Recorded human history dates back approximately 5,500 years. Until Robert Fulton used a Watt steam engine to power the first commercially successful steamboat in 1807, human capability to travel more rapidly to overcome time and distance made little advancement. Foot and horse travel limited the speed on land, and ocean travel was limited by sail and ship design, especially before navigational knowledge developed. Travel through the air was unknown.
Over the last 250 years, land, sea, and air travel speeds have greatly reduced travel times while opening access to anywhere on the planet. This revolution in travel speeds and access to previously remote locations, combined with electric power generation, instant worldwide communications, and other technological progress, has created the complex new societies in which we now live, dependent on the availability of constant electrical power.
Major populations left their self-sufficient farms and moved into large urban areas where they could be supplied from a just-in-time worldwide supply network. Reliable instant communications and payment systems made this human support system feasible. What would happen if unexpected events extended the time and distance parameters upon which the new time-based system depends?
If not foreseen, expected, or planned for, these happenings are called “Black Swan Events”. They are defined as “the disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology”.
Brian Fagan, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published 1999 the book “Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations”. Diagrammed on the two inside front cover pages are 10,000 years of climatic events and the resulting historical events. Early in his book, Fagan writes about the Great Monsoon-caused Famine of 1899-1900, where ‘rainfall dropped 27 percent below normal’ and the ‘dead littered bridges and roadsides’. He covered the droughts in the Maya Mesoamerican lowlands during the Cold Period, 650 A.D., which followed the Roman Warming Period, 400 A.D.
Fagan’s two summary pages cover droughts, floods, climate change, and the rise and fall of emperors over 10,000 years of history. These pages show a ‘severe drought in Egypt’ 3,000 years ago. This timeline is consistent with the seven years of drought in the Old Testament forecast by the Biblical Joseph. This forecast caused his elevation in the Egyptian hierarchy. Did Joseph prevent a Black Swan Event from happening in Egypt 3,500 years ago? Or is Joseph a myth?
Whatever the case, climate events caused empires and civilizations to rise and fall well before our modern times. In addition to climate variability, volcanic eruptions have created global cooling from air pollution, screening the Sun’s warming effects. Solar flare storms, named the Carrington Event, burned the points of teletype devices in 1859. These storms of variable strength occur periodically, the last major one about 60 years ago. These occur randomly and as such are Black Swan Events.
These unpredictable, naturally occurring events could potentially cause blackouts on our nation’s electrical grids, upon which our civilization now depends. When they happen, our iPhones are powerless within one day. Our food supplies run out in less than a week. The food shelves in our supermarkets become bare in three days. Our vehicles quickly run short of power. Our communications with the outside world are soon cut off. Cash works – credit cards out!
Within a week with no power, chaos begins to reign. Our complex civilization, dependent on electrical power, is shattered before a month passes without power.
Electrical grids built with high dependence on wind and solar energy are the most vulnerable to Black Swan Events. Battery backup is insufficient to bridge long hours of power outages, much less days or weeks. Sufficient permanent natural gas or nuclear-generated base power backup may be too expensive.
Who is running this Circus? Are the tires on your bicycle inflated?
TW3
May 8, 2025
John Whitmore Jenkins
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