Communications of the ACM

Q: What about solar on the southward
walls of buildings to power the build-
ings? Some cities are already doing this.

Sure, south-facing walls are another place for photovoltaics. But there’s competition for that valuable real estate—urban agriculture. Technologies are cresting toward where future cities may require new buildings to recycle their organic waste through vertical farms that purify water while generating either industrial algae or else much of the food needed by a metropolis. With so much of the world’s population going urban, no technology could make a bigger difference. The pieces are coming together. What’s lacking is a sense of urgency. Pilot programs and tax incentives should encourage new tall buildings to utilize their southward faces, nurturing this stabilizing trend during the coming decade.

Q: You’ve also spoken about apps sys-
tems that turn your smartphone into
an intelligent sensor. Can you say how
this supports resiliency?

Cellphones already have powerful cameras, many with infrared capability. Soon will come spectrum-analysis apps, letting citizens do local spot checks on chemical spills or environmental problems, and feeding the results to governments or NGOs for modeling in real time. The Tricorder X Prize showed how just a few add-on devices can turn a phone into a medical appraisal device, like Dr. McCoy had in “Star Trek.” Almost anyone could use such apparatus in the field with little training. Take a few measurements, and a distant system advises you on corrective actions.

Infrared sensors, accelerometers, and chemical sensors could provide a full array of environmental awareness systems by turning citizen cellphones into nodes of an instant awareness network. (I describe this in my novel Existence.)

Such a mesh is already of interest to national authorities. But the emphasis has been hierarchical— authorities send public reports down to citizens after gathering and interpreting data flowing upward. The hierarchical mind-set comes naturally when you are an authority with protective duties. But this can blind even sincere public servants to one of our great strengths—

for recovery. What can we do to preserve
our ability to communicate?

On 9/11, passengers aboard flight UA93 demonstrated remarkable resilience when they self-organized to stop the terrorist plot to use that plane as a weapon against their country. If we want that kind of resilience to work on a large scale, we need resilient communications. Alas, our comm systems are fragile to failure in any natural or unnatural calamity. One step toward resilience would be a backup peer-to-peer (P2P) text-passing capability for when phones can’t link to a cellular tower. Texts would get passed from phone to phone via well-understood methods of packet switching until they encounter a working node and get dropped into the network. Qualcomm already has this capability built into their chips! But cellular providers refuse to turn it on. That’s shortsighted, since it would be good business too, expanding text coverage zones and opening new revenue streams. Even in the worst national disaster, we’d have a 1940s-level telegraphy system all across the nation, and pretty much around the world.

All it would take to fix this is a small change of regulation. Five sentences requiring the cell-cos to turn this on whenever a phone doesn’t sense a tower. (And charge a small fee for P2P texts.) Doing so might let us restore communications within an hour rather than months.

Many efforts have been made to empower folks with ad hoc mesh networks, via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi webs, and so on. None of these enticed more than a tiny user base—nothing like what’s needed for national resilience.

Q: It appears that solar power for homes and offices is at a tipping point as more people find it cheaper than the power grid. Localized solar power should also bring new benefits such as ability to maintain minimum electrical function at home during a blackout. Is independence from the electrical grid good for resilience?

It would be. One can envision a mil-
lion solar-roofed homes and business-
es serving as islands of light for their
neighborhoods, in any emergency. But
there’s a catch. Under current regula-
tions, almost all U.S. solar roofs have
a switch that shuts down the home or
business solar system when the electri-
cal utility has blacked out. The purpose
is to prevent spurious home-generat-
ed voltages from endangering repair
linemen. This is a lame excuse for an
insane situation. Simply replace that
cutoff switch with one that would still
block backflow into the grid, but that
feeds from the solar inverter to just two
or three outlets inside the home, run-
ning the fridge, some rechargers, and
possibly satellite coms. Just changing
over to that switch would generate ar-
chipelagos of autonomous, resilient
civilization spread across every neigh-
borhood in America, even in the very
worst case. A new rule requiring such
switches, and fostering retrofitting,
would fit on less than a page.

Across the next decade, more solar systems will come with battery storage. But this reform would help us bridge the next 10 years.

Q: What about protection against elec-
tromagnetic pulse disruption?

Much has been written about danger from EMP—either attacks by hostile powers or else the sort of natural disaster we might experience if the Sun ever struck us head-on with a coronal mass ejection, commonly called a solar flare. These CMEs happen often, peaking every 11 years. We’ve been lucky as the worst ones have missed Earth. But some space probes have been taken out by direct hits and a bulls-eye is inevitable.

The EMP threat was recognized over 30 years ago. We could have incentiv-ized gradual development of shielded and breakered chipsets, including those in civilian electronics. Adoption could have been stimulated with a tax of a penny per non-compliant device, with foreseen ramp-up. By now we’d be EMP resilient, instead of fragile hostages either to enemies or to fate.