871 there were only about 39 million people in the United States, about 12 percent of what we have now. There were only about 560,000 people in California, and Atlanta was smaller than Evansville, Ind.
To be fair, it’s worth noting that 1871 was less than a decade since General Sherman burned Atlanta in the closing months of the Civil War.
Florida and Texas, now two of the three largest states, had barely a million people — between them.
More than a third of the population lived on farms. If they had electricity and lost it, they would still be able to feed themselves.
Our cities now are so dependent on being able to stock their shelves with deliveries from elsewhere that we would be running out of food and pharmaceuticals within a couple of days.
I’ve seen estimates that if we lost electricity and computers, 90 percent of our population would be dead within a year.
Largely because they wouldn’t be able to get food or medicine. It would also be a survival-of-the-fittest world, and all the gun nuts would finally be able to say they told us so.
As for average folks, they wouldn’t know how to do without the modern stuff.
It’s best to think we would regress 300-400 years, but with a population 100 times what they had then.
Life would be a constant clusterfuck.
We really ought to start thinking about solutions.
If it isn’t too late already.