Note: This article pertaining to Have We Become Too Dependent on Energy? was originally published on Thursday, October 9, 2014 at 1:36 in the afternoon and has been updated.
Electrical outlets were at a premium at the E gates of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, where I spent the day with a fellow member of FlyerTalk who lives in the southern part of the city back in October of 2014.
Have We Become Too Dependent on Energy?
As I had a couple of hours before my flight of approximately ten hours departed for Seoul, I thought I would access the Internet with my laptop computer. Assuming that no outlets were available aboard the airplane — I flew as a passenger in the economy class cabin throughout my unintentional trip around the world at that time — I knew I would not be able to work for much of the time during the long flight.
All of the banks of electrical outlets — such as the one shown in the photograph below — were out of service as several people were roaming the E gates at this airport in search of that invaluable power source, attempting in vain to get some work done…
…as absolutely no electrical outlets were available in the E gate areas except for behind what appears to be some kind of fire extinguisher, shown in the photograph below:
I actually found one of these fire extinguisher things with seats nearby in a quiet area near a food concession area; but as I approached it, a mouse scurried across the floor and into a hole at the base of it. Great. Now I had someone to keep me company.
Not that I did not realize it before — but that we have become a world more dependent upon electricity than ever before became more apparent to me. Just the fact that you are reading this article assumes that you are using electricity — or, at least, battery power. We do not even think about plugging in a device these days — we just do it as though it were second nature…
…but when electrical outlets are at a premium, the realization seems to set in on just how dependent we are on available power sources which are operable.
Even worse is that in 2025, numerous articles discuss what is called the debilitating cost of energy for artificial intelligence — and that hunger and thirst for the consumption of energy is only going to increase. “Billions of daily queries are reshaping energy and infrastructure”, according to this article titled The Hidden Behemoth Behind Every AI Answer from IEEE Spectrum, which is the official publication of a global community for technologists who help to shape the systems and standards of tomorrow called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
The graphic from the aforementioned article — which is shown above — shows the projections for the increasing consumption of energy by 2030, with the estimated requirements of how to meet such a voracious demand.
Final Boarding Call
At one time, reading did not require electricity. Whip out a book or a newspaper if you wanted to read something. Today, electricity is practically imperative to read. I hope that more reliable sources of energy will continue to be developed to keep feeding the need to connect to a power source simply in order for many of us to go about our everyday lives — as well as ensure that there are enough places to go around where we can plug in our devices…
…but being plugged in was only part of the problem: the Wi-Fi service to access the Internet at Schiphol Airport was painfully slow — practically at a standstill…
…and yet what we can accomplish these days with the click of a button is amazing — the ability to communicate with millions of people around the world in ways better than what only established media could do only 30 years ago — but I digress.
Do you believe that we as a society have become too dependent on energy in general? What are your thoughts?
All photographs ©2014 and ©2016 by Brian Cohen.
