The thing I keep thinking about, and I feel like I’ve never been able to properly communicate, is that the machines our society runs on are built to run in a certain temperature range.
The 2021 texas winter fiasco was a perfect demonstration of what happens when we try to run a society’s machinery outside of it’s expected temperature range. Yes, the ERCOT goofballs were trying to save money by narrowing that expected operating range because “It never gets that cold” and “It never gets that hot”, but my badly articulated point still stands - a system was made to operate in a temperature range outside of it’s capability, and it started to fail. They were minutes away from losing very expensive and hard to replace equipment. What we don’t want is for one of the more competently-run power grids in the world to start to buckle due to temperatures, because the same thing that happened in texas could happen on a larger scale.
And that’s just talking about the power grid. Anything with a heat exchanger in it, including your car and air conditioner and all the refrigeration that is needed to keep everyone fed, is designed to run in a certain temperature range, and will stop working if you run it outside of that range for too long.
But wait, we can just design stuff to run in a wider temperature range! We certainly can. But we would have to redesign everything that moves heat around.
The thing I keep thinking about, and I feel like I’ve never been able to properly communicate, is that the machines our society runs on are built to run in a certain temperature range.
The 2021 texas winter fiasco was a perfect demonstration of what happens when we try to run a society’s machinery outside of it’s expected temperature range. Yes, the ERCOT goofballs were trying to save money by narrowing that expected operating range because “It never gets that cold” and “It never gets that hot”, but my badly articulated point still stands - a system was made to operate in a temperature range outside of it’s capability, and it started to fail. They were minutes away from losing very expensive and hard to replace equipment. What we don’t want is for one of the more competently-run power grids in the world to start to buckle due to temperatures, because the same thing that happened in texas could happen on a larger scale.
And that’s just talking about the power grid. Anything with a heat exchanger in it, including your car and air conditioner and all the refrigeration that is needed to keep everyone fed, is designed to run in a certain temperature range, and will stop working if you run it outside of that range for too long.
But wait, we can just design stuff to run in a wider temperature range! We certainly can. But we would have to redesign everything that moves heat around.
Holy shit I’ve never considered this until now. Survival skills intensify…