It is never wise to invest too much time, energy, or faith into a single point of failure. You might have the fastest and most efficient car in the world — but if it breaks, you have nothing. Investing all of your money in Apple stock might make a lot of sense in the short term, but if an earthquake hits Silicon Valley you’re going to wish you had a diversified portfolio. Having just one best friend who you share everything with is great — until that friend moves across the country or dies.

But sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes, the only way to get through life, or to be critically, commercially, or ideologically successful, is to entrust everything with one person, construct, or thing. Take the internet, for example. Huge swaths of the population, many enterprises, and increasingly large portions of government rely on the internet. Millions of people owe their livelihoods to the internet, and billions more rely on the internet for vital access to information and services. Ditto, billions of us rely on fossil fuels, cheap food from the supermarket, and the various national grids — power, potable water, natural gas. You could even say that modern life is defined by having access to all of these things. This isn’t to say that everyone buys food from the supermarket or uses fossil fuels, but if no one had access to these things, the world would be a very, very different place.

Apotheosis

Underpinning each of the fundamentals of modern living is what I like to call a machine. In the case of the internet, the machine might be quite literally a network of optoelectronic machines and wires that bounce your requests around the world; in the case of the electrical grid, the machine is a network of interconnected generators governed by some clever software and some engineers pressing some buttons. In general, these machines are the standard bearers of human technology. We created these machines, with our own flesh and blood, with technology refined over the millennia, often utilizing tools that had been ingeniously and specifically created for the task by a visionary.

These machines, by virtue of extensive and massive real-world testing — and a sizable dollop of capitalism — are generally so well oiled that they’re almost transparent to you, the end user. When was the last time you stopped to think about the multi-thousand-mile journey enjoyed by the banana that you’re about to eat? Or the redistribution of fresh water during drought periods? Or how that pirated episode of Game of Thrones found its way onto your computer within an hour of it airing on HBO?

In many cultures, one or all of these machines have been elevated to almost religious statusThe chilling truth is that we are slaves to these machines, and in some cultures, where the machines play vital roles in our upbringing or day-to-day lives, we even worship them. The Hollywood machine, the news machine, the internet machine, the fast food machine, the electrical grid machine — in many cultures, one or all of these machines have been elevated to almost religious status through apotheosis. If you’ve ever had the internet turned off by your mom, or if a pigheaded friend has ever dared insult it, how did it make you feel? If your access to the electrical grid regularly and spontaneously cut out, or perhaps if the grid started randomly shocking you whenever you had impure thoughts, you would probably start to think that someone up there was punishing you.

Where is your god now?

Even these deified machinations of human endeavor aren’t immune to physical and sociopolitical wear and tear, though. Sometimes these machines start to show the massive strain that they’re permanently under. In 2003, some 50 million people were plunged into a two-day blackout when a single tree resting on a power line in Ohio caused a cascading power failure for most of the US northeast. (In 2012, 620 million people were affected by a cascading failure in India). When the transatlantic fiber, TAT-14, experienced two failures in as many weeks in 2003, the internet was essentially split in two. Just the tiniest of instabilities in the Middle East can cause huge fluctuations in gas and energy markets, which then cause knock-on effects that depressingly illustrate just how reliant we are on cheap fossil fuels.

And one day, one of these machines will stop. It probably won’t happen for a very long time, but nothing, not even the most vital of machines, is totally immune to failure. It might be caused by war, or global warming, or the detonation of a massive EMP device, but at some point these machines will suffer a catastrophic failure and stop. One day, you will hit Enter in your web browser and the packets won’t have anywhere to go. One day, you’ll rock up to the supermarket and there won’t be any food or soda or tampons. One day, the services, devices, and amenities that make modern life modern will vanish.

Rebooting The Machine

What we do after The Machine stops will be very telling. If each machine fails gracefully, one by one, then I suspect we’ll just restart each machine and carry on. In the past it has definitely been rather dramatic when a machine fails, but humanity is more than capable of dealing with it. If more than one machine failed at once, perhaps due to nuclear war or some other apocalypse-type event, then the situation would be a lot more complex.

Let me paint — in broad strokes — an example apocalypse, so you can see what I mean. It’s midnight, and somehow the Russians have successfully managed to bomb or otherwise disable every major power plant or substation in the United States. The grid fails, and except for the few homes and businesses with backup generators, the entire country is plunged into darkness. At the same time, let’s say that a war breaks out in the Middle East, and OPEC decides to embargo all US oil imports. Eventually (within a month or two, depending on how quickly it burns through its stockpile) the US runs out of oil and those backup generators also sputter to a halt. (If this happened in another country with a smaller stockpile, we’d be talking about a day or two of backup power; the US has an unusually large stockpile.)



The sociopolitical fabric of the US would be intractably warped as a result



But let’s cut back to a pseudo-real-time transcript of what would actually happen. Very few houses, offices, and stores have backup generators — and if they do, they’re generally designed to provide enough power so that the building can be safely evacuated. Yes, you could buy a generator, but how many generators do you think are readily available in the US? A few thousand, perhaps — and even then, you would need a silly number of generators to keep a supermarket or office fully powered. Basically, you will have to live without electricity. Your refrigerated food will spoil. There will be no TV, and no radio (how many people have battery-powered radios today?) You can forget about internet access or cellular connectivity (your local base station will only have enough backup power for a few hours, if it has any backup power at all). Traffic signals, train signals, and any and all electronic signage will fail. Air traffic control will either fail dramatically, or more likely planes will be grounded permanently.

I could go on, but you get the point: Without the grid and a reliable source of fossil fuels, life would be very, very different. In this instance, I’m not sure if the US would manage to reboot the machines (with lots of help from Canada, Mexico, and the rest of the international community), or if the lack of electricity would simply make recovery impossible. Even if the grid could be turned back on, it would be a very unpleasant few months, and the sociopolitical fabric of the US would be intractably warped as a result.

It’s hard to fathom just how vital electricity is. Without power, you wouldn’t be able to listen to emergency broadcasts from the government (and the government would struggle to communicate with its citizens and other nations, too). You probably wouldn’t have a job. You wouldn’t have access to your bank account. Other machines — such as Hollywood, news, fast food, and the internet — would fail soon after the cessation of the grid. And of course, if multiple countries had their electrical grids disabled at the same time… well, let’s just say that it would be very hard to recover if our machines failed on an international scale.

A brave new world

Having described the failure of a single system, the electrical grid, it’s easy to see how a spanner in the works could cascade into a catastrophic collapse of the entire machine. Society as we know it would swiftly follow suit. Our technological gods, which we have come to worship and revere, would be quickly and angrily forgotten as we try to find out feet in this brave new world.

If the machine stops soon, while there are still people alive who remember a time before human civilization was underpinned by these all-encompassing technologies, there’s a small chance that the human race might survive. Even if there are enough people who know how to grow crops, construct tools, and manage economic systems from first principles, it’s almost impossible to imagine more than seven billion people coexisting peacefully on Earth without assistance from The Machine. Would we pitch together and try to rebuild civilization? Or would the world quickly devolve into a post-apocalyptic mess of anarchic outlaws and militaristic, robber baron-run city-states?

There’s really only one way to find out. Personally, though, I think I’ll just keep on praying to the grid and internet gods and hoping for the continued health and wellbeing of The Machine. Perhaps if we believe in The Machine, if we have faith and devote enough time and resources into it, then it’ll be possible to build a system that is nigh invulnerable. The internet, which is massively distributed and almost impossible to shut down, is proof that such invulnerability is possible. We have a long, long way to go, though, if we want to bring the same kind of resilience to the other machines that modern civilisation rely upon.

Now read: Slaves of electricity