TechStuff Classic: Tech in the Post Apocalyptic World (Part 1)

tech will look like. Should you know the apocalypse actually happened? This was before the pandemic, y'all. We didn't really have an idea of what an apocalypse was gonna be. And now we all know it mostly involves watching a lot of Netflix and trying to, you know, stay home and wear masks whenever we have to go out. But back then we didn't have any idea. So let's listen in. Thank you for having me on to day, Jonathan, especially to talk about this really exciting topic, Clayton Utter breakdown

of society. Yeah. Okay, So first, Joe, before I get into the listener request that prompted this entire episode, I should let you know that the previous episodes that went up and we're just recorded were with Ben Bolin about

the Manhattan Project, so it tells nicely into this one. Um. So the this discussion actually comes to us because a listener, Benjamin G. McCall on Twitter's wrote to us and said, after watching Mad Max, I'm wondering what tech would be viable in a post apocalyptic world, what which tech would be jerry rigged? So really, this is such a huge topic. We could end up having discussions about all sorts of

different doomsday scenarios. Yeah, I know. One of the options we talked about for this episode was just coming up with a list of like the maybe I don't know, weird tech hacks you could make, yeah, in a post apocalyptic scenario. But then we realized, like, uh, you know, we're not the inventors of the waste land, right, Yeah. There there are so many different science fiction stories out there that cover this sort of material that two to

kind of. I mean, we could have, I guess gone through each one and graded it on a plausibility scale, but that would have taken forever to sure. But we figured maybe a better approach would be to say, Okay, let's imagine there's a scenario that has represented a technological apocalypse. Suddenly all of the technology that sustains our lives that usually just runs in the background and keeps us happy without us even noticing what it does for us. What if all that went away? Yeah, so we're not so

much focusing on specific scenarios. We will some of them will come into play because they factor into, uh, the contingencies we might we might use in the case of a catastrophic failure of technology, Like there could be somewhere you say, hey, what if we use blah blah blah. So well, if the reason for the catastrophe he was this blah blah blah, would not work. We'll get into that. But but just some general catastrophes that that could be the ones that lead into this nuclear war would be

a big one. Right, so that people always want to say, zombie attack, zombie attack. Okay, so some sort of pandemic would be a possibility, right, The more realistic version of and pandemics could end up being something that is directly affecting people, or could be indirectly affecting by killing off let's say, crops or livestock, anything like that that could lead to famine obviously, could also capitulate into technological failures sure like is imagined in the movie Interstellar, where they

talk about the idea that there's like crop blight getting all of their food supply. Yea, So in that case, you could end up having a vast reduction of the population on Earth, which in turn would cause technological issues. Uh, there are a lot of other ones to super Volcanic eruption could potentially at least for leading to catastrophic climate change. Really anything that leads to catastrophic climate change, So really

just waiting around right. Sadly, I wish that weren't the case, but uh so, there are a lot of different scenarios that could lead to this, and and we've got a whole bunch of different variations of that in literature. And at the end of this episode, Joe and I are going to talk about our favorite post apocalyptic stories and scenarios. Uh. The reason why I'm putting it at the end is so that we have something wonderful to look forward to

on our journey through terror. But honestly, my favorite ones are kind of depressing, so so are mine. It's fine, but I mean it's kind of hard to have an upbeat post apocalyptic scenario. I promise you, folks, you're at least gonna hear us talk about Zardas. Yes, Czar does. But okay, what's the first thing that we need to talk about? The big tune in the basket, as I might say from I think I said that recently. I'm pretty sure that was a forward thinking but I'm not

entirely certain. But out of the basket, it's power. Yeah, the power grid. Yeah, the power grid where our energy comes from, because almost everything that sustains their life depends on it. Yeah, and on some form or another, If not directly, then indirectly. Correct. So, yeah, the power grid is the big one. Let's say that whatever the catastrophe is has hit the power grid, and we're largely going to be focusing on the United States because that's where

Joe and I live. But power grids across the world have varying degrees of vulnerability. Many of them are very old. There are elements of the United States power grid that date back to the late nineteenth century. Yeah. In fact, our current power grid is not there. Oh man, I hate it when that happens. Our press temporary power grid is not necessarily in the best of shape. No, this could come as a rude awakening to some people. Yeah, So here's here's the deal. First of all, the power

grid is incredibly complex. We talk about it as if it's this big, united thing, but really it's a collection of lots of smaller things. So, in most basic terms, how does it work? All? Right, most basic terms, if you want to look at kind of the microcosm, the individual element that makes up the power grid, you're looking at a power plant, uh, something that is generating electricity through some means. There are a lot of different versions of this. There are coal fired power plants that use

coal to generate heat, turns water into steam. Steam turns a turbine that's what generates the electricity. Uh. Have a hydro electric plant hydro electric that's using the power of water moving turbines in a similar fashion, there are wind turbines that use wind to do that. Solar generation where you're you're you're really just converting solar power into electricity. That's one of the few that doesn't require steam or

or turbine. Yeah. You've got, of course, nuclear power, which is really like coal fired on steroids, except it's using obviously nuclear fuel, not burning coal. No smoke, No smoke, there's lots of steam. Uh. Yeah, if you're if you are have designed it properly, it's perfectly safe. At least the operation is the nuclear fuel and the waste generated is something else that is an issue, but we're not going to go into that because it's just it's it's

a side issue to what we're talking about today. Though, if you are interested in that, we did a couple of episodes before thinking about that some time last year. Yeah, those were a lot of fun, So definitely recommend us. One might be a word to describe how we h, well, it was fun nuclear ways fun in the sense of really trying to wrap your brain around something that's truly complicated, not just the technology but the political and cultural side of it. Uh. Then you also have things like, um not,

there's there's natural gas uh. And there's also oil power power plants, power plants that rely on oil belthough that's a very small percentage of the ones that are used here in the United States. So you've got these power plants. They generate the electricity a the the electricity is sent through a transformer which steps up the voltage The reason for this is that the higher voltages will transmit over

a greater distance with less loss of energy. Right, so this's going to be alternating current going out through all of the wires of the grid to the neighborhood. Direct current will not work in a transformer. You have to use alternating current. So yeah, it steps up the power you have. You have different types of lines. There's a

distribution power line that is pretty heavy duty. That's what carries the super high voltage that gets stepped down by a different type of transformer for the power lines that you typically see in the neighborhood. So like the telephone polls that have the power lines um uh dangling from them, particularly on a hot George today. Uh, those are those

have been stepped down from the major transmission lines. There's another transformer that will step that power down again for it goes into a building or a home or whatever to be the proper voltage for us here. Uh. So that's your basic setup, right. That's and the power grid is made up of lots of these. By the way, these power plants are run by different organizations, different entities, so it's not all a unified thing here in the United states, and not just like the government or something

privately owned power generation company. It's not like the monopoly board where you just you land on the utility and you own it and that's all of it. It's not the way it works. So it's the real monopoly. You should be able to win monopoly as soon as you buy electric, right like exactly like, hey, do you want power in your hotel? Guess at buddy, I am it. So as it turns out, that's you know, that's not

the case. There are all these different entities across the power grid that and that generate power, and they're doing it with different types of hardware and software, which makes it even more complicated. And we'll talk about that a little bit when we get into cybersecurity. So um. Because of this complexity, there are lots of potential points of failure. Uh. And the complexity both cushions the power grid from failure

and also is vulnerable to to further failure. It all depends upon the actual conditions that exist at any given time, right. I guess in the best case scenarios, all of the interconnectedness of it would mean in some cases you have some degree of redundancy. Yeah, It's kind of like if you think about the Internet, how if a a single computer goes down, traffic can route around it. The power

grids kind of like that. But depending upon where you are, you may, you know, if a power plant goes offline for whatever reasons, if it is quote unquote tripped, which means that it turns off essentially for any amount of time, you may be without power until it's returned to service. Uh. Other area as might be able to receive power through rerouting or whatever. But the goal, of course, is to create a smart grid that can respond to those issues in real time. But the reality is we do not

have a truly smart grid throughout the United States. It's not a unified system like that. Here's an interesting fact I'm seeing in the notes that I wasn't aware of before. So we've got three interconnected grids in the United States. That's correct. I didn't know about this. Yeah, the Eastern Interconnection, which you would think at first, Oh, that's gonna be the East coast, right, Well, yes, it's the East coast all the way out to the Rocky Mountains. Uh. Yeah,

that's the Eastern Interconnection. It's a large part of the nation and then you've got the Western Interconnection, which is the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. And then you've got the Texas Interconnected System which covers Texas. Big shock there. So uh, I don't mean that in that electricity sense either, So I didn't mean to, but yes, you've got these three larger interconnected grids that collectively make the power grid

of the United States. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break. There are two related concepts when it comes to power grids that we want to talk about. There's reliability and there's resiliency. So reliability is how consistent is that power grid, How frequently are there any interruptions in power? The fewer, the more reliable, obviously, so if you're having frequent brown outs,

that's not reliable. No, it's not reliable. It would be rough to uh, and obviously we have had periods of that in the history of the United States and in different regions. Then there's resiliency, which refers to the power grid's ability to withstand adverse effects like solar flare activity or severe weather or you know, an apocalyptic scenario like if an e MP went off. By the way, if any MP goes off electromne atic pulse, that's what that

stands for. Uh, there's not I don't think there's a power grid on the world that is resilient enough to withstand a truly powerful electromagnetic pulse. UM. Also, the interesting thing with those is that you know, you hear about these, like especially in movies. You'll see uh like Oceans eleven uses an e MP at one point to knock out the security system of casino because if you're gonna do it, this will go a whole long Um. Then they get

back outside somehow. Yeah. Yeah, at any well, you know, hey, it's a movie. But at any way, the the e m p s, depending upon how powerful they are, they and how close you are to the pulse. Uh, that can affect all sorts of levels of electronics. Although generally speaking, the larger the system, the more vulnerable it is, because the more more likely it will have current running through it as a result of this electromagnetic pulse. It's the

same principle that's affecting the transformers. It's just imagine that it's this enormous pulse that isn't a controlled element of the power grid. So uh, most e MPs would probably affect large systems like the power grid, but leave smaller stuff like the The less complicated and smaller it is, the less likely it's going to be directly affected by the e mph So your battery operated stuff might work for a while, at least until the batteries run out, even in the face of an MP unless you happen

to be really close to where the pulse goes off. Alright, So resiliency and reliability to very important concepts. I read a report and boy was this report card? It was a report card. Yeah, The American Society of Civil Engineers released a report card that graded the United States on various elements of its infrastructure. And this came out in

two thousand thirteen. The whole thing is available online. It's a very interactive site that will depress you if you live in the United States because overall US got a D plus and that was for everything. That included things like not just electricity and energy, but drinking water bridges, Damn's hazardous waste handling, and aviation were also in there. Um, none of the grades were great. So what's are like GYM class grade that's waiting it up? Oh? Right, Um, yeah,

some of them are a little better than others. Actually, D plus being the average the g p A. That's also what we got for energy. So it's still a failing grade, but it's one of the higher ones. I mean, like, it's not a D, like are I think? I think Bridges got a D. So like, so what you're telling me is I really need to charge my cell phone before the zombies attack, and you really need to make sure your your your commute home doesn't go over Bridges. Um. Yeah,

they also, by the way, grade at individual states. Not every state got a grade, but Georgia did. We gotta ce. Oh so that's better than average, Yeah, we we it's better than the average score for the United States. By the way, in case you are unfamiliar with this grading score, the scale of grading. Uh, the school's not used that anymore, not not not universally, and we have listeners from all over the world. So this would be a grade system that typically goes A, B and C would be the

passing grades. See being average, B being good, and A being superior. Then you have D, which is technically a failing grade, and you've got plus and minus as well. So on the high side. D plus would be oh, you almost passed, but you didn't. Uh. I don't know if anyone who has ever used E, but F means fail. I thought a D was just a shameful passing grade. I always thought of C as well. Maybe, but I always thought C was passing, like C minus was the

for me, the threshold of passing. Essentially, that was the equivalent if you looked at it percentiles A seventy. Folks right in and let us know what you think about D S. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a failing grade, but I could be wrong. F is outright fail. D is like on the cusp um. So maybe I guess if you're a glass half full kind of guy, you might say that D is a passing grade D plus for energy. Energy, by the way, was not just the

power grid. It was all the elements of energy in the United States, but they did focus quite a bit on the power grid. They reported the aging infrastructure of the power grid as a huge problem, some of it again dating all the way back to the late eighteen hundreds, so it's pretty old. Um. And they also said that they these older facilities in particular are uh, they're prone for failure for things like just the fact that it's

such an aging infrastructure. Uh, they're not very good at handling, uh, adverse conditions like weather events or solar flares, that sort of stuff. And they said that, uh, the significant power outages in general are on the rise. They said there were seventy six recorded significant power outages. They didn't define what significant means in the stuff I was reading, so I'm not sure exactly what that refers to. But seventy six of them in two thousand seven and three hundred

seven of them in two thousand eleven. So it's a problem that is getting worse. So that's that's an issue. But they also had some less awful news in it. So they said that the United States is having a very slow growth in population in general. The rate of increases is fairly low when it comes to the need for electricity. So in other words, our population isn't growing so quickly that our need for electricity is outpacing our

ability to generate electricity. And in fact, there probably won't be a significant issue until around And that's that's saying that we don't we haven't invested in our ability to generate electricity. They of course very strongly advocate that we should be investing in that, both in the the power generation or the electricity generation and the transmission of electricity. All right, well, let's look at one particular type of threat to our energy infrastructure. How about a cyber attack. Yeah,

we've talked about this on tech stuff quite a few times. Uh, I mean, could foreign hackers just shut down the United States with some with some smart malicious computer people, Probably not the United States, but certainly elements within the United

States very targeted ones. Yes, because this is not a surprise we have discovered we being people in the United States, not myself in particular, UM, that there are elements of code, malicious code within several different facilities throughout the United States, within our our power grid infrastructure. UM a lot a

lot of them originating from China, some from Russia. But there are elements of code that clear really have been planted there, possibly as a way to weed out vulnerabilities and uh, you know, in the effort to exploit them in some potential future. So it's not necessarily the case that these are all going to shut off on the same day. In fact, that's probably not going to happen.

And it's largely because of what I talked about earlier, the fact that the power grid is actually made up of all this diverse you know, hardware and software run by different organizations. It means that there's not a unified means of shutting everything down, so any attacks would probably be very specific, and people know to look out for this stuff now, So there's there's there might be individual utilities that are lagging behind because they're not paying enough

attention to this problem. But it's not a universal issue. So in other words, it's kind of patchwork, right. You You may be that the target you've selected is really vulnerable, but also means that the effects are going to be localized to that area. You can't you can't say like, oh, he has a big red switch and when we push it that lights go out. It's not gonna be like that. Also, I don't know why I would, Well, they're actually Austrian, but it is just because that's where I go for

the my mad scientist. It is the best mad scientist accent to our German or Austrian listeners, no or to our Russian ones who who really agree that the Russian mad scientists is the best one. I mean, there's they all have their charms, is what I'm getting at. Well, you know, one possibility that strikes me is you're saying that a cyber attack could potentially target a localized facility or small subsection of infrastructure, though there's always the possibility

that by doing so they could trigger chains of larger events. Yes, and this is where you have to start taking into consideration the specific conditions around that localized area. So is this the scenario people have actually imagined, like a sort of a cascading series of problems that get bigger and bigger with infrastructure failure. It absolutely is. Yeah. There have been studies that have looked at specific UH systems that have centralized critical nodes, which would be very much similar

to the United States power grid UH. And if you were to target one of those important critical nodes and take it down, there's the potential to have this cascading domino effect where it would the the the loss of that part of the power grid would put such a burden on the surrounding ones that they too could fail, which could potentially cause others to fail as well. It might not be a nationwide outage, but it might be

much more significant than that one utility going down. Um, for that to happen, generally speaking, you have to have other elements that are at play. It's it's generally understood or believe that if it's an average day that probably it would just be the localized utility that was affected.

But if other issues, like if it was at a peak demand when other neighboring utilities were working overtime to supply power, because just because the way that particular day is unfolding, then you might have a different situation on your hands. I have to imagine somebody has tried to

simulate this. There's been a lot of interesting simulations that I looked into, most of which we're saying, hey, it's not as bad as we think unless and it's always that lesson like you're like, I guess, I guess if if things are aligned just right or just really really wrong,

then it could be really bad. In fact, in August two thousand thirteen, there was an article in Nature of Physics where scientists from the United States and Israel asserted that a cascading failure in the system it ends on those few critical elements, but they pretty much guarantee that at some point it will happen. And this, by the way, it doesn't necessarily mean that there was an attack. I mean, an attack could be the precipitating event that causes us.

But it could just be a failure. It could be a particular power plant in a grid fails and it and conditions just happen to be right for other facilities to fail as a result of that, and then you have a rolling blackout that could be pretty huge. Um or it could be a failure due to some other event, like a solar flare, which causes a similar event to

an e MP going off. It's not good. Well, maybe we should get back into the possibility of an MP solar flare, you know, any one of these high energy events that can sort of fry the components of our electricity infrastructure. Yeah, this is super bad news. Like, this is stuff where it's not just that it shuts down

the power, it does damage to the infrast structure. Uh. And again, one of the other issues about this complexity we were talking about is you don't always necessarily know where the problem is ultimately or which elements of your infrastructure are the ones that were damaged by this activity. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this text stuff

classic episode right after we take this break. So, if it's a significant solar flare that shuts down power in an area, you may have to do some really extensive testing to figure out which elements need to be repaired or replaced. In the meantime, you've got people who are without power. Not only are they without power, that a lot of them are going to be without any means of receiving communication to hear what the status is. And the longer that goes, the worst things are going to get.

Right Like like people, some people will react, all right, you they might hunker down or whatever. Some people might panic. Uh. You also have other elements at play that are going to continue whether you've been able to communicate or not, things like hospitals having to treat patients. I mean, there are some major issues that have to be addressed. And meanwhile you're scrambling to try and fix a broken system

and you don't necessarily know where the problem is. That's the real danger with these these uh events that would overload a power of grid by putting a huge amount of electricity through a system that wasn't prepared to handle it. Um and there's not a whole lot you can do to prevent that. I mean, like the these are events

that are outside of our control. The best you can do is is make your system as robust as possible so that it can resist electromagnetic interference, but actually involved I don't know, I mean really mostly in all of separating UH elements out into micro grids, that's right. One of the things we could do is instead of having these giant interconnected power grids UH, concentrate and create an infrastructure that has more micro grids that are only serving

a small region. They can be interconnected with other systems still, but they're not dependent upon them. They're not as interconnected as the current systems are. That way, if a local event knocks out a few systems, they are not going to pull down surrounding neighboring systems. In this cascading effect, it isolates the problem, which means that you can devote more attention to solving a localized issue than you would if it were a general nationwide problem. A nationwide blackout

would be catastrophic. Like you want to talk about post apocalyptic. Sure, you might argue that it's not an apocalypse, but a nationwide blackout would cause enormous problems. Well, yeah, we can I guess talk more about the projected consequences of that in a bit. But yeah, how about the zombie attack scenario? People always want to know about this. I have to kind of remind people sometimes that like, that's not gonna happen because zombies are sort of physically impossible. But you

could have something like a zombie sort of problem. You could just basically have a pandemic, really really bad uh infection that spreads throughout the population. So in this case, we're looking at a scenario where it's not necessarily physical damage to the infrastructure, right, It's it's a it's a dramatic reduction and human population where you just don't have

the people to run the systems anymore. Right. So, so let's say that you've got um really terrible conditions where the people who would be running the power plants and the various utilities mostly have been wiped out, so there are very few of them left, um, along with giant swaths of the population in general. So how long would you have electricity? You are one of the lucky survivors zombie apocalypse. Yeah, Rick Grimes has not made it over to your house yet, so you're still on your own.

How long could you expect to continue to have electricity? Well, this largely depends upon what style of power plant is providing electricity to your home and whether or not your home is on the grid. Now I'm assuming your home is on the grid. If you have managed to create an off the grid power scenario, you are in way better shape as far as how long your electricity is gonna last, but at least for the short term. But

let's say that you are connected to the grid. Well, if you are getting your electricity from a coal fired power plant, which by the way, makes up the vast majority of power plants in the United States, more than sixty percent, I believe our coal fired power plants, Uh, you would probably have electricity for the event has happened people have been wiped out. For maybe well to eighteen

hours after that event, you would have electricity. That's That's about how long the coal firing power plants would probably operate at their best before tripping before shutting down. Automatically. Uh, that's no, and that's because there's no there are no humans there to keep the operation moving. Because even with automation, there are things that require human attention. An alarm will go off and you'll look, and it may not be

that it's like a catastrophic failure. It could be something like you need to vent some ash out of the system, and if you don't do it, then ah, it'll trip. It'll say all right, well this will get to unsafe levels, so we're shutting down. Um, and it's one of those I need an adult. Yeah, and all it would take is to vent it. It's not a it's not otherwise a huge deal. It's not like it's leading to a

catastrophic failure. But it's one of those systems that's put in place for safety that if it's not monitored and acted upon, the plant will shut off. We need get some robots in those plans. Yeah, and well, there's actually been some people who have suggested that if this were an event where it was more gradual, like it's not a sudden thing where humanity disappears. If it were more gradual, then you might be able to alter the system so

that some alerts don't trigger an automatic shutdown anymore. Because you prioritize what what is the most important of the alerts, and which ones can we absolutely not ignore and we have to respond to anything else. The power plant just keeps on going until it can't go anymore. Okay, so is natural gas is going to be pretty much along the same lines as coal kind of um so, Cole,

here's the other issue with coal. You only have a certain amount of coal stored ray to go, and once that's gone, if you don't have people pushing bulldozers to push more coal into the system, you're out of fuel. So even if somehow magically the coal power plant works perfectly, you burn out of coal within a day. Natural gas is a little better. UH. You will essentially continue to get natural gas to feed into the power plant as long as the pressure inside the pipelines remains constant. But

that's a big if. I mean, any any problem that would trigger one of those UH systems to go into shut down mode would stop a natural gas power plant from operating. So you might go a couple of days maybe if if everything went well, like if there were no nothing was messing with the lines and no errors happened. Well, I hope you enjoyed that Part one. Next week we will continue with part two, and clearly at the very beginning of this episode, I was joking about the pandemic

being close to an apocalypse. It was bad, don't get me wrong, but I don't think we can go so far as to call it a true apocalypse. UM thankfully, but you know, keep staying safe out there, be healthy, be well. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again. Release it Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.

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