The Ash Cloud Should Be A Wakeup Call For Technology We Depend On
It is strange how some memories stick in our minds for years after the event and yet others have gone the very next day. I remember as a child some four decades ago being in the playground of my school talking to another boy. Looking up at the sky he pointed to a contrail running across the clear blue sky. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, clearly wanting to demonstrate hi knowledge. “Of course” I replied, “It’s a skyscraper.” Now I may be wrong but I have a feeling that I knew the word skyscraper from somewhere and instantly assumed that must be what it was. Quite an interesting idea I think, as I look back at it now, but wrong, of course, and the other boy was very pleased to show how much more knowledgeable he was by explaining it was the vapor trail of an airliner. That was forty years or so ago and on every single day since, at every hour of every day there have been planes criss-crossing our skies until one day last week when everything came to a halt.
Only a handful of scientists would even have been aware of the potential problems a volcano in Iceland might cause to the travel plans of people throughout Europe but cause problems it did and because air travel has become so normal a thing to do it was not just intrepid adventurers who were caught out. Families, groups of schoolchildren on trips, businessmen,sports personalities and entertainers were all caught out by this unexpected chaos.
It could have been a lot worse. It could have been that the first we knew about the problem would have been planes falling out of the sky as the volcanic dust stopped their engines. It looks now as though the risk was not quite as serious as first thought but given the choice I would rather be stuck in an airport for 6 days than scattered as body parts across the burning wreckage of a crashed aircraft.
Expect the unexpected and most times you will be wrong but come the day you were right and you will be glad you planned for it. We live in a very complicated, interconnected and fragile society where everything depends on everything else to keep working as expected. The ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland caused chaos throughout Europe but it demonstrates that we cannot and should not take technology for granted. Things can go wrong and there may be lessons we need to learn.
The technology that keeps our society humming smoothly along seems to be pretty robust but then so did the system of for air travel. In a society that is so dependent on technology we cannot simply assume everything will carry on working day after day and we need to plan for the most unlikely situations.
Imagine, if you will, that something occurs somewhere on the internet. The internet was designed to be quite literaly bomb-proof but if a virus was maliciously placed there or some other problem that nobody ever thought possible occurred we would all suffer. In a society that is so dependent on the internet this would cause massive disruption to the daily lives of millions of people. It would cause major disruption and many businesses would be unable to operate without it. Imagine that small mishap were to last for several days or even weeks. Most business are dependent to some extent or another on the internet these days. Many of the airlines that suffered recently are totally dependent on the internet for bookings and their business would come to a grinding halt. Anyone who uses VOIP internet phone systems would lose their phone connections to the world and everything would just stop working.
It may never happen but we surely need some sort of backup plan and the way everything is internet based these days does make the assumption that it will always be there. The lesson of the Icelandic volcano is that perhaps we should not always assume everything will run smoothly. Even if it did take forty years for those vapour trails to stop appearing in the sky it did eventually happen and nobody really gave it much thought before it did.
