The way things work

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

By Richard Anderson

Physicists and other big brains say that if the electron were one scintilla heavier, if the proton had just a slightly stronger or slightly weaker electrical charge, if – I don’t know – the universe had just the tiniest amount less of dark matter, that all of creation would fly apart, the lights would go out, would never have gone on in the first place.

It just goes to show you how delicately balanced our plane of reality really is. But, really, all you need to do is drive around a little city like Jackson, and you can witness by how narrow a margin we avoid disaster. We blithely cruise around in our 2,000-pound metal cans, hitting velocities for which nature really did not design us, usually oblivious to the fact that we’ve put our faith in a whole crowd of strangers: the guys who made the steel, the guys who pressed and bent and twisted it into frames and fenders and engines and drive shafts, the guys who changed our oil, checked our brakes.

We go to restaurants and order from the menu, not even having met those who will cook it, those who purchased the ingredients, those who raised the chickens and beef and spinach. We buy a toy car for our boy or girl, not giving the slightest thought as to what’s in the paint, what metals are in the chassis, what strange chemicals lurk in the plastics and rubbers.

Of course, we want to believe we can still be so carefree. We want to believe all the layers of government oversight and bureaucracy and red tape – the very same stuff we all bitch about when we’re on the wrong end of the microscope – will ensure that our cars are safe, our food is safe, our toys, our water, our air is safe. But more and more, we are proved wrong.

Lead paint in Thomas the Tank Engine. E.coli in our greens. Bridges that suddenly heave and collapse. Has the world always been so uncertain? Or has modern life become so complex, with so many interconnections and steps between producer and consumer, that even the simplest choice in the supermarket requires a giant leap of faith?

Maybe it’s just miraculous that more airplanes don’t fall out of the sky or more nuclear power plants don’t melt down and catch on fire. But, no, I don’t think so. I think it’s more likely it’s because there are whole armies of regulators and inspectors armed with clipboards and a heightened sense of humanity’s tendency to look for shortcuts that we can travel from one end of town to the other without having buildings topple over onto us or roads wash out from beneath our tires.

And I suspect it’s not any fault of theirs that the world seems so much more dangerous than is used to. Maybe it’s just the proliferation of information drawing our attention to it. Maybe it’s just less-tested technologies still going through growing pains. Or maybe it’s that old bugaboo greed, acting up during particularly desperate and dicey times, challenging our values, testing our boundaries, finding that ever-tempting shortcut.

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The way things work | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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