Slaving to Electricity

Homo sapiens. 
We are the most advanced race on the planet, and it is us, who have led innovation over the millennia. We invented technology. From discovering fire, inventing the wheel, harnessing electricity, building robots, venturing into space, to being able to access the entire world’s information by simply tapping on a screen. We made it possible.

After the Industrial revolution, the pace at which our technology has evolved is staggering! The time span between new, breathtaking innovations has been reduced to a fraction of what it was earlier. Every sunrise sees something new taking shape, ready to take the world by storm.

All of the components of modern-day technology, be it electricity, the Internet, or transportation, function like a machine. Modern technology is in itself one huge machine encompassing everything. A machine powered by electricity. This machine runs the world. From cars, airplanes, computers, tablets, to smartphones, technology has become so much more accessible. Robots have replaced humans in factories, making production quicker, more efficient, and cheaper. Automation is the new fad. From phones that automatically power up, text, and sync your friends’ Facebook profiles, to computers that control nations’ militaries. Computers are in control of things ranging from shuffling songs playing on your iTunes, to controlling nuclear warheads!

Electricity.  A form of energy we cannot imagine life without. Electricity is an integral part of the technological machine. Our generation was born in bulb-lit rooms, with TV’s and fans, and air-conditioning. We take it for granted. For us, it’s always been there. And we think, it’ll continue to exist for all eternity.

 Now, imagine it just shuts down. No electricity. Power failure. Our nuclear plants fall out, and we have no oil. The entire country is in total darkness, barring those who possess generators and inverters. Those too will run out in a couple of hours. There is no light, no fan, no TV, no internet, cell-phone connectivity will be lost as generators run out of fuel, and phone batteries die. The food in your refrigerator starts to spoil. We lose connectivity to our satellites. Airplanes are grounded. Trains halt to a stop. Financial systems collapse. The government loses data, and control over our defence forces. We are vulnerable. We are isolated.  (This did happen in a part of India once, on a much smaller scale, in 2012, when 60 million people were left without power due to a cascading power failure.)

The above is just the scenario for our country, where we still are fairly used to power cuts. Imagine this happening in USA, or in some European nation. Imagine this happening to the whole world. The whole world in a black-out!  When Tesla and Edison first harnessed electricity, I doubt they would’ve even imagined that’d we be so dependent on it!

And that is only electricity. One cog in the technological machine. Imagine the whole machine collapsing. The world as we know it will grind to a halt. How do we recover from something like that? Do we individually reboot every machine on the planet to get back to normalcy? Can we somehow prevent this?

 There is nothing we can really do to stop this. It will happen. Someday. Petroleum reserves will run dry. Coal will run out. What we can do, is reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. We can begin switching to alternate sources of energy. Solar energy is one of the best options we have. In a sunny nation like India, we can easily meet our individual electricity needs through photovoltaic panels. Wind farms, and geothermal power units are options the government should start considering seriously. We have to start being judicious with our use of resources. Using more efficient devices, consumer lesser power, and making sure we’re not wasting power, will help us a long way in going green. We can indulge in developing sustainably. The three Rs’ importance is more now, more than ever. Recycling one tonne of paper saves 17 trees, 310l of oil, 4,000 kWh of energy, 2.4 cubic metres of landfill space, and 27.2 kilograms of air pollutants. Another thing we ought to do is reduce the amount of e-waste we’re producing, which currently stands between 20-60 million metric tonnes, worldwide.  We can stop being slaves, slaving to electricity.

 As Tesla once wrote, “Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs." Let us be masters.