Jim O’Brien: The scope of human ingenuity is truly miraculous... especially if you don’t even understand how a kettle works!

 

Jim O’Brien: The scope of human ingenuity is truly miraculous... especially if you don’t even understand how a kettle works!

I am are surrounded by miracles. From the moment I wake in the morning until John O’Dreams takes me away at night, the wonders of the natural world and the extraordinary achievements of human ingenuity mark every part of my day.

The radio wakes me. I have no idea how it works. It is a wonder that people sitting in a building in Dublin are having conversations I can listen into 150 miles away. And that’s just radio, one of the older technologies.

When I rouse myself and make my way downstairs the first thing I reach for is the electric kettle, and it beats me as to how that works. At secondary school more than 40 years ago I learned about the basics of electricity, about AC and DC, but all is now lost in the attic of unused facts.

I switch on my phone to read the morning headlines and haven’t the foggiest clue how it does what it does. According to my children I’m only using a fraction of its capability.

After that I turn on my computer to see what delights await me in my email inbox. How these messages are generated and get to me I don’t know. I send a few emails in reply, and as I tap the keys on the wireless keyboard and my thoughts appear in script on the screen in front of me, I don’t have a notion as to how these electronic pulses become letters and words.

On it goes all day. I sit into my clunky nine-year old car and it tells me the time and the temperature. It beeps at me if I don’t put on my seatbelt, it beeps again if a door isn’t fully closed, and when I reverse it screams if I get too close to whatever is behind me. Driving down the road, the wipers come on automatically at the first sign of rain.

I understand the basic technology the car is based on — the wheel — and I have a rudimentary understanding of how the internal combustion engine works, but the rest is a mystery. The Current Consort drives an electric car and the workings of that are even farther beyond me.

In fact, when I go through the list of things I do every day, my dependence on technologies and contraptions I don’t understand is staggering: the bank card, the television, the vacuum cleaner, the toaster, the gas boiler, the dishwasher, the solar panels… the list of things with inner workings that remain a mystery to me is long, somewhat frightening and can be embarrassing.

There is no doubt that human ingenuity is amazing, and the amount of minute technological detail supporting the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed is wondrous.

Much of this remains a mystery to those of us who regard ourselves as the Joes and Josephine Soaps of modern civilisation It doesn’t particularly bother us that we know little about the technology behind the phones in our hands, the cars under our backsides and the microwave that keeps pinging until we open the door and take out the reheated remains of yesterday’s dinner.

I am reminded of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In the days before we were confined to the island, I found myself in the French capital on a number of occasions. Among the many wonders of that beautiful city is the Pompidou Centre.

Completed in 1977 it is described as an ’inside-out’ building where its structural system, mechanical systems and pipe-works are exposed on the outside and not hidden behind walls and cladding.

When the centre was first built, the various elements were colour-coded, with the plumbing system in green, the climate control in blue, the electrical infrastructure in yellow and safety equipment in red.

A visit to the Pompidou Centre, just to walk around outside, gives an immediate sense of how complex all buildings are and is testament to the amount of detailed design and engineering that goes in to making and operating them.

Every building we live in, we work in or visit has, to a greater or lesser degree, these complex sets of innards. Few of us know anything about their workings.

It is a useful exercise to contemplate the complexity of the world we have created. In the relatively short period of time humans have been on the planet we have put ourselves in a powerful position in relation to all forms of life.

But while our technologies are complex, our choices are simple. Do we build or do we destroy? With power comes responsibility.

Online Editors