It’s easy to forget how reliant we are on our technologies … until we are unexpectedly deprived of the means to use them, that is.
Deprived by … oooh, let’s say, an electricity grid fault that leads to an automatic shutdown at a nuclear power station and leaves a big chunk of Florida completely blacked out for an evening? [image by dogfrog]
[As a side note, I never knew that nuclear reactors could just be switched off. Disconnected from the grid, sure, but switched off?]
And that’s just one little hardware failure, hence quickly fixed. But imagine for a moment another highly electricity-dependent country, like the UK for example, being hit by some sort of environmental disaster to which it isn’t accustomed, which causes a large number of grid hardware problems which are hard to trace and fix in the absence of the electricity they provide …
… I think we have a potential cookie-cutter techno-thriller movie plot, folks! Now, who shall we cast as the plucky Prime Minister?
I mean, really. Everyone from Phillip K. Dick to the ‘Fallout’ videogame series used nuclear war as a backdrop for stories set in the American West. Now, Mother Nature gives us new possibilities, only minus deadly radiation. Seems Yellowstone National Park is a giant