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A week of chaos?

What is happening out there?

Last week saw parts of New Zealand's national grid fall over... quite literally.

We also saw power disrupted to the Coromandel area for a while.

While this was happening, the interisland ferry Aratere was suffering the aftermath of a steering failure and subsequent grounding.

And these are just local "incidents", if we set our gaze further afield, things are just as bad.

At Manchester city in the UK, 85 percent of flights were canceled and things were thrown into chaos after a power-cut hit the airport, creating lingering issues with computer systems.

This isn't the only issue UK citizens are having to deal with, earlier this month London hospitals were hit with a Russian cyber-attack and now patients' personal data is being made available online.

Elsewhere, across the Northern Hemisphere, many countries are suffering weather extremes that, we're told, are being driven by climate change.

Heatwaves are causing issues and deaths across many countries north of the equator right now and summer has only just started. On top of these heat-wave events, significant flooding is already causing issues in the US Midwest.

So, are we seeing "the end of days", as predicted in one of the world's favourite books?

I don't think so.

What we're seeing is more likely the fact that we now have a fantastic pan-global communications capability that allows us to become aware of events within seconds of them happening, no matter where on the face of the planet they occur.

I recall "the old days" when newspapers (yep, hardcopy) would carry "wire pictures" of world events. You knew something really important had happened overseas if a wire picture was involved.

Those wire pictures were sent using an early form of fax machine. An image was scanned, line by line and the varying luminance was sent by telephone, or sometimes even radio, over long distances. At the other end, that image was reconstructed and printed out.

Those pictures were grainy, of poor contrast and definitely of poor quality but they did enable news organisations to deliver images within minutes rather than days.

Today, whenever anything newsworth happens there are probably a dozen or more people filming it on their smartphones and immediately uploading it to X, Facebook, YouTube or whatever, in glorious 4K HDR quality (unless it's a UFO sighting, in which case it will still be grainy and indistinct as if filmed on a potato for some strange reason).

It might not be that more bad things are happening, it's just that we're more aware of those things than ever before.

However, due to our increasing reliance on technology, I suspect we have something of a domino effect occuring in some cases. For example, when the power went out at Manchester airport, it took down computer systems and, even when the power came back up, many of those systems simply failed to reboot properly. One failure lead to another. We are creating a mountain of delicate dependencies as a result of our reliance on tech and that shows up quite often when one part of that dependency chain is disrupted.

Also, now that we inhabit far more of the earth's surface, any weather event or natural disaster is going to affect far more people and be of considerably more significance than may have been the case 50 or 100 years ago -- and most of those people will be be beaming images/video of those disasters to your screen.

Interesting times abound.

Carpe Diem folks!

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