Straws in the Wind

The two massive power-outages in northern India, last Monday and Tuesday, initially affecting 300, then 600, and yesterday 680 million people for a day, ought to be seen as straws in the wind; and in this day and age, repeating that in other words, thus saying that these are “signs of things to come,” seems appropriate.

People like me are labeled Chicken Little, the chick famed for crying that the sky is falling. But the point is not so much to engage in doom and gloom but, rather, to suggest how the global and local environments are shaping. Aesop has a fable that applies with equal force. It is about the Grasshopper and the Ant. Now I looked high and low in folk tale archives, and I cannot there discover any allegory about the King Who Was Too Fat to Die—nor one about a deeply caring Mother Nature who sheltered darling little Capitalism under her shielding wing.

India is the second-largest nation in the world—and only partially developed. When things fail there, vast masses are involved. When Chicken Little grows up, it worries about physical maintenance, alternative forms of energy, and ways of husbanding what fuel resources remain. An example of that is to replace, to the extent possible, private with public transportation. Which reminds me to look up some data about railroads.

Okay. So people sat about in trains with gloomy faces. Okay. Some barbers cut hair by candle light. These two events lasted about, say, 30 hours in the aggregate. From the peaks of the United States of Grasshopper, the Indians are far away and tiny. Useful outsourcing targets, they, especially those in the big cities. Don’t worry your little feathery head, Chicken Little. Mighty Technology will come to rescue us—and them. When, finally, they get with the program and cut those evil taxes.

The Electrical Brain

Power failed again in our neighborhood, evidently due to some defective transformers. This had happened before, and over an extended period, the week of August 8-14, 2010, thus less than two years ago. Oddly enough, power to half of our circuits remained on. It was denied to about a third of the house, from basement to the second storey. Whole banks of plugs were also gone, and these affected parts of the still “lit” portions of the house. The failure lasted from 8:43 pm to 1:10 am (this morning)—but we were gone and discovered the situation at 11:30, about midway into it.

Such events rudely remind us. We never think about electric power—until it fails. And when it does, it is truly difficult to think about anything else. It is a trauma—although in rank secondary to failures of the body itself, which are even more powerful reminders of our contingent state in this dimension.

This morning—the coincidence seems meaningful—comes an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal informing us that data centers now consume 1.3 percent of all electricity generated across the globe. Data centers are used by the likes of Google, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, and many others—not least any organization or individual engaged in “cloud” computing, thus storing files miles away from the screen-keyboard-and-box. The author of the piece, Robert Bryce (“Renewable Energy Can’t Run the Cloud”) says that “The power needed by data centers has been a hot topic for more than a decade as local electricity grids have been forced to adapt to huge new loads.”

When you think about it, that 1.3, while a small percent, is high when we think of all the lights that burn—so much so that you can see the outlines of America from a satellite by night if it is cloudless across our sub-continent.

Got us thinking. How much of our food-intake is used by our brains? The answer is 20 percent (link). This answer is based on the brain’s average consumption of our oxygen intake, used for burning, in part to the brain’s glucose consumption; that varies from 11 percent in the morning to nearly 20 percent in the evening (link). A fifth is pretty high considering the size of the head in comparison to all the rest. Here is a highly privileged consumer of our daily bread.

Now we known what the global cybernetic brain’s memory storage consumes. It would be nice to known how much electrical energy we use in our communications—including the devices that are hot-and-ready to serve me here, in this basement work space. The printer’s on, the computer hums, and light reaches me from my efficient flat-screen display. Are we, in the broader category, already at 20 percent? I think not—but have no data. But the time will come. As will the arrival of the end of fossil fuels. What are we going to do then? And what will we call that approaching time? The Dark Ages?