It’s the first week in August. Temperatures are still soaring to the mid-30s. Happily there’s ice in the freezer to keep me and my drink nice and cool. But, life wasn’t always this simple.
Less than 100 years ago, we kept our food cool and preserved by storing ice cut from a lake [1]. The technology was simple to say the least. Insulate a small building with sawdust, line the insides with sawdust and ice cut from a lake and voila, you’ve got a fridge butter and a freezer for ice cream. This took no more than hard work and simple tools to cut and carry everything together.
Today we have fridges powered by electricity. These wonderful marvels keep a small bit of space at the same cool temperature whatever the outside temperature may be. But their controls are complex and beyond the average person’s understanding. Also, they don’t stand alone. They need a complex network of wires, transformers and generating stations to supply them with the power they need.
My fridge today certainly is more capable and reliable than the sawdust versions of your. Yet, they are much more fragile. Any break in the power supply, the power delivery network or the controls of the fridge and my food wastes away. The olden days may have offered much less control but a block of ice is about as reliable as you can get.
Will reliability be a value of the future or will we always expect and thus require may safeguards to preserve the systems we’re creating?
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