Aeverything about us is water. It may not be obvious right away, but even the text you are reading has made much of its journey in the darkest depths of the ocean.
Of course, it originated in my rather chaotic brain, which itself needs a lot of water to function properly. (The human brain is eighty percent water.) The text zips through my spinal fluid and is transformed into a series of electrical impulses by my fingers, across the keyboard, across the circuit boards, and onwards in a series of ones and zeros, through a black box at the back of my apartment building, beneath the rain-soaked streets of New York, in beams of light pulsing billions of times a second, until it disappears into the sea somewhere on a Long Island beach, in a fiber-optic tube on the dark, mysterious seabed until travels to a station in Germany and finally – via other watery brains – into the hopefully receptive depths of your head. It only takes a fraction of a second to travel from New York to Germany.
We like to think of the data clouds that rule our world as floating somewhere in the sky. But the world isn’t as wireless as we think, and very little data is transmitted by satellite because it’s too slow and too expensive. The clouds live in the sea.
The busiest place on earth
The seabed is where love inspires and hate pulses. There longing, despair, jealousy, indifference and ruthlessness meet. There is laughter. Fortunes plummet there. There questions meet questions, porn runs endlessly, scams flourish, revolutions begin, stupidities are hatched.
In fact, the dark seabed might be the busiest place on earth. Virtually all of our intercontinental information, more than ninety-nine percent, is transmitted on the floor of our supposedly still oceans. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have calculated that a single pair of fibers in an undersea cable can carry more signals than four thousand satellites in Elon Musk’s Starlink system.
This data travels in cables no thicker than a garden hose, in pitch-black depths, through the cold and darkness of that vast expanse of which, despite all technological advances, we know little – our oceans.
E-mails are basically Sea-Mails.
***
We live in exciting times. The world seems to have gone haywire. This has to do not only with the aftermath of the pandemic, but also with the fact that the world is suffering from increasing self-confidence. We are all convinced of our own truth. Come in if you talk like me. Come in if you look like me. Come in if you think politically like me. Otherwise stay out. Leave me alone.
fragmented relationships.
There are currently 426 underwater cables in operation worldwide, a total of 1.3 million kilometers. A working cable is just a cable. But what if an underwater cable stops working? If it tears or is damaged by fire or otherwise? This could be an electrical fault or a wear and tear condition. Or a shift in flow. Or an underwater volcano. Or an earthquake. Or a suspension current caused by a typhoon.
The internet repairs itself
It is usually a normal fishing trawler that accidentally catches an unexpectedly large fish. The cable is ruined – and maybe your day, if not your life, too. (Let’s not forget that the entire global economy depends on our digital connections. Nanoseconds are the new measure in stock trading: when a cable’s transmission speed slows, so does a lot of other things, not least your cell phone or your hospital computer.)
