🦺 The Story of the Microprocessor

Welcome to the 34th edition of Safe For Work. Some recent safety news and then a story of manufacturing and invention at the far reaches of the universe. At the end, the latest SFW Film, Never Again, adapted from the story of Abagail in issue 19.

In Safety News

• A new bioresin may keep old wind turbine blades out of landfills.

• How workplace safety improves performance and drives revenue. This one is a bit more biased than the report we shared a few issues back. Despite being from a former OSHA director, it has some sound arguments and a good case study from Alcoa Aluminum.

• New Zealand is in the news trying to solve its incredibly high per capita injury rate. This story is written from the opposite perspective of the one above- `how could a profit driven company possibly care about safety, only regulation can make them.´ This paternalistic view is short sighted, if not simply wrong, but it led us to interesting research on what regulation and creative sentencing can achieve when working in tandem with corporate solutions.

Drift

Like boats-- tall, sailing ships, they came, drifting faster than anything-- could you really call it “drifting”? They called themselves “drifting”, when we asked-- “It’s always better to slow down a little as you’re entering a solar-system… ease off the wheel, too, let the gravity do some pulling on your world-line. Do you gun the gas into a parking space?”-- they had cars, like we had cars, and not at all like we had cars, but cars-- they had them. They had a lot of things that we had.

Like boats-- tall, sailing ships-- when you give a person water, a sea of it, and something that floats, they will build you boats. You don’t have to ask them to.

Did a person in the desert ever build a boat?

Did a person living on a mountaintop, or in a tunnel, ever build a boat?

They were kind and friendly people. They were not keepers of secrets-- or if they were, they kept it a secret that they were keeping secrets-- they never seemed to have anything to hide. They showed us their ships, how they worked-- what they were made of. They let us fly them-- and they laughed at us as we went this way and that way-- sharply, awkwardly; we flew their ships like drunk ballerinas on an icy hill. We managed not to crash into anything, mostly. They reached out every now and again like a patient father in the passenger’s-seat on a sunday morning in an empty mall parking-lot, gently nudging his sixteen-year-old daughter’s steering wheel to the left or to the right. A little help here and there.

“I imagine the autopilot would do a lot better!” we laughed. And they were confused.

“‘Autopilot?’”-- a word they didn’t know. It didn’t exist in their language, or at least not a one-to-one-- or perhaps there was some problem in the hypercomplex translational software we’d developed in something of a hurry to speak with them. They hadn’t had any software of their own for that; they’d never needed any; we were the first other life-forms they’d ever encountered out here.

It was not a problem, in any case-- an easy enough concept to explain; “‘Autopilot’-- this is when you let the computer fly the ship instead of having to do it yourself.”

“‘Computer’? What is this?”

Boats. Tall ships. A crew hoisting ropes, a captain at the wheel-- swab the deck-- load the cannons. Give someone an ocean and some wood, and they will build you a boat. Give someone a mountain and some fibers, and they will make a sturdy rope. Give someone a desert, and fabric, and they will make coverings for their face and body, to protect them from the sandstorms. People build for where they are. People build with what they have.

We showed them what a computer was. It was just a box, wasn’t it? We showed them the screen-- “What a strange, magical window, able to show so many distant and bizarre places!”-- we showed them the insides of everything-- and that wasn’t any help either.

They had lots of things that we had, but not this. And suddenly, the dynamic changed. Suddenly, they weren’t laughing at us anymore-- they were no less kind and friendly, but their eyes had narrowed a little. We hadn’t even figured out the most basic thing-- how to fly across the Universe, how to drift the currents of time and space-- and yet we’d gone and built something they couldn’t understand?

We took turns, working backwards, back and forth, complex to simple. They did not know what a computer was. We explained that it was a thinking machine made of silicon and wires. We did not know what a transcore lattice was. They explained that it caught the flux coming off of refined zolomite, and use it to displace the mass of a ship from the spacetime bulk-- “Like a boat floating on the water-- it really is that simple, don’t you understand? Has your kind never even bothered experimenting with zolomite?”

“Show us.”-- so they tried to show us. They scoured the entire planet. They got into their tall ships and they drifted around the solar system, checking every world and moon, every comet and asteroid, every bit of dust that they could find.

“Nothing,” they said. “Not a trace of it, anywhere around your star. How can this place have not even a single atom of zolomite? Our home system is practically drenched!”

Give someone an ocean and some wood, and they will build you a boat. Give someone an entire solar system full to bursting with zolomite but barely a dozen atoms of silicon and copper laying around, and they won’t build you a computer. They won’t even think to. They won’t build big wired contraptions-- they won’t even build simple electrical motors. They’ll turn the keel of their starship by hand. They’ll speed up and slow down their path through the stars by tightening and loosening their transcore lattice with their own calloused hands. People build for where they are. People build with what they have.

SFW Films presents: Never Again

See you next week as we draw inspiration from the inventors and inventions envisioned in Star Trek.

Stay safe.