Humanity's Indomitable Ingenuity Versus the Fragility of Progress
Humanity's Indomitable Ingenuity Versus the Fragility of Progress
Disasters forever linked.
A vicious sandstorm hit the Ever Given on March 23rd, 2021. It blew in from the west, pummelling the port side of the leviathan container ship as it picked its way north through the storm along the Suez Canal. The heavy winds transformed the immense hull into something akin to a sail, turning the vast bulk of the Ever Given against itself. That and, likely, the unfortunate contribution of a phenomenon known as the bank effect – in which waves reverberating from the shore nearest a vessel can have a cumulative pulsing effect that essentially shoves back against the vessel – combined to create a shipping nightmare. The Ever Given’s crew lost control. The stern drifted toward the west bank and the ship ran aground, the crew staring through the storm into the vast desert of the east bank while the stern now loomed over the green and cultivated west bank.
A year before the Ever Given ran aground, March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. What began in Wuhan had reached exit velocity. Today, millions have died, tens of millions have been sick, often violently so, and the economic impact is staggering.
Covid-19 and Ever Given are linked in one very simple way: each is proof-positive of a modern world so interconnected and interdependent that a single ship can cripple trade and cause shortages a world away, while a virus originating in so distant a place rampages across the planet in no time flat, demolishing life and industry alike, mutating all the while. Put another way, everything works until it doesn’t. The machinery of the modern world is perfectly predictable and so reliable as to be invisible – until it isn’t.
OVER TO YOU
And then there’s you. The innovator, the administrator, the leader. The one expected to plan, hire and build. You are as reliant on the living, breathing system that is the built environment as any other, yet charged, in some way, with building atop it – improving it while disrupting it – making it more secure yet more open, more useful yet less costly. Your role must create jobs, educate the population, unleash creative potential, save lives. You are at once dependent upon everything those who came before you constructed while determined to make it better, without compromise. You are on the front line.
Ever Given and Covid-19 serve to make a larger point about the fragility of progress while demonstrating humanity’s indomitable ingenuity. Run a 400-metre long ship holding 18,000 20-foot long containers aground in a sandstorm? No problem, sorted in a week. Facing a devastating pandemic that tears at the very fabric of society? Incredibly, tested and effective vaccines entered bloodstreams within a year of the pandemic’s declaration. The structure and resilience of modern science and technology rescued us in both cases as information, services, tools and skills arrived from all four corners of the world.
This means something for you. It is not just the unsubtle reminder of the profound need to keep the innovation pedal to the commercialization metal but for the need to look everywhere for solutions to your challenges, to be clear about your findings, and to speak effectively to the widest possible audience. It amplifies, exponentially, the need to mobilize knowledge, and not just for the experts but also for the general public. Because what feeds fear is ignorance. And ignorance burdens research.
Why should we fund this? Why should we care? What are we going to get out of this? What’s in it for me? All reasonable, necessary questions but budgets reduced for lack of understanding, departments shuttered because they are seen as obscure or unconnected, projects abandoned for being controversial or political, opportunities squandered for poor leadership – these outcomes are all too common and may carry future costs dwarfing those of today.
Conversely – and obviously – what brings hope is knowledge. And knowledge is what you offer, from your university or college, research park or innovation district, your sector nonprofit or association, your startup, your enterprise. And if we may assert that knowledge is power, and power is best employed openly, democratically, and in the pursuit of the advancement of the planet and its inhabitants, then the products of your knowledge might just overwhelm the most enthusiastic expectations.