Monday, February 27, 2012

Technology ups and downs - Part 1

This is the script for my new CBC series "Things Against Nature", which will never happen now, because they never called back.  :(   I was going to do a video on this, but that seemed like too much work.

*********************

"I have entitled my new series in response to certain opinions that we should eschew all technology, and go back to Nature.  In short, this would result in all of us being dead.  Technology invents 'things' that go against Nature, that is how we live.  I intend to focus mainly on the nuclear industry and earthquakes, but I must go through a little history.

In the history of technology, there have been ups and downs.  Successful urbanization with sewage systems drove the Roman empire to kill all those 'natural' Druids, and is considered one of the greatest advancements for mankind.  The Dark Ages showed us what happens when you forget about sewage.  Still, there was a problem in that all that raw stuff went directly into the rivers and bays, and came back to us as Cholera.  A minor patch was needed for long-term usage, which was sewage treatment.

Now, we go to the Age of Steam, which was another great advancement for mankind, and allowed us to kill all the remaining natural people, along with guns, which we won't mention because they seem to be a naturally dark technology.  :(   Steam was a glorious technology at the beginning because of trains and ships, but it had the seeds of its own destruction (possibly).  They just banged together boilers with any old stuff they had hanging around.  This gave a one in 500 or 1000 chance of blowing up, but with just one boiler near you at any time, who cared?  It is just when thousands of boilers were deployed that these odds started catching up.  Huge boiler explosions were in the news, perhaps thousands died.

I suppose at this point, if certain influences existed then, we would have given up on boilers, since the technology was obviously not 'foolproof'.  But no, the engineers 'upped the game', and increased the reliability of boilers by orders of magnitude, mainly through increased transparency in the manufacture and operation, enforced by codes.  You never hear of a boiler explosion these days.

-to be continued.


No comments: