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Permalink Reply by Ted Foureagles on September 4, 2012 at 8:33pm

It's one thing to work out ways of getting electrical power back, and quite another to consider not having the ability to exploit electricity as an option.  Thought experiment:

Imagine that something catastrophic happened -- say a devastating thermonuclear event that collapsed existing infrastructure and wiped out most of the minds adept at understanding and rebuilding it.  We'd be in about the same place with material technology that we were a mere couple of hundred years ago, but without the skilled, smart people to move us forward.  They do, after all, tend to congregate in likely target spots.

We would still have exploitable (if less readily) coal and oil energy (and thus steel) to allow the smart-ish & aggressive types to once again colonize those less agressive or a bit slower on the uptake.  Information transfer would slow to a crawl, further enhancing aggressionist advantage even without the tool of Fox News.  The immunosuppressive advantage enjoyed by western Europeans 500 years ago is gone, and knowlege of food diversity is more widespread; so the political power structure in rebuilt societies would likely be more even.  It might even be a world without a superpower!

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Permalink Reply by Madhukar Kulkarni on September 5, 2012 at 12:06pm

It is posible that the humanity on this planet may become extinct, but. until then, electricity willl always be there.  There is so much generation, transmission and distribution capacity established that total losss of electricity is impossible. Let us not worry. Nuclear fusion is going to be the next source of energy and that will ensure that electricity will always be there.

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