"Revolution" TV Show.

This entry is some thoughts about the new television series "Revolution."  This latest invention from the imagination of "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams premiered Monday, September 17th, on NBC.  The pilot episode was released early on Hulu, so I took a look at it.  I'll try to write this entry without spoilers, or at least without any more spoilers than the ads and website for the show provide.  Still, if you prefer to avoid even a hint of fore-knowledge, you may want to read this after you watch the pilot episode.

"Revolution" is set "fifteen years after the blackout."  In a video on the show's website, Abrams says, “The question the show asks is, 'What would happen if everything powered by electricity suddenly turned off?'” Because I'm interested in worst-case scenarios, disaster preparedness, and knowing what to do when the zombies come, I'm intrigued by ideas like this.  But this a problematic scenario...  People are really ingenious and given the proper motivation (say, the loss of civilization as we know it), they would come up with some pretty clever stuff.  Let's consider how...

While it's true that we use electricity for an enormous number of things, we can still do a lot without it, as we did in the past.  Energy can be harvested mechanically in the form of movement, with windmills and water wheels or water turbines. In 1890, George Westinghouse suggested that the energy of Niagara Falls would best be transmitted to Buffalo not as electricity generated on site, but as compressed air. Compressed air can also be used to store mechanical energy in high-pressure gas cylinders.

Furthermore, a lot of technologies that we think of as “electrical” don't have to be. In many cases, we use electricity to provide mechanical energy that could be provided by other sources. Refrigeration, for example, uses electricity to turn a motor to run a compressor. But there's no reason the compressor can't be turned by a water wheel or a windmill. Or a steam engine...

In the event of a “Revolution” scale blackout, the world would quickly see the return of the steam era. Boiler technology and steam engines would be the next big growth industry. Coal and wood fired steam railroads would quickly provide critical transportation links, first on a small scale as museum exhibits were pressed back into service, but then growing as fast as more equipment could be built. Central steam engines in factories could provide mechanical energy for all sorts of tasks, such as machining, cooling, cutting, building, and so on.

And if the “Revolution” world really just precludes electronics, it wouldn't be limited to steam engines. Diesel engines use the compression of the piston to ignite the fuel-air mixture, without any electrical spark plug. And they can be built to be started using only compressed air. It may take a lot of tedious pumping, but you could prime a compressed air system with a hand or foot pump. Then, once you've got the engine running, you could use it to drive a compressor to charge up the compressed air cylinder for the next time you need to start.  All without electricity. Virtually all large scale modern engines are highly dependent upon electronic engine control modules  (ECMs) to manage every aspect of their operation. But that's in order to make them as efficient as possible. You can trade away some of that efficiency for a much simpler, all mechanical control system. That's how they all used to be. And there would be enormous motivation for people to return to and advance these sorts of technologies.

Refrigeration also illustrates the case where the current state of the art is only one of many ways to achieve the desired goal, in this case of making things cold. Anyone with a propane fueled refrigerator in their camper knows that you can keep a fridge full of food or drinks cold just fine using a small flame to drive an absorption refrigeration cycle.

A permanent loss of electricity would limit the production of some materials. Aluminum, for example, is refined using an electrolytic process, without which, it is becomes a very precious metal. Fortunately, there is already a significant stock of metallic aluminum in the world that could be recycled almost endlessly. But anything that depends on an electrolytic manufacturing process could no longer be made.

Otherwise, I can think of only a few key technologies that would be impossible to at least approximate in a “Revolution” world: high-speed computing and high-speed, long-distance, and wireless communication. And even some level of both computation and communication can be done mechanically. Mechanical calculators existed for years before modern electronic logic circuits, and I'm sure the world would see new heights of sophisticated mechanical computers being built. It would be a steam-punk enthusiast's dream come true. I can also imagine a telegraph system based on mechanical modulation of something like a metal bar, in order to send messages significant distances at the speed of sound in metal, or around 13,000 miles per hour. Or perhaps we'd just see the return of other pre-electronic communication technologies.  Sure, neither of these are as good as what we have now, but they are still a major step above the pre-industrial, agrarian civilization portrayed in the show...

Stuff I Want

Here are some of the technologies that I would like to see really take off yet in my lifetime:

Life Extension - While I don't necessarily want to live forever, I'm nowhere close to bored yet, and I think I could easily keep myself amused with the things I'm already interested in for at least a few hundred more years.  But my cells aren't optimized for that kind of span, and there are enough external sources of creeping degradation (random cancer cell clusters, environmental toxicity, sub-optimal diet and lifestyle) that I'll be lucky at my current pace to make it past 100 years.  But these are largely engineering problems, and if enough of them can be solved, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to live a few hundred years, killed off almost exclusively by sudden accidents.  The societal impact of this is a whole other discussion, but if I can have my biological age cleanly reset to 25 years old, I would be happy to have my social security eligibility also reset to 25...

Automated Transportation - There are a LOT of people working on self-driving cars.  The idea of having the flexibility and convenience of automobile transportation together with the someone-else-doing-the-work aspect of riding a train or bus really appeals to me.  On top of which, even though regular car usage kills tens of thousands of people a year, any automated technology won't be accepted until fatalities are virtually eliminated.  So not only will I be able to ride anywhere I want while doing whatever I'd like sitting there, the likelihood of being killed while doing so will be far less than any road trip involving human drivers.

Less Stuff - When I was younger I felt that material possession was a symptom of success.  I have, over the years, come to believe more and more that your stuff owns you far more than you own it.  And even with that belief, I'm writing this at a desk piled with random bits of debris from my life, including several cameras, a digital audio recorder, three loose hard drives, two MP3 players, various office supplies, three headsets, and at least 500 pieces of paper.  I can pare down or efficiently store the electronics, but the paper is just unnecessary.  I don't really want paper, I want data.  And while there are already online bill payment mechanisms and online document storage and online information management systems of all sorts, we aren't quite there yet.  I would like getting a piece of paper to become the exception, and instead I just receive a secure, verifiable, digitally timestamped piece of data.

Clean Energy - We are rapidly coming up on the end of the age of oil, one way or another.  There's still a lot of coal left, but that is still taking carbon out of the ground and dumping it in the air.  We really need a clean efficient energy solution.  Ultimately, it seems that it is going to be either direct nuclear (preferably fusion), or indirect nuclear, which is to say, solar.  There has been a huge increase in solar energy production in the last few years, and the curve is getting steeper, but it is still a tiny fraction of our total consumption.  There are also several related technologies that need to mature in addition to production.  We need efficient storage and transport, and we need more efficient usage of what we do produce.  There are almost no incandescent bulbs left in my home, and in a few more years, I expect I'll have started to go toward LEDs.  It will be interesting to see if my first self-driving car (see above) is also entirely electric...

Of course there will be false starts, and development in directions that we can't even begin to imagine right now.  There will also be lots of unintended consequences, some of which may have the potential to kill us all.  But there's some of my wish list items.  How about you?  Leave a comment with the technologies you want to see come to fruition...