Mark Hill
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We tend to think of an apocalypse as a single big event, where one day everything is normal, but 24 hours later we're all scrounging an irradiated wasteland for food scraps. But in reality, things tend to quietly break down in the background for so long that by the time you're having a sword fight for the last known box of Corn Flakes, your new life feels natural. So before we reach that point, we should all pay a little more attention to how ...
Brace your monocles and top hats for a shock here, but computer code is pretty important these days. And because programming is such a huge and vital industry, we like to think that the job is done by masterful logicians who value clarity and purpose. But, much like how the Cracked article writing process ends when the whiskey bottle is empty, code prioritizes expediency above all else. No one has the time or energy to care about tomorrow's problem, as long as today's problem is solved.
The result of this is dubbed spaghetti code, an endless mishmash of complicated and hard-to-understand programs produced by tough deadlines, shifting priorities, a lack of standardization, and sometimes simple ineptitude. These programs mostly work just fine, but when they inevitably break, it can be next to impossible to locate the problem in the tangle. The code's own creator (or huge team of creators, each with their own style) often isn't even still around to make the fix, and they don't bother leaving instructions behind. Imagine having a co-worker whose filing system was "throw all my shit on the floor," and then, a decade after they've moved to a new job, you're tasked with saving the company by finding one piece of paper in a pile of hundreds of thousands.
This isn't a huge issue if needlessly obtuse code is bringing down your epic Ruth Bader Ginsburg fanfic, On The Basis Of Sex (In The Fuckin' Sense). But spaghetti code has been blamed for things like a lethal car crash caused by a car's flawed acceleration system, a six-hour 911 outage in the entire state of Washington, United Airlines having to ground its whole fleet for a day, and New York Stock Exchange trading going down like it had been targeted by a Batman villain.
Every program breaks sometimes, but modern code has become so large and sprawling that it's impossible to test, or even understand, every possible situation and variable. How do you anticipate every outcome in a system designed for millions of people? And when code breaks, it's not like when we broke our arm trying to do that backflip -- the problem cannot be visually diagnosed. You're stuck staring at tens of millions of badly organized and documented lines of code, trying to figure out what went wrong.
WikipediaThen, to keep it interesting, imagine trillions of dollars are on the line and the coding language predates the state of Hawaii.
Around 2 billion of the planet's 7.6 billion people lack easy access to clean water. The United Nations wants to get that number down to zero by 2030, but worries that it could instead blow up to half of the world's population. Yes, "water balloon fight" might one day be an activity for the highest elite.
Global 2000/The Carter CenterYou could read here why that's important, or spare yourself some nightmares and take our word for it that there's more than dirt in dirty water.
Like with most problems of this scale, there are a variety of causes at play. Climate change, and the droughts that come with it, is the obvious one. Water quality has deteriorated too, thanks to agrochemical runoff, industrial discharge, and municipal waste. And sheer demand is growing due to the increased living standards in developing countries. Since "Thanks for making a bunch of shit for us in pollution-riddled sweatshops, now please continue to live in abject poverty so that we can continue to enjoy long hot showers" isn't a reasonable request for the Western world to make, that growing demand will have to be met.
While this is a good excuse to glare at that guy at the gym who goes through three bottles of water with every workout, the vast majority of the world's fresh water goes to irrigating crops, raising livestock, and farming fish. Thanks to more efficient technology and farming methods, we're slowing the rate at which we withdraw water from the ground, lakes, the tear ducts of whiny nerds, etc. But the current rate still outpaces population growth. And, ironically, one of the most important methods for fighting climate change -- renewable energy, like biofuels -- will require more water than if we just continued to belch coal into the atmosphere until the planet shrivels up and dies.
This could mean difficult resource allocation decisions, like forcing a population to choose between electricity or a fish supply. It could also, in a worse scenario, mean water shortages. Remember when Cape Town's 4 million people had to ration water in 2018, and still almost ran out of it? It reached the point where people were dredging up an old mad science scheme to haul Antarctic icebergs to the city, and that could be Los Angeles in 2040. Skyrocketing urban growth could create an insatiable demand for water that will make Cape Town's crisis look quaint. And water scarcity, as many a Mad Max movie have taught us, leads to civil unrest, migration, and general dystopian conflict.
World Resources InstituteOh, and the common tactic of assuming U.S. citizenship will get you out of any global crisis might not work so well this time.
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