Over the past few weeks, I've become a fan of The Walking Dead, an excellent sci-fi show depicting a post-apocalyptic world dominated by zombies.
Following the main characters as they attempt to navigate a horrific world overrun by the living dead has been fascinating because you realize how quickly our society could fall apart with the subtraction of one key, but often overlooked, ingredient: electricity.
These 21st century folks have all the weapons they could need (show is set in the Georgia so everyone was presumably armed to the tits before the zombies even took over), have decent access to food and water, gasoline is readily available via siphoning yet "the world", by almost any definition, has ended. Why? No juice. The electrical grid has collapsed so the production of everything has ceased and the survivors merely consume what's left over from before zombies took over.
It's amazing how little importance we place on the grid in our everyday lives. No electricity means cooking is back to open flame, hot showers become a bittersweet memory, communications revert to pre-Industrial Revolution mode. Internet? We're talking smoke signals, folks. We marvel at what we have while overlooking what makes it run to a surprising degree.
We marvel at so many modern advancements today, it's funny how easily we overlook the one invention which makes them all possible.

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