Don’t worry, for now anyway, I’m only planning on there being a Part II.

As many of you know I have many different interests that keep me thinking and occupied. It’s not all just economics and monetary concerns. The End of The World, or the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it for a less apocalyptic and more probable version, is also much on my mind. I’ve written about this before but several things have come to my attention lately that make me think that the end is not so nearly far enough away nor as “as-we-know-it” as even I, in my disastrously predictive delight, could have conceived it.

Luckily for you, neither of these scenarios is caused by an economic catastrophe. At least not directly.

The first has to do with The Global War on Terror. As you know, I’ve been working writing fiction which, given my published output, may seem like fiction in itself. While my chances of publication may be as low as the probability of any of the made-up scenarios in my writing ever coming true, I am, nevertheless, constantly coming up with new ideas to write about. Once an idea takes shape in my brain it’s hard to get a leash on it, much less get it to sit and stay and sometimes the only way to regain control is to write about those ideas here. One of these ideas – I sure hope the CIA has thought about this one because I sodon’t want to get a knock on my door tonight after the spooks scan my computer – is that the terrorists don’t have to blow up buildings, sink a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, or release anthrax into a crowded subway to disrupt life on the planet. It’s much simpler than that.

They could just steal time. This is easier than you might think and any number of scenarios come to mind.

There would be two fairly simple ways to take time hostage and some others to end time completely and take care of whatever gratification the terrorists get from blowing shit up. The first involves taking over a U.S. Bureau of Standards atomic clock facility, like the one in Boulder, Colorado. The bad guys grab some hostages, stop in the cafeteria to empty the coolers of sandwiches and Snapple, and take over the atomic clock control room. Should be easy enough particularly given that the rent-a-cops guarding the place are all being paid ten-bucks an hour and that Boulder has seven or eight medical marijuana dispensaries.

Yeah, but once inside the terrorists will just blow the place up then we switch over to one of the other atomic clocks and everything is hunky-dory? Right?

Nah, what they do is reset the time and keep broadcasting it. Having multiple versions of time would be as damaging as having no time at all.

Alternatively, to avoid the bad press from shooting up the guard shack and taking hostages, the time bandits could simply set up shop in falafel trucks outside of several atomic clock facilities and broadcast real loud terrorist music on the same frequency as the time signals are sent out, jamming, as it were, the time broadcast. No burglary, no prisoners, and the food would be better.

Of course, they could strike at sites around the world but the cesium clock sites in the U.S. are the high-value targets because they are the standard used by everyone else.

Okay, but why would they want to steal time?

Unlike almost any other target – oil, infrastructure, people – time is absolutely essential to life as we know it. When an accurate and agreed upon time isn’t available things start breaking. Lots of things. Everywhere. Right away. The short list of things that would go boom includes, GPS – no more mapping applications on your smart-phone, oh wait, the cellular network would crash too so no more cell phones of any kind; the internet wouldn’t work anymore which would take out everything from Amazon.com to the cash registers at your local grocery store. Medical devices in hospitals would crash. Television and radio? “Poof”; the silence would be golden. Then there would be the little things like banks, gas pumps, the stock market and all the conveniences that are absolutely essential to life as we know it. But those losses are merely an aside as there wouldn’t be any electricity either – the grid itself is dependent on time.

It might not even take a terrorist plot to start this dismal cascade. We may have already painted ourselves into that corner. There’s a very real probability that we could end up losing time even if all the terrorists did was sit in their Lazy-Boys and watch Jeopardy reruns on the Tivo until the power goes out. I know you’re thinking that this idea is farfetched but, and I’ll admit it just this once, it’s not my idea at all. This one comes from no less an authority than the National Academy of Sciences in their recent publication Orbital Debris: A Technical Assessment.

Don’t you just love my reading list?

In a nutshell, the National Research Council’s Committee on Space Debris feels that there is so much crap flying around in Earth orbit that a collision between chunks of space junk and operating satellites is nigh-on inevitable. Consider for a minute that the number of pieces of space junk measuring one-centimeter (a bit less than half an inch or roughly the size of a .45-caliber bullet) or larger is something over one million. Each of these pieces is zooming around possessing nearly five times the kinetic energy it would get from being shot out of a cannon (+/-24,000 FPS vs. +/-5,000 FPS for the curious among you). With all this space-age detritus whizzing about, the destruction of am operating spacecraft is basically inevitable. The really remarkable thing about the whole NAS assessment is that it hasn’t happened yet.

But it’s started.

Here’s this end-of-time scenario. A satellite in low-earth orbit smacks head on into a chunk of space junk the size of a teacup. Lest you think this is unthinkable, remember that the International Space Station has had to move more than eight times to avoid colliding with space debris; no mean feat that. So, BOOM, the satellite gets blasted to bits and now there is a cloud of debris – much like one resulting from the collision of two satellites in 2009 – sweeping around the Earth. This cloud, just happens to smack into another large something-or-other and now there are two clouds. One more piece of bad luck and a chain reaction of collisions could very quickly sweep the sky clear of functioning satellites and make it nearly impossible to replace them.

That’s just nuts!

Well, that’s no way to talk about your National Academy of Sciences. However, taking their assessment and the number of times the ISS has had to be moved to avoid smacking into something the size of a toaster we can give some hard numbers to the whole scenario. There has been just one accidental collision between large orbiting objects. This occurred in February, 2009 between an Iridium communication satellite and a defunct Russian spy satellite. These things were each about the mass of a small car. So that makes one collision of that scale in roughly fifty years of spaceflight. Since the number of orbiting bits has increased exponentially over those years it could be argued that we may have recently crossed some critical threshold. That would complicate matters and this is supposed to be light reading so I’ll defer getting into that argument. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that the chance for collision increases one-hundred times for each ten-fold decrease in size. This means that a given object is one-hundred times more likely to smack into something the size of a refrigerator than of a car and that much more likely to crash into a toaster sized object than one the size of your Kenmore. The probability progression continues down into the very-small appliance and household item scale and beyond.

This is why they always had to change the windshield on the Space Shuttle when it returned to Earth.

The end result of this orbital demolition derby would be that navigation – not just GPS but GLONASS, Compass and Galileo – and communication satellites, which are the primary means of time distribution around the world, would all be turned into shiny chips of tin. No satellites, no time.

Most of you at this point are going, “Nah, couldn’t happen.” While the rest of you are saying “Yup, maybe a bit exaggerated but that’s about it.” The one thing to come away from those two scenarios is that, in our current high-tech world, Time, at least in its agreed-upon format, is a single point-of-failure technology. If time gets screwed up the whole shebang comes tumbling down.

Time is not the only single-point-of-failure but it’s a biggie. If it, or any of the others like energy or agriculture, break, the impact will be global in a way that has never been experienced before.

We humans have always been dependent on technology. As soon as something new was developed it spread as far as it could as fast as it could. We come to rely on our technological miracles to the point that they become part of the landscape – they become invisible. But there’s more than that; when we accept a new technology, any new technology, we abandon what came before. Sure, you could imagine giving up your cell phone and going back to those quaint “landlines”. But could you conceive of doing without phones entirely?

This is where we’re going to start next week: Time has been stolen and we, despite our technological skill, have been plunged back to the time before computers, telephones and electricity. The task before us is to rebuild society and to do it we’re going to start with a piece of high-technology that has been in development for over two million years and is still undergoing major changes.

Consider the humble hammer.