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Suspension bridge on Mount Ai-Petri in Crimea

Avi Schnurr

Avi Schnurr
CEO and President at Electric Infrastructure Security Council

The Bridge Back from Armageddon

 

What if someone convinced you, no matter how, that your family, community, everyone and everything you care about were on course for inevitable, terminal disaster?

What if simple affordable steps, working with others facing the same fate, could build a bridge to bring them all home?

What if this isn’t just metaphor, but well-researched, cold, hard fact? 

The path to Armageddon

Writing for the BBC’s Future project, researcher Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk summarized how we stack up against the collapse of virtually every civilization in history:

“Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us how much risk we face today. Worryingly, the signs are worsening.”[1]

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In January 2022 the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the famous “Doomsday Clock” at 100 seconds to midnight.[2] And that was before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In short, not looking good.

How did we get on this path?

It’s not hard to find our suffering world’s collection of brewing manmade catastrophes. And the growing scale of climate-change-driven disasters, newly discovered megaquake seismic zones in gas pipeline country, periodic extreme, grid-munching solar flares and the threat of high morbidity pandemics are all there, waiting in the catastrophe-de-jour lineup.

Yet each of these threats is not that different from what humanity faced in the past. What has changed?

Unlike in previous civilizations, we’ve tied the critical infrastructures, products and services that sustain us together into a living, planetary-scale infrastructure/product/service supply chain.

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Lose one link, and the chain breaks.

Unless there’s a quick patch, the whole chain dies.

We die.

Why do researchers think we’re closing in on Armageddon?

Imagine a subcontinent-scale blackout, with all the trimmings. The lights are out, the fridge is warm, cell phones and comm networks dead, the water tap runs dry, grocery stores empty, hospitals stop functioning and the roads – for those who still have gas – are gridlocked.

Emergency managers have enormous practice and great capabilities to deal with the kind of disasters we see every year, or even once in a decade.

Not this one.

As decision makers in every critical corporation and government agency try to engage, they will quickly find a handful of simple but very terminal resilience gaps will stop them cold.

  • What’s happening? After days without power on a subcontinental scale, situational awareness runs dry
  • Emergency services and collaboration?  No power for days means no cell phones, no landlines, no communication. Emergency services require wide communication
  • Managing chaos? Prioritizing limited resources to stave off the worst?  Even if there were situational awareness and solid communications, no human will be capable of sorting through chaos on a subcontinental scale. The scale, complexity and interdependent hemorrhaging of every infrastructure, service and supply chain will be far beyond anything anyone, no matter how experienced, will be able to sort though.

Coming home from Armageddon

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Ok, this is where we pull the Elon Musk genie out of the magic technology bottle. After all, we’ve got high tech. Amazon. Google. StarLink. Why can’t we just techno-glide our way out of the problem?

So here’s the big secret: We can. We can solve this.

But there is a catch: the return fare from Armageddon can only be paid in advance.

 

 

 

 

The return fare from Armageddon can only be paid in advance

For years, EIS Council and its partners have focused their resources on developing and deploying the unique tools and capabilities the world will need to survive and recover from a Black Sky catastrophe. All-hazard, fully interoperable, high data-rate emergency communication that can operate with no grid and no national telecom assets (BSX). Low cost, prioritized many-week add-ons for emergency power (E-UPS and Energy Assurance). Peer reviewed strategy for population-sustaining power grid restart (EPRO Handbook V). All are elements of the Human Continuity Project™, the whole-of-world collaborative project structured to develop and expand on these capabilities. To build a bridge back from Armageddon.

And, perhaps the most surprising tool in the list:

A new AI technology to enable a multi-corporate operating system with unlimited scalability. So all the interdependent links in our planetary infrastructure/product/service supply chain can collaborate when catastrophe strikes; can work together automatically to distil out the critical, time-dependent, life-sustaining priorities for the decision makers who need them.

It’s called GINOM.

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Join us at thewebinar to learn more.

And one more thought for you. There are many organizations you can join who recognize the problems our civilization is facing. But at EIS Council, we don’t think yet another organization is needed to help “admire the problem.” We’re working on the tools that can solve it. If you agree, visit us at www.eiscouncil.org, and become a member. Get involved.

Why get involved?

Luke Kemp, the author of the University of Cambridge study, said it well. Let’s stop pretending our civilization is immortal. Let’s learn from history, and get busy building a path back from Armageddon.

We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past.[3]

 

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[1]  “Are we on the road to civilization collapse?”; Luke Kemp; Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge; https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse

[2] “Bulletin Science and Security Board condemns Russian invasion of Ukraine; Doomsday Clock stays at 100 seconds to midnight;

[3] Ibid.

 

 

 

 

 

Visit our resource to learn more about:

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