杏吧原创

AS I write this, it鈥檚 13掳C and foggy in San Francisco. But 1000 kilometres north, in Portland, Oregon, it hit 47掳C just days ago. Across the border in Canada, it reached 49掳C. Coroners are blaming the heat for hundreds of deaths in the US and Canada. Climate experts are warning that it鈥檚 only a matter of time before my region of the west is broiling under a 鈥渉eat dome鈥� (see page 10) 鈥� catalysing wildfires bigger than those that burned 1.7 million hectares in California last year.

Heat domes are statistically likely to become more intense and common every year due to climate change, just as hurricanes and flooding are. As the weather gets consistently weirder, it鈥檚 becoming easier to accept that we live in a world that is rapidly changing 鈥� not because of the internet or some fantastic new scientific discovery. It鈥檚 changing because of nature 鈥� or at least its reaction to us.

This realisation is especially weird for those of us who grew up learning that humanity tamed nature a long time ago, and that the future of our civilisations will be determined by technology. Now it seems that nature is getting the last laugh. Maybe our great industrial machines beat it back for a while, but unfortunately the fossil fuel we used to power those machines has given nature the upper hand again.

I keep thinking about one of the unexpected side effects of the heat dome in Portland, which is that it caused the city鈥檚 streetcars to melt. To be more precise, as Robinson Meyer put it in The Atlantic: 鈥淎 power cable on a major bridge warped, twisted around some metal hardware, and scorched. Elsewhere, the wires that run above the track expanded and sagged so much that they risked touching the train cars.鈥� By afternoon, the city had shut down much of its transit system. To understand how truly staggering this scenario is, consider that Portland is famous for being damp and chilly. It鈥檚 a northern, coastal city, full of people who don鈥檛 own sunblock or air conditioners.

Now that鈥檚 going to change. People in the Pacific Northwest, also home to cities like Seattle and Vancouver, are snapping up air conditioners. That means we can look forward to more strains on these cities鈥� energy grids. At the same time, as the Portland trains show, electrical infrastructure isn鈥檛 built to handle extreme temperatures. I can all-too-easily imagine a near future where wires are melting throughout a city, imperilling people鈥檚 health, mobility and their access to information online.

Moments like these jump-start technological revolutions. Already, there are engineers at work trying to build air conditioners that are more efficient and don鈥檛 depend on coolants made from greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons. It鈥檚 odd to imagine a world where climate controls on a building could be more life-changing than the internet. But that鈥檚 where we are headed. We have to start thinking about innovation in the context of our real-life environment rather than the cyberworld we have built inside our computers.

It鈥檚 not as if we are going to chuck away our mobile devices and the apps we use to show each other the new dance moves we have taught our cats. Still, the next wave of the information revolution will need to focus on ways to get life-saving instructions to people in peril. Yes, that will inevitably involve some government regulation to stop misinformation from circulating. It鈥檚 dangerous to have wild speculation about chemtrails zooming around when people need to know whether they should evacuate or how to get to cooling centres with fresh water.

Beyond that, we might need special devices for communicating with first responders when the network goes down. Of course, many vulnerable people will only have those technologies if a government or other public agency steps in to help.

That鈥檚 why the next technological revolution will have to be political. To protect ourselves from nature 鈥� and to rebuild our infrastructure to be sustainable 鈥� we must invent new ways to create communities. I鈥檓 not talking about electing someone more progressive, or staging a coup. I鈥檓 talking about a political shift that transforms the world as much as trains did. Or as much as the internet is doing right now. Perhaps when this revolution is over, we will no longer have nations, and we will have invented new forms of democracy.

We can鈥檛 save ourselves with machines alone, though green air conditioners are a good start. We are going to need social infrastructure to support us, to provide poor and marginalised people with the tools to survive what鈥檚 coming. I no longer think of the future as a gleaming game world full of robots. Instead, I dream of a new social system 鈥� one where our greatest scientific innovations don鈥檛 make us rich, but will help us survive catastrophe.