Our Electronic Lives

As if the potential disasters weren’t enough, you can now add solar storms to the list of potential disasters you can pretend you don’t know about.

Courtesy: teamsugar.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - One clumsy (not enchanted) evening I knocked over a glass of Pepsi, spilling it on my modem, giving it an apparently fatal injury.

I had some small hope, however. My son told me that he was at a party once where a beer was spilled on a Sony Playstation, to the same effect, except that two days later when it had dried out, it worked again like a charm.

While I was waiting for a new modem to arrive, it tried it every day, but to no avail. Pepsi is sticky; beer is not.

It didn’t take long to became obvious to me how dependent and interdependent we have become on electronics in our lives.

No modem, meant no internet and no email. Many, if not most of us, have become almost pathologically dependent on our electronic communication devices—email, Blackberry, cell phones, Twitter, etc. In my case I primarily use email because my friends and correspondents are all over the world. At a stroke, my connection with all of them was severed.

As the days dragged on, I became aware of all the other things for which I depended on the internet. I couldn’t check the weather or my Google news. No more Salem-News.com or New York Times. Even such a simple thing as my calendar was online. It’s been years since I’ve had one hanging on the wall.

Gone, too, was online access to my bank. No more public library online for all the reference I used it for—from Encyclopaedia Britannica , to the Oxford English Dictionary.

My ISP got a new modem to me five days later, so I never really found out all the other things I was missing!

Our dependence on electronics really only begins with this scenario. Have you ever gone into a store and couldn’t buy anything because the debit or credit system (not just a telephone line) was temporarily down? It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

Think of the societal repercussions if the entire banking system were down. You couldn’t buy food in stores or gas up your car as the two main things. Society would fall into chaos in a matter of hours.

Even if you happened to have some cash in your wallet (an increasingly rare event these days) you might not be able to use it because some outlets might be unable to accept it with their cash registers completely tied in to the banking debit/credit system.

That this could actually happen, we are reassured, is extremely remote. This is the kind of thing that terrorists would love to make happen, but all the forces of the state are arrayed against them so, movies notwithstanding, I don’t really have much fear in that regard.

But there are other concerns. Electronics fail with the wave of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP). I am not suggesting that a nuclear attack is likely. In fact, if that were to happen we would have much bigger concerns than being unable to Twitter.

The equivalent of an EMP can arrive unexpectedly from an otherwise friendly source—the Sun . Solar storms are common, occurring over an 11 year cycle from high to low activity, but are usually harmless to us on the surface of the earth. We see them as the Northern Lights (rarely, I think, from Oregon).

The history and background

In the first half of the 19th century, scientists in Europe and North America studied electricity and magnetism. They discovered a few, apparently unconnected, mathematical equations and in the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish theoretical physicist, studied these equations to see if there was any mathematical relationship among them.

He found that the equations required the addition of another term, which he called a displacement current. The only physical meaning he was able to find for this current was that from an electrical source (say a current traveling through a wire) an electromagnetic wave must spread out from the wire.

These electromagnetic waves can be of various frequencies and include what we now receive over our radios and television sets, as well as X rays, light, infra-red rays, and ultra-violet rays. Thus from mathematics alone Maxwell was able to predict the existence of previously unknown phenomena.

From his equations, he concluded that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon. (Einstein picked up from there, a quarter century later—but that’s another story).

The first inkling of electromagnetic phenomena was the 1859 solar superstorm when from August 28 to September 2, many sunspots and solar flares were observed on the sun’s surface.

On September 1 and 2nd, a large solar storm occurred and the pulse arrived at the earth’s surface 18 hours later—a trip that normally takes up to four days. Telegraph wires in both the United States and Europe shorted out, some even causing fires. Auroras were seen as far south as Mexico and Cuba.

One hundred and thirty years later, on 13 March 1989, the Hydro-Québec (eastern Canada) power grid collapsed in a matter of seconds as equipment protection relays tripped in a cascading sequence of events with the arrival of a pulse from a solar storm. Six million people were left without power for nine hours.

And now, a little known secret

"What is especially remarkable about electromagnetic waves,” said mathematician Morris Kline, “is that we have not the slightest physical knowledge of what electromagnetic waves are. Only mathematics vouches for their existence, and only mathematics enabled engineers to invent the marvels of radio and television."

As if the potential disasters from hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes and swine flu weren’t enough, you can now add solar storms to the list of potential disasters you can pretend you don’t know about.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue, although a lot of his views could be described as left-wing. He understands that who he is, is largely defined by where he came from. The focus for Daniel’s writing came in 1972. After a trip to Europe he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Alberta, and Calgary in particular, was extremely conservative Bible Belt country, more like Houston than any other Canadian city (a direct influence of the oil industry). Two successive Premiers of the province, from 1935 to 1971, had been Baptist evangelicals with their own weekly Sunday radio program—Back to the Bible Hour, while in office. In Alberta everything was distorted by religion.

Although he had published a few pieces (unpaid) in the local daily, the Calgary Herald, it was not until 1975 that he could actually make a living from journalism when, from 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman (1979-1993), Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting with the CBC. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com