wires

There is a US government-built spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away from us traveling at 38,000 miles per hour. It was launched 47 years ago when Jimmy Carter was President of the United States. Voyager 1 is still collecting data. It operates electronically. And, obviously, there is not a single wire connecting it to conEdison, Exelon, Duke Energy, or any of the countless for-profit electrical companies that enjoy near-monopolies in most areas. My question is this: if great minds can engineer a still-functional electric vehicle that can travel 15 billion miles over forty-seven years, why are we still stringing wires on poles that fall and break whenever there’s a big wind or ice storm, or spark and cause devastating fires and then fall and break? I’m sure there are a thousand rational reasons to continue to use this often dangerous and mostly ugly century-old technology. I know nothing about electrical transmission or its infrastructure. So I’m left with my convenient theories and one of my theories is that profits in the pockets of energy executives and political campaign accounts might have more to do with our inability to engineer safe, sustainable, point-of-use power systems than we care to acknowledge. I have power lines in my backyard that fail every time we have a hurricane or energetic windstorm. My more affluent neighbors have the wires underground. That’s some improvement (for the wealthy). The only point-of-use systems around me are gas-powered generators that drone on endlessly after an outage. The giant pylon beasts that march single file through our forests, our lakes, our neighborhoods seem inevitable, unstoppable. Are we made to see them as a juggernaut when they’re really only a scheme of short-term convenience?  Are there only Quixotic actions of resistance lowly citizens can take against these behemoths? Greater minds must answer. For now, I’ll try not to admire the beauty of their form as they stride into a distant vanishing point.