- This could come in perhaps two or three years, or even
sooner. This is about a future with no electricity. Such a disaster can
quickly happen anytime after the Sun generates a coronal mass ejection
(commonly known as a CME) in the direction of Earth. A CME is the product
of an X class solar flare as solar material leaves the sun, and does not
loop back into the Sun as it does an M class flare.
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- A CME is a momentary event, which will have extremely
negative effects lasting for a century or more on Earth. We'll explore
what will happen in detail to most aspects of life as we know it. Some
parts of this article will be graphic in nature.
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- In the 1990s a minor CME event did happen. CME solar
material becomes ionizing radiation and hit the Earth's atmosphere over
the area ofQuebec, Canada. For about one week the power company was
unable to reset high tension power line circuit breakers to restore power.
The ionizing radiation made the atmosphere so conductive that high tension
power lines were arcing.
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- Ionizing radiation ionizes the air, making it highly
conductive and shorting out the AC power to ground. All power authorities
could do was to wait for the radiation to subside, which took about one
week before power could be restored. We do not officially know how much
of the Quebecarea's electrical system was damaged by the CME. It would
also be interesting to see if there was a spike in cancer or other diseases
with people who were exposed to the ionizing radiation during the event.
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- If a truly massive CME hits the Earth, it could for all
practical purposes take out the world's electricity distribution. For all
practical purposes, this would essentially be permanent. It could take
decades to repair the world's electrical system, if replacement parts were
immediately available. There would be massive damage to power generating,
distribution facilities, substations and countless transformers and switching
equipment everywhere.
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- When high power transformers used in substations or on
utility poles are damaged, they must be scrapped or rebuilt. If the factories
that create or repair these electrical components are also without power,
they will be unable to rebuild or repair electrical equipment. With an
AC power outage, there will be no diesel fuel available to fill the tanks
on large trucks used to transport and install these massive electrical
components.
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- We've read in history books how mobs of people grabbed
and lynched people, or tar and feathered them, about former queens voluntarily
walking to the chopping block, the condemned walking up the steps to the
gallows or people burned at the stake. Living in the past where these things
were accepted as part of life seems incomprehensible to us with our modern
mindset.
-
- Yet a sudden shift back in time to a mindset of acceptable
brutality can happen faster than we want might want to accept. And it all
starts with a light switch on the wall that won't work.
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- Imagine life without electricity. First, let's consider
something simple like lighting, which is often taken for granted. Today
we flip a switch and a light comes on. Turning on a light seems simple
enough, but try lighting your home at night when the power goes off. All
of us have made a simple mistake when the power is off. As we move from
one room to another we instinctively reach for the light switch and flip
it on and nothing happens. Meanwhile, food in refrigerators and freezers
is in danger of spoiling as temperatures slowly begin to rise.
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- It's instinctive today to simply grab a flashlight. Most
people do not know that the life expectancy of an ordinary incandescent
flashlight bulb is about 25 hours according to some manufacturer's data
sheets. That means having a big box of batteries on hand won't help you
when the lamp burns out. And although the lifetime of a solid-state LED
flashlight is measured in thousands of hours, battery lifetime is not.
If power is out and not coming back on for decades how many batteries
and light bulbs would you need for a lifetime of power? Will batteries
last for decades sitting unopened in the packages? Of course they won't.
Everything has an expiration date on it.
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- So why time travel back 5000 years? That's roughly how
far back in time we need to go back, to when candles and kerosene/oil lamps
didn't exist. Even during the years America was founded, they were accustomed
to lighting with kerosene lamps and candles. Without power this is where
we'll be. In biblical times and even before, people had oil lamps and candles.
Egyptians even had a means to light their tombs to do paintings. Today,
almost everyone is completely and utterly unprepared to generate even simple
lighting at night at night for any length of time, without resorting to
oil lamps and candles. The art of making candles (and volume availability
candle wicks and animal fats or paraffin used to make them) is, for all
practical purposes, non-existent.
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- Without electricity, kerosene to fill oil lamps will
be completely unavailable. Tanks in the ground at your local gas station
may still hold thousands of gallons of kerosene when the power goes off
- but there won't be any easy way to reach it. And if there was, the kerosene
would be completely gone in a matter of a few days. It ends the usefulness
of those cute little portable kerosene heaters in the winter.
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- Computers and communications of all types including the
emergency broadcast system will become worthless without electricity. To
be informed, we will have to return to listening to government vehicles
using loudspeakers which drive up and down streets blaring instructions
to people on what to do, where to go and what the curfew hours are.
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- Oil refineries cannot operate without electricity which
is used to run large pumps, valves and computer controlled instrumentation
for controlling the refining process. Extremely high pressures and temperatures
are involved in the refining process which must be carefully controlled
to prevent explosions or leaks. Even if a refinery generates its own power,
who will be their end customer? Surely it will be the government that will
become their biggest customer.
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- Men will grow long facial hair. This will be a forced
hair style, since electric razors will no longer function and stores will
quickly be sold out of razor blades and shaving cream. Women's legs and
armpits will soon look likewell, what men's legs and armpits do. Hair styles
will soon turn flat, gnarly and wild, as only scissors will be available
to cut hair. However that should fit right in as many hair styles are already
gnarly-looking.
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- If you owned a huge stockpile of new flashlight batteries
you could sell, what would you take for them as payment? The dollar or
currency of whatever country you lived in would become meaningless. You'll
need a store to spend it in for needed goods. But what value does a dollar
actually have? Toilet paper will become more valuable than gold. You can't
wipe your butt with gold coins, but you can with a fistful of one hundred
dollar bills.
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- This leads us to bathroom issues. Back in the days of
outhouses, there was the legendary (and now non-existent) Sears catalog
among other things which was used as toilet paper. No matter what you may
use for toilet paper, it will run out sooner than later. What then? What
will people use? Leaves? And without a flushable toilet, where will people
relieve themselves? Cities have millions of people, but most of them do
not have access to a field or wooded area in which to dig a hole or build
an outhouse. This is one of many reasons why city life will become incredibly
difficult. City life will return to what Europe was hundreds
of years ago, when sewage was dumped from buckets out of windows into the
street. Along with the sewage, rats and the plague will most certainly
thrive as well.
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- Medical issues will arise on a scale never seen before
in recorded modern history. Even a routine simple surgery like an appendectomy
will become a serious problem. Hospitals will generate their own power
using backup generators, but can only do this for a short time. When the
fuel runs out they too, will be crippled. Being a patient in a hospital
without power will quickly become a nightmare. Smart patients will get
up and leave, because their fate will soon be sealed.
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- When the power goes out in the hospital for the second
time after generators have permanently shut down, all the beeping alarms
will soon go silent after a few hours when battery packs in medical equipment
like IV pumps are depleted. Everyone will know deep in their gut that this
is the beginning of the end. An eerie silence will descend upon all the
floors. Someone might hear news on a portable radio broadcast from an emergency
station that power won't be coming back on for many years, if ever again
because of damage to the grid. This will add confirmation to the fear.
Government and emergency services can't even begin to cope with the crisis.
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- Nurses and doctors hearing the devastating news will
soon be talking amongst themselves in hushed tones, deciding the fate of
many unwitting patients. A nurse will enter a patient's room holding a
hypodermic filled with cocktail of a pain killer and potassium chloride.
She will tell the patient with an assuring and comforting voice, "This
is just a vitamin shot the doctor ordered. It won't hurt." On the
obstetrics floor the crying of babies in the nursery will bring on a whole
new meaning of hopelessness to mothers and staff, as the reality of life
without electricity sets in.
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- Most hospitals can only operate a matter of days without
power. No modern hospital can run indefinitely without main AC power. Laparoscopic
surgery requires electricity to power the light sources used to illuminate
organs inside patients during surgery. TV monitors allow the surgeon to
see what's going on inside the patient. Laparoscopic surgery will have
to be replaced by older style open surgery near windows but this
can only be performed while medical supplies and sunlight lasts. Medical
instrument sterilizers will also become useless. Every hospital's supply
of pain killers will be quickly exhausted in a matter of days, or perhaps
even hours once euthanizing begins.
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- Deaths from something as simple and curable as appendicitis,
currently almost unheard of today, will become commonplace. Even a simple
kidney or bladder stone problem can become life-threatening if a stone
is lodged in the wrong place and left untreated. Defibrillators used to
revive cardiac patients will become non-functional. One-time-use portable
defibrillators such as those carried by police and fireman or used in the
home will be quickly used and discarded. Government forces will confiscate
any defibrillators remaining for saving the lives of only those deemed
worthy to survive.
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- Hospital ultrasound, CT scanners, X-ray and MRI machines
will become useless hardware without electricity to run them or the associated
computers that reconstruct today's images. Most hospitals only use digital
imaging plates for single image X-ray imaging. Even if film and developing
equipment was available this would make no difference, since there will
be no power to run even a simple X-ray machine or run a film processor.
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- Modern medical diagnostic tools and procedures will become
worthless almost instantly. Medical procedures will quickly return to the
state of the art hundreds of years ago, with only a blood pressure cuff,
thermometer and stethoscope as diagnostic tools. Today's doctors are mentally
and physically unequipped to deal with primitive medical techniques. Most
of these ancient diagnostic techniques they have only have read about in
med school textbooks or heard medical school professors describe. Despite
all their modern medical training and experience, their profession would
be seriously impaired. Almost every clinical instrument a doctor uses today
has batteries or an AC plug on it somewhere to power it. This includes
life-saving respirator machines to assist breathing.
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- We saw a glimpse of what will happen with the hospital
in New Orleans when Katrina hit the city. Patients were left
to die or were euthanized when temperatures rose without electricity. There
was nothing doctors or nurses could do to help them. This only made a brief
appearance in the news when discussions about criminal charges and reprimands
were discussed, then little more was heard. Now imagine these decisions
taking place in thousands of hospitals across the world after a CME takes
out the power.
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- There will be major problems disposing of the deceased.
Cemeteries depend on gas and diesel power equipment such as backhoes and
bucket loaders to open and close graves. Without diesel or gasoline fuel
there will be few burials. Hand-digging graves could never keep up with
the demand. No hearses will have gasoline to transport bodies to the cemeteries.
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- So what about cremation? Crematories are not something
people like to talk about. However, they use gas burners and blowers to
generate intense heat to perform a cremation in about 90 minutes, according
to manufacturers who manufacture these machines. Crematories also require
electricity to run the gas safety circuits and the air blower which forces
oxygen and gas into the chamber. No electricity, no cremation.
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- Without graves, hearses, trucks or crematories, the deceased
will have to be dumped into large piles in locations as far away from the
population as they can be moved to with whatever available means of transport.
There will be no diesel fuel available to dig pits to bury them in. Remember
old films of German concentration camps? Those cadavers were eventually
buried. But without power and fuel, no one after a CME event will be.
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- Dead bodies quickly generate Cholera and other diseases.
Rats and wild animals will run rampant without predators to keep them in
check, and this will quickly spread the disease to the living.
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- There will be vehicles scattered on the sides of streets,
roads, interstates and highways everywhere. Cell phones won't ever work
again (what a shame) and there will be no fuel for even a tow truck to
come get your vehicle and drag it back to your home. Wherever a vehicle
quits is the very spot it will stay for the rest of time and eternity,
rusting away until nothing is left of it. People will gather their belongings
from a dead vehicle that runs out of gas and try to walk to the nearest
place of shelter. There will not be a "ride back home." A ride
back home in what?
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- Martial law will surely be declared, but it won't be
enforced for very long. Soldiers and serviceman will soon decide to simply
return home to their families to be with them and to protect them. They
may even walk if they have to. Drinking water and food will be in extremely
short supply before it too, becomes unavailable. We'll talk about
later what happens with food and water run out, and it won't be for squeamish
to read.
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- Someone else I know who has seen the future a few years
ago using remote viewing told me about seeing street after street, home
after home with front doors open and no one around. I didn't understand
it then, but I do now.
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- People will feel forced to pack up and leave their homes
to seek out government camps to live in. However, this is a big mistake
and equivalent to knocking on the gates of hell and begging to get in.
No need here to talk about how bad it will get in the camps when food is
gone.
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- Those who have food storage at home will be anxiously
taking inventory of their storage each day to see what they have left.
They know that every morsel they eat will bring themselves and their family
one step closer to starvation, and there will be little they can do about
it. They will be a victim of their own choices made back in today's time,
before the power went out. A continuous, unspoken fear about being robbed
or killed for what they have left will always be nagging in the back of
everyone's mind.
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- Without the rule and enforcement of law, no place in
any city will be safe. Cities will be the first areas to plunge into lawlessness.
To believe that police officers will report to an extremely dangerous job
without any pay to protect you is to imagine the Moon is made of green
cheese. Soldiers that patrol the streets will increasingly be in harms
way.
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- When food runs out people will return to cannibalism.
This is when life gets very, very ugly. No one will be safe. Mobs of people
will overpower the weak and consume them. I was recently sent a series
of very gruesome photos taken of a group of about 20 people consuming a
dead man, who was laid out on a board in a field. He was literally hacked
into pieces with machetes and long knives. Those eating his flesh were
a wide variety of ages from teenage to older folk, and some were smiling
for the camera while holding up his body parts.
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- The distant background in the cannibalism photos showed
a modern city. In the last photo only a few ribs were left. Whether staged
or not, these photographs accurately show how life without electricity
would be reduced to a completely barbaric existence.
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- Countless gruesome repeated scenes like this every day
will be the ultimate end of civilization as we know it. People will kill
anyone for a cup of drinkable water. An inherent, primitive drive to survive
is present in all human beings and should not be underestimated. Even the
most kind and loving people you know could become one of these people almost
overnight when they are hungry enough.
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- The only possible solution for survival is to live in
a very rural area, completely out of sight from the road. You will need
some form of renewable power to survive, such as wind, water or solar.
You will also need hydroponics to grow your own food indoors. If food is
grown outdoors, animals or people can consume it or steal it during the
night. This will not be hobby gardening, but serious survival gardening.
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- You'll need to have your own medical supplies, organic
non-terminator seeds, hydroponics solution and equipment, a water well,
well pump, a source of heat in winter and other basic necessities of life
such as shoes and clothing, and either an outhouse or an indoor toilet
and bidet. Whatever system you have to survive on, you'll need a lifetime
of replacement parts and supplies. One must prepare for this assuming that
no store will be available to go buy anything - ever again.
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- If you are thinking "chain saw" for your wood
supply consider how fast a chain saw uses fuel and how you won't
be able to obtain any. Sawing down a 36" diameter hardwood tree is
far more difficult than most people realize until they try it. It's a two-man
job for two men in great physical shape, with the right saw and experience
doing it.
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- You will be forced to defend yourself and your family
using deadly force with a firearm, bow and arrow or a long knife. It's
easy to shoot at paper targets, but quite different to kill a living, breathing
human being begging you on their knees to spare their life. Our culture
has raised us to know killing is deeply wrong.
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- This is the case under normal circumstances.
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- But killing is a decision that sooner or later you will
be forced to make when the power is out and not coming back on again. It's
a case of "either you or them." If you are the head of your family,
your failure to make the right decision could cost everyone in your home
their life. Like breathing, you'll just have to do it automatically without
giving it any thought. Logic is the only way to look at it. If you do nothing
and the attacker kills you and takes your food, who will be left to protect
your family from starvation and harm after you're gone?
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- A complete collapse of society as we know it will be
the result of losing electricity permanently.
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- Will we be prepared in time? Or be knocking on the gates
of a concentration camp begging to get it? Thirst, hunger and cold drives
people to do things that they would never imagine themselves doing.
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- Ted Twietmeyer
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