Recently my phone line went down along with my internet connection as well, I don't have wireless at present so I endured 4 whole days without the web! This of course is not too tragic because I knew that eventually my phone company would restore my landline connection and everything would be back to normal. I have friends that I communicate with on a regular basis within the domain of the internet and during this time all communications were temporarily severed!

The situation got me thinking though about how we all take for granted this seemingly modern technological age where everything is at our finger tips for us to use at will, until it goes wrong that is, things break down and we all know it, but we never really get to grips with the concepts or implications of shall we say more extreme failures within our society communication infrastructure.

Communications are always important to the world as a whole, lets face it before the onset of modern transportation such as trains, planes and automobiles….letters, parcels or anything sent out of that nature would take quite a considerable time to reach their destinations, weeks in fact, especially if they were going abroad by boat (one of the first couriers other than pigeons) even mainland deliveries took time to reach their targets, these of course would be delivered by the use of horses, or indeed a man on 'shanks pony' such were the times.

I don't send any paper mail these days unless I have to, my preference is the web based email system which is instant and effortless to use and it doesn't require the expense of a stamp. Obviously, packages and parcels or things of a bigger nature which one needs to send cannot be sent down the 'fat pipe' but can be ordered and dispatched via the internet should you want to. So, the lines of communication have been somewhat speeded up over the past two or three decades to such a degree that the world has now become a smaller place, but what is driving all this? and what would happen if this driving force was abruptly removed or exhausted?

We now enter the darker aspect of my train of thought, everything that powers our society at large is electricity, the energy choice of the world! We all live our lives around it infact, we wake up to it, we use it during the course of the day and we even take it to bed with us so to speak, there isn't many aspects of our lives that does not include the assistance of electricity, so imagine a scenario where electricity that was once abundant and taken for granted is now gone! Not that I'm saying it will, but the possibilty or threat exists, in a world where we rob natural resources from the planet.. something will give, like oil for example, nothing lasts forever and the ecology of our planet is deteriorating so the eventuality of a global disaster is not too far fetched, anyone seen "The Day After Tomorrow"?

So, back to the electricity scenario…….

The energy that powers your laptops is gone, the energy that powers your computer towers is gone, ah, you might think, I can use batteries instead, wrong, they also need power to be manufactured or re-charged on a large scale, anyways…..the energy that drives your tv's, radios, hi-fi's, sound studio's (grrrrrr), lights, fires, cookers, food blenders, mixers, kettles, coffee makers, micro-waves, fridge-freezers, hair driers, washing machines, water heaters, tumble driers, dish washers, central heating, overnight storage heaters, immersion heaters, hot water, shower units, burgular alarms, street lights, cash withdrawal machines, lifts, escalators, mobile phone chargers, telephone exchanges, power plants, nuclear reactors, business, commerce, or life as you know it is completely gone, vanished!

Life would go on and we would naturally adapt to the situation, but life as we know it would slow down to something resembling the dark ages! Electricity, once discovered has become the main energy choice of the planet and we depend on it more than we realize. I can't begin to itemize the potential fall-out from such an event, but it doesn't take too long to imagine what the consequences would be given the current sorry state our societies are in.

I can remember in the 70's here in britain, several power cuts were induced through stikes if I remember correctly, and at night too, that was bad enough having to endure candle lit nights, yes, you could say "how romantic!" but you knew that the power was going to be turned back on again eventually so it never became an issue of concern or worry it was just an inconvenience with no underlying threat of permanency attached to it.

Gas, solar power, or other alternate energy sources would come to the fore and prices would soar because……………………………

Enough of that!

Smegging tangents?

Power to the people I say.