Lights Out

I would like you to take a few minutes to contemplate what would be a catastrophe for you of the highest magnitude—one that would completely change your life as you are currently experiencing it and would start to do so within just minutes. Since it would be happening to others as well, within just a few days the social disequilibrium would have spread and chaos would be the norm. Within a few weeks life, as we knew it, would be completely different—and there would be many fewer of us; the elderly and the very young and highly vulnerable would be first to go. And then there would be a new norm for those who remain.

I am setting up a scenario where the reader consider where our technological dependence is disrupted by having, say, our national and regional electrical power sources go down for a protracted period of time—maybe weeks or months or maybe a year or more. And for those who think their stored supplies and batteries and generators would get them through, perhaps they would be partially spared for a slightly longer period of time, but what happens when the batteries run down and cannot be recharged and when the generator fuel is depleted?

Here are a few things that would immediately happen. If you were at the gas station the gas pump would stop and your car, which was empty, would have to be parked or left possibly some distance from your home. Who knows when you could get it because gasoline would be quickly used up and the refineries would be shut down. You would have to find another way home; you might have to walk. The checkout counter at the supermarket would have to shut down because the cash register would not work. And if they still let you take your purchases home, you would have to pay cash because the credit card machine wouldn’t work; likewise with the ATM machine where you were going to make a withdrawal. Soon the supermarket would be empty of goods because deliveries could not be made.

Money would quickly cease to exist, except for the little cash you might have in your pocket, because most money movement today is in the form of electronic funds transfers and practically all financial records are stored electronically. Bank accounts would mean nothing. You could not recharge your cell phone so you’ve only got, perhaps, a few calls you could make. Your computer would go down. There would be no television or electronically transmitted music to be heard—the transmitters would not transmit.

More seriously, for the ill or elderly, hospitals and medical services would go down after their emergency power supply was exhausted. How would law enforcement work and how overburdened they would suddenly be! There would soon be no heat for buildings and air conditioning would stop. All communications and information systems would break down. Systems for manufacturing, distributing, and accounting for all goods and most services would cease to operate. Your refrigerator and freezer would not work so you would quickly need to depend on your stored and canned food, and unless you had some bottled LPG gas, which would last for only so long, and a portable stove, and then you would have to eat your food, if you had stored some, cold.

Perhaps most serious of all, water could not be pumped. People might flock to bodies of fresh water which soon would be polluted water because sanitation systems would not operate—including your toilet.

Because so many people have become the passive recipients of services and have become so dependent upon technology, there would be comparatively few who would have the broad practical knowledge, tools, and skills to survive. So, many would die. In short, we would be plunged back into the world of the mid-nineteenth century or before.

Now before you just blow this off as doomsday nonsense or a negative attitude, take a serious minute and consider how you would get by and what you would do if the lights went out in your house—and your neighbor’s house, and every house in your community and state and nation for a protracted period. Where would that leave you? It would not take a nuclear bomb or an out-of-control communicable disease—all it would take is for the power to go down.