![]() By Will Wainwright |
Have you thought about what you would do without electricity? And how easily this might come about?
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MANKIND HAS LIVED LONG AND PROSPERED WITHOUT ELECTRICITY.
Eons ago man made his first tools from wood, stone, bone and antlers. This was before fire which came later as a "bolt" out of the blue. For his/her next discovery mankind discovered the first practical use of copper, silver, Iron and lead, ushering in the Bronze ages. Around 3500 BC the wheel was conceived and not long after came the first written language, with its paper - papyrus.
Think of all those great civilizations from the early Mesopotamian to the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians and Romans. From the other side the world, The Mayans, Aztecs, and the Incan. They all have come and gone. Still mankind survived. Man grew crops he hunted. He fought to enslave for labor and with labor built buildings and cities and great monuments to himself. Then came Europe's renaissance and the birth of the modern age. Up to this point, all of mankind's accomplishment and achievements were without electricity.
ANNO DOMINI INVENTION
100 Paper from pulp - Writing (Asia), migrated to Europe by 1000
I can not emphasize enough, how till this point, man has survived primarily by living off the land using farming techniques learned over the generations and using brawn and brain power. Often it was with the help of horsepower by the animal of the same name or other animals. Man raised animals also for food and clothing and caught fish using nets. He learned to weave, sew and knit over the years, tame and ride horses and sail ships on the seas using the wind.
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IN 1900 IT ALL BEGAN - first slowly - our addiction to Electricity. Without it, most of our ingenuity would not have followed. Electricity takes the foremost roll in mans inventions without which the telegraph, telephone automobile and radio would not exist. Not to mention and the technological wonders that followed. Motion pictures, cameras, phonographs, the airplane, radar, Xrays, television, computers and MRI's, and come lately, drones and robots.
Jumping ahead only 140 years to 2020, electricity is now foremost in our survival only third behind oxygen and water. I'll say that again in case you missed it. Electricity is now foremost in our survival only third behind oxygen and water. At the fundamental level, electricity runs the pumps that bring our water and remove the sewer waste through numerous lift stations. It is integral in all internal combustion engines from farm tractors and combines, to automobiles, planes and trains, buses and subways. Dont forget cranes and all sorts of infrastructure construction equipment. Then there are elevators and traffic lights and we haven’t even touched on the myriad of appliances that reside in todays modern home.
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I remember seeing an episode of Star Trek where the evil doers held hostage an entire planet. They were dependent on them for the manufacture of Felicium which offered temporary relief for their unknown addiction, thought as a plague, which was purposely inflicted by the villianous race generations ago. If only they knew, a week of rather uncomfortable withdraw symptoms would cure them of this dependency forever. (Wow that sounds eerily familiar with 2020 having need of a vaccine to be free of a manufactured Coronavirus and its resulting Pandemic. But that is another story.) Imagine humanity now in the same situation, dependent on a product for which we had no need of only 150 years ago. Issac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln lived with out it. Even Napoleon, Baron Lionel de Rothschild, Ben Franklin, Robert Fulton and, Cornelius Vanderbilt lived without this life sustaining staple too. What is it? Electricity. TODAY WE ARE NOW AS DEPENDENT ON ELECTRICITY AS THE OXYGEN WE NEED TO BREATHE. As you can see, this was not the case of the not too distant past. What will we do without those amps, volts and watts when that day comes? And it could come abruptly. For any prolonged period, we will have three - four days before food spoils, medicine and water run out, batteries die with constant use, and society will effectively collapse. This is assuming you cant drive to an area where there is power. This occurrence is exactly what was seen in California in the fall of 2019 - 2020 where PGE deliberately turned off the power to prevent forrest fires. Fire damage aside, the loss of power caused great distress and hardship for about 730,000 customers across 34 counties. Shop owners and business shut down. So did schools, fortunately most hospitals had generators. Then there was Texas in early 2021, only it was a deep freeze. Frozen wind turbines cause electric over load in many areas killing water pumps on top of electricity. My son lost water for three days in Austin. As a result folks in his condo were scooping water from their pool to fill their tub to use to flush the toilet. The whole state was minuties away from total Collapse. WSJ article Just a small taste of doing without the Electricity.
YOU ASK, how could we lose our electricity on a grand scale? Simply put, there are three ways this could happen with only two resultant outcomes - one really bad, one even worse. Two are man made, one by nature. The first and seemingly easiest way of turning off our electricity would be Cyber Warfare. Specifically the disabling of our nations power grid. Most of us have read about Cyber Warfare as the means by which a foe gains access to our most secret computing and data facilities, be they private, governmental or industrial. You may know it as hacking. We would mostly hear of it when it is a major department store like Target and Macys or service industry giant such as JP Morgan Chase bank. Even tech giants like Google, Amazon and eBay are not exempt. The CEO of Twitter had his account hacked causing him some serious embarrassment. So far damage has been financial and limited to the stealing of information and secrets for either sale or blackmail. Other pranks are more serious, like the encryption of records rendering then useless unless a ransom is paid, hence their name Ransomware. The big target here is cities and municipalities. There have been hundreds hit, most of which is unwanted publicity so you dont hear about them. One you may have heard of is the City of Baltimore, not wanting to pay the $75,000 ransom so wound up paying over $18 Million trying to undo the damages. The resort town of Sarasota, FL was also hit a couple times although hushed up. And 22 small town banks were hit in one week in West Texas. Most are finding out it is cheaper to pay than fight. So far their impact has been just costly and embarrassing. So far, physical harm has been negligible. However……….. Late in 2020 the US experienced a massive, supposedly Russian hack the details of which are still kept under wraps. Just the scope based on the numbers is unnerving. The Government Agencies hit: Department of State and Office of the President
Department of Homeland Security...
National Institutes of Health...
The Pentagon & Five branches of the U.S. military
Department of Energy...
Department of the Treasury...
Department of Commerce…
State and local governments…
Center for Disease Control…
And such industrial giants as
Microsoft…
Ford Motor Company…
Lockheed Martin
To name a few. |