So, you're sitting at home watching some top-notch Bright Side videos and sipping on hot chocolate.
Hey few things in life are better!
Nothing bodes trouble… until your screen suddenly goes black!
“What the…”
You move the mouse.
Nothing.
Push the power button.
Still, no life.
“Ah, must’ve accidentally knocked the cord out of the wall somehow…”
You check it, and everything’s plugged in!
You’ve been so preoccupied trying to revive your PC that you didn’t even notice the
room got darker!
The house is uncomfortably quiet too.
You can’t hear the refrigerator, the fan standing in the corner of the room is silent
and still.
But then, the worst thing -- the lights on your wi-fi router stopped blinking!
“Great, power’s out.
Guess I’ll just sit and play on my phone until they turn it back on!”
Yeah, good luck with that…
A person can go without food for a couple weeks, water for a few days, air for mere
minutes.
But without electricity ... it's hard to say.
It all depends on where you live, what survival skills you have, and how much you depend on
the conveniences of living on the grid – like the supermarkets that store and sell your
food, which they got thanks to factories that mass-produce it or even farmers that grow
it themselves.
But let's see what will happen to humanity if electricity disappeared for, say, a year!
Let the games begin… just not on your smartphone.
Day 1: Late afternoon…
There’s a bit of charge left on the phone, but your mobile data isn’t working.
Nobody suspects that communication towers have shut down, which means no calls, not
even emergencies!
For now, all you know is, the Internet is gone!
How long do you think you’d make it?
Let me know down in the comments!
You don’t have any offline games either.
Your phone is nothing more than an overpriced calculator now.
“Guess I’ll go for a walk before the sun goes down…”
You head to your favorite cafe.
Hey, why not grab a latte to pass the time?
The barista cuts you off as soon as you walk in the door.
“Sorry, all our machines are down from the power outage!”
Ok, there goes that idea.
You walk around aimlessly, still trying to catch a signal on your phone…you, and everyone
else standing around looking at their screens in confusion and frustration.
You overhear a group of people talking about a nasty crash on a busy intersection.
Oh yeah, traffic lights don’t work now.
And the cars will soon go along with them once the gas in their tanks runs out.
It’s not like you can fill up at stations – they, like the café, need electric too!
On that note, you decide you’re better off heading back home…
Evening…
First thing’s first, a nice hot shower to wash this crazy situation away.
…No tap.
The toilet doesn’t flush either.
Yes, public services like plumbing, heating, and cooling go too.
An outage like this is a lot more serious than just losing your lights, especially when
it’s prolonged…
No TV, no PlayStation, no nothing.
Man, why does anything fun have to be plugged in?
“Ugh, fine, I’ll read a book.”
You start lighting some candles.
You check outside the window to see if other homes have gotten their electricity back yet.
It’s the darkest you’ve ever seen the city.
All you notice are dimly lit windows – everyone else is lighting candles too.
You look up at the sky.
Stars!
Without street lights and lit-up homes and businesses, the night sky looks breathtaking.
“Well, at least there’s that!”
Day 2…
The perishables in your fridge have long reached the point of no return.
You throw out your milk, eggs, cheese, and so on.
The same goes for all the refrigerated and frozen products at grocery stores and restaurants.
The entire city wreaks of spoiled produce over the next few days….
Maybe you can get something else at the store?
You better have cash on you – card readers aren’t going to work.
Neither will ATMs.
Anyone with money in the bank now has no access to it…
Emergency generators are already running out all over the world – the most powerful models
can only go for 24 hours max.
Factories are at a standstill.
Food production for 7.5 billion people has come to a screeching halt…
2 weeks without electricity…
As kitchen cabinets and pantries run dry, panic begins.
A lot have even taken to helping themselves at local stores – they really need that
bottled water.
You decide to get out of town.
Can’t fly – the airports have been closed.
If only you had a little turboprop, like a Cessna Skyhawk.
At least your car has some gas in it.
But, besides you, hundreds of thousands of people leave the city as well.
You’ll spend the whole day in a traffic jam.
1 month without power…
The global economy is plummeting.
Commerce, banking, trade, national and personal debt – they’re just gone overnight!
Without public services, the garbage has piled up on the streets.
Rats come up out of the sewers – this city is theirs now!
But it’s good that you already left this chaos a long time ago!
3 months off the grid…
You knew there was no way you could just “up!” and start a farm and be self-sufficient.
Like many people, you turn to relatives for support.
Lucky for you, your Uncle Joe and Aunt Sue have been living off the grid their whole
lives.
But you have to help out around the homestead too.
Gone are the days when you get to eat simply because you paid for food – now you must
earn it through physical labor!
6 months without power Small communes have sprouted up everywhere.
People extract water from wells, they stay fed thanks to agriculture and fishing.
Without money, we go back to bartering.
Need another sheep?
Then trade it for a pig!
Still, humanity even begins to wean off electricity, but…
Day 365 … Light appears!
Well, that is, if the equipment at power stations is operational after a year without maintenance
(it probably isn’t).
Once they fix things up and electricity is back, it’ll take at least 10 years to fully
restore the economy, infrastructure, and production.
So, in a nutshell, we’d go back to living how we did before we ever had electricity!
But now I can only wonder…
What happens if natural electricity disappears?
Like…
- Lightning
Around 50-100 lightning bolts strike the planet…every single second!
Our world needs lightning.
Each time a bolt lights up the sky, it puts off ozone.
That word sound familiar?
Yep, there’s a layer of it in the atmosphere that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet
and cosmic radiation.
Lightning benefits the planet in lots of other ways too, but I’ll save that for a future
video!
So let’s move on…
–Electromagnetic fields Let's go back to the moment you were watching
YouTube and the power went out.
If ALL electricity disappeared (I’m not just talking about power outages but electric
energy itself!), then you’d notice all the magnets had fallen off your fridge.
All because they lost the power of electromagnetism.
If there are no more electromagnetic fields in the Universe, then things go south very
quickly…
Electromagnetic fields make all atoms and molecules stick together to form tangible
matter – that is, you, me, and everything around us.
Without that magnetic glue, everything would fall apart and dissipate!
Yes, Thanos-style…
– No more light and time itself!
Going off that last note, you’ve got your molecules made up of atoms.
Flying around each of those atoms are ELECTRONS.
They not only rotate but also repel each other because of ELECTRIC charge.
(Ah, so that’s where the name comes from!)
Such repulsion is necessary to restrain the greatest force in the universe – gravity!
And gravity compresses everything around.
So, if the charge in the electrons disappears and they stop repelling, then gravity will
begin to squeeze them together with such force that a black hole will arise and begin to
absorb all matter!
Even if you somehow managed to survive such an event, you wouldn’t be able to see anything
because gravity also absorbs photons, which are particles of light.
Absolute darkness will come.
Everything will become nothing.
And this will continue for a whole year.
Although, wait, the concept of “a year” will cease to exist because gravity will distort
not only space but also time…
– New Beginnings!
Let's say, some time has passed (whatever that means now!), and electricity returns.
What will happen then?
BOOM!
Big bang!
The universe will be shocked into life!
Electrons will return to their repelling, atoms and molecules will work again.
But it’ll take billions of years to get back to where we are now.
Good thing this is all purely hypothetical, a little fantastical thanks to my wandering
mind, and certainly not possible!
So, keep sipping on your hot chocolate and enjoying that Tube!
Hey, while you’re still here, give the video a like and share it with a friend!
Here are some other cool videos to check out – just click to the left or right, and stay
on the Bright Side of life!