Oh No! They Smashed Up My Machines!

Surprise, surprise. Suddenly, you see a sharp, blue flash shooting across the sky. And the next moment -- everything is dead.

Well, not everything. You are still alive and doing fine, and so are all other people, as well as all animals and plants. But your machines, they’re all dead. Dead as a doornail.

If you’re by car, train, subway, ship or airplane -- it grinds to a halt (which is of course rather inconvenient if you happen to be sitting in that airplane). If you’re listening music, it stops. If you’re gaming: game over. Computer screens go black, lights pop out, factories stop. An eerie silence falls upon the civilized world.

And it’s permanent. Television sets that aren’t even turned on, give off an eerie glow, then go dark forever. Computers loose their data and get roasted from the inside. MP3-players and cell phones heat up, then die. Telephone lines melt, power stations give off a fountain of sparkles and then fall silent forever. And you don’t want to be wearing a pacemaker: all of that stops, too.

What you’ve witnessed is what’s known as an ‘electromagnetic pulse’, or EMP. Perhaps some wicked genius detonated an EMP-weapon high up in the atmosphere. Or perhaps some star violently exploded nearby.

Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: the atmosphere is flooded with exceptionally highly charged light particles, called photons. The photons smash into the atoms that make up the atmosphere, and knock out their electrons. That’s the flash of light you see: suddenly, a HUGE cloud of electrons comes surging down, much like a ridiculously large bolt of lightning. The electrons demolish everything electric. Everything with circuitry or wiring in it, turns into a foul-reeking porridge of molten plastic and short-circuited wires.

Poor Man's Doomsday Weapon? - There is some concern terrorists may disrupt the West, using a very large electromagnetic pulse bomb. Indeed, EMP weapons are cheap to make. But don't get paranoid: you'd have to be one goofy whiz kid terrorist to achieve it. Oh, and what they don't tell you, is that the only country that has used e-bombs in combat already, is the US. During the war in Iraq, the US Army dropped several small e-bombs on power stations and television stations. That worked.

Indeed, EMP’s can be that nasty. The calculations show that a large enough EMP going off high in the atmosphere should be able to knock out every machine in Europe or the US. If a large stellar explosion flooded the atmosphere with super-charged photons, it could even get worse. The dreaded machine-killer may even affect half of the globe -- and all of mankind.

It’s difficult to tell what will happen next. With luck, some machines will survive. Devices running on batteries or machines that were turned off during the blast, have a far better chance of survival.

And of course, diesel engines and steam-powered machines won't be affected -- although you may be unable to operate them, without the electrical circuitry that’s usually needed to run them. For transport, you may want to use a horse or a bicycle (with no light). And you may be relieved to find that your hammer, screwdriver and other basic working tools are still in tip-top condition. At least, you can try to build up society again by hand.

So in the end, we should survive -- but not without a terrible crisis. Just read how one of our readers cozily puts it:

"We will have no food. We will have no clothing. We will have no access to the information needed to make that food and that clothing. The ending will be sudden and complete. If air systems are needed, the deaths will come in minutes. If water is needed, deaths will come in agonizing days. If food is needed, death will pay a visit only after several excruciating weeks. People escaping the clutches of the Machine will not be able to cope with an environment that doesn't pamper them anymore. They will die clutching the remotes that used to make the Machine do what they wanted and needed. They will die hungry, thirsty, filthy and cold."

We don't really know how big the danger is. We've only had electric wiring for a mere 150 years - a tiny fraction of the planet's history. No one knows how many times the Earth has been hit by immense EMP's from outer space already.

And come to think of it, it gets worse. A large EMP isn’t the only thing that is capable of shutting down our machines. Perhaps, a simple technical failure can do the trick, too. That’s less silly than it sounds. We live in an ever more connected world, with ever more connected machines. This makes us vulnerable to power failures, computer bugs, system malfunctions -- stuff like that.

Walk of Shame: Without machines, we would find ourselves in the Middle Ages. For instance, we'd have to walk -- just like these New Yorkers during the 2003 blackout.

Take the infamous Northeast Blackout of 2003. No less than 50 million people in the US and Canada found themselves without electricity. And the cause? For crying out loud, it was a humble tree that gently touched some power lines in Canada! Now that’s encouraging. If something as simple as a tree can put 50 million people in the dark...

Or consider the Millennium Bug. No one will ever know what would have happened if computer experts hadn’t taken precautions. But the forecasts were bad: on 1/1/2000, computer systems would go berserk. Bank accounts would empty themselves, data bases be lost, power stations would fail, nuclear missiles would decide to launch themselves. Gladly, all of this didn’t happen. But what if someone released a computer virus which, say, told our computers it’s the year 3000?

As our reader puts it: "That automation is coming, and coming fast. Home automation is here already (albeit pricey and unreliable for now) and will improve by leaps and bounds quickly. Internet-connected everythings are being sold everywhere. We're even taking baby steps into fully-automated factories and fully-automated transportation systems. (You really don't want to know how planes are guided these days.) And sometime within the next century the turning point will come. We will become so dependent upon the Machine that its absence will kill us."