Last Night I Saw the Stars

In this old creaky senile corner of Detroit
Of late the wires behind the residences smoke
Or display fireworks and we are told, “Avoid
Getting too near because if that there cable broke
It’ll come flying and it could electrocute
The careless stander by. And our ambulances
Can’t get here fast in this here time of the commute.”

After three, four such vivid events—sparks at night
Smoke by day—loss of power has now been organized.
Outages are timed, at ten a.m. or at midnight,
They’re unannounced so that we may still be surprised
Unless we’ve learned to note and mark a subtle sign;
It’s the appearance of a little red Honda generator.
Chained to a pole it feeds a box from its turbine.

A little Honda generator? Thanks Japan,
We needed that. Edison needs power too
To feed a panel there to read, record, and scan
The progress of its contractors as these aspire
To find the ancient flaw, transform the transformer,
Cut the branches, string new black and unfrayed wire—
And this as cooling fails and it’s just getting warmer.

Last night the power failed right at the witching hour
(The little Honda had arrived; saw it today.)
Flashlights guided us to bed without a shower,
But never mind, it’d been an almost frigid day.
Outside in the silent dark I saw the planet Mars
And lots and lots of strange white shiny glimmers.
In time I realized that I was seeing stars.

Intimations?

Another power failure quite early in the morning—I’ve mentioned a series of these that took place three weeks ago with literal fireworks—caused one of our neighbors to mutter: “Just like the third world.” To which I responded saying, “Welcome to Iraq, Betty.” But the sun was out, the sky was a deep blue, a cool, a lovely Indian summer day, which prompted me to pen, literally, a blog for LaMarotte out back. Done with it I read it to Brigitte saying: “No power, no Internet, no blogs. But posts can still be written.” And she: “Yes, but how are we going to post it?” This led to some bemused speculation.

We still have a typewriter, but it’s electric—and the F key doesn’t work (which might please linguistic puritans). The answer therefore was to use the daylight while it lasted to make neatly legible hand-written copies. Brigitte could make two, I could make three. The telephone still worked, thus while lunching on home-harvested tomatoes (we wouldn't dare open refrigerator doors) we might attempt to locate the physical mailing address of the two of five blog readers whose whereabouts we only vaguely know. The Post Office near us might still have power—although the stop lights on Mac had gone blind—and while I was out I might still find a functioning restaurant where thermos bottles might be filled with real hot coffee.

If you’ve wondered why some of my posts are so doomy, it’s because, from time to time, we’re getting intimations of cultural mortality.

We're Oddly Privileged Observers

The chart I present today is a somewhat more rationalized version of data from the Bureau of the Census that I had already posted here a while back. It shows the best scholarly estimates available on the subject of human global population for the period 1 to 1950 A.D. What I have done is simply extrapolated data points to fill in the gaps in the estimates, thus enabling me to show population on a continuous scale at 50-year intervals for the current chronological era. The raw numbers are available here. To this I might add that the original tabulation also provides estimates from 10,000 B.C. down to 200 B.C. The estimates for the human population for the time—and it’s nothing more than a guess-and-a-golly—suggest that in that entire period the human headcount was always below 230,000 million. When I arrived in America—the 1950 census was still being processed then—our population here was just a hair under 151 million. If I’d charted the entire range of the scholarly guesstimates, it would show a straight line running just above zero for all recorded history—and a huge, unbelievable spike appearing the day before yesterday.

In this chart I’ve plotted, along with the lower and upper estimates of scholars, the running average of the low estimate (green bars) and, overlaying them for most of the temporal trip, the difference between that average and the actual low estimate. What this tells me is that the real divergence from the perennials of history had its beginning in or around 1700, thus before the Age of Oil actually began. The early rising of the curve no doubt owed a great deal to advancements in agriculture discovered and applied in medieval times as documented by Lynn White in his fascinating Medieval Technology and Social Change. Coal mining began in the late 1740s; the steam engine appeared in 1770. And it was “hold on to your seats” after that.

We’re oddly privileged observers. We’re also, if you think about it, challenged to make the most of this odd and wondrous opportunity. The Age of Oil has already begun its descent from Mount Petroleum, and in another wink or two of historical time, the found wealth—which we, in fact, did very little to obtain beyond extraction—will have been consumed. We have a tiny window of time in which, somehow, we must, if we can, learn something from all this—and make the kinds of arrangements whereby we save and protect the physical gains we have been able to realize—not least electric light and the vast deposits of knowledge leisure has made possible to study under lamps—and to apply that knowledge to social well being.

The oddity of all this is how little one person can actually do. Thus this subject, already once touched upon in this blog, deserves this repetition—in new words and with a chart that features a blue sky.

Reminder

Power failures are intended, I believe, to remind us that the most important technological innovation of the modern age is the discovery of electricity. That reminder came again abruptly yesterday evening at 5:30 p.m. Light enough remained to let us find the flashlights and, using those, to find the matches to light the candles. The message for me, personally, was that while technology may be neutral, its absence can be felt as something positively annoying. Light is that ultimate symbol of value. Let there be light!

I’ve spent a substantial part of my life studying technology from various points of vantage. This began for me as a personal point of curiosity while I was still in the Army and later became a professional activity. I remember once in the service filling an empty hour looking up the respective populations per square mile of India and the United States and then calculating the U.S. population as it would be if it had India’s population density. That is a technological preoccupation? Absolutely. By the time I first chanced across Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight,” I lit up, as it were, already adequate to understand that feeling.

You cannot spend your time doing things of that sort without becoming painfully aware of the fact that our civilization is largely defined by the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels beginning early in the nineteenth century. In my personal parlance we have been and are still traveling on a bubble of oil, suspended in air, as it were, but this bubble, like the soapy kind, is of a brief duration. What follows after we’ve exhausted oil, gas, and eventually all coal? What I am hoping is that we shall still have the most important gift that we discovered: light.

That may happen if we eventually master fusion technology. The interesting aspect of that potential development is that it promises to give us light and modern communications and, possibly, energy enough for emergency transportation—and not much more than that. The reasons for that are that the yield of energy obtained, per unit of new energy needed to get it, will be modest. I’ve summarized the issues on LaMarotte here. Still, if we could get there, it would be a great boon—although, at present, mastery still eludes us. But if this brief blip in history, the Age of Oil, now stumbling towards its chaotic end, leaves us with electric power, that will have justified its vast excesses and violence for endless generations to come.