The Day the Earth Stood Still
I’m not that much on science fiction in my movie-going preferences, but there are some films that you can’t help but remember. One of the most famous commands in the history of film, one that is right up there with “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”, is that 1951 SciFi memento, “Klaatu Barada Nikto” that Patricia Neal is supposed to say to Gort, the robot with the power to destroy the world. It almost sounds like Esperanto since it means “Klaatu says no” and “Barada” has a distinctly Hispanic sound to it while “Nikto” seems pretty Germanic or Russo-centric. Esperanto, the supposedly universal alternative language sprang from Eastern Europe 150 years ago, but despite its ease of use and learnability, it never really caught on and created more animosity than support. There are still supposedly over 2 million speakers of the sterile language, and for all I know, Gort may be one of them.
The beauty of the phrase “Klaatu Barada Nikto” is that it is never translated or really explained in the film, but we do get the sense that it is some sort of a Fail-Safe that keeps Gort from destroying the Earth. That term comes from WWII and was popularized in another Cold War classic SciFi movie made in 1964 by the same name. It was meant to be a way to insure that a nuclear detonation would not end the world. I’ll bet it was uttered a few times by Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos when they wondered if their Trinity test would set off a chain reaction that might ignite the atmosphere and deep fry us all. It denotes the concept that should one part of a system fail, it will not endanger the continuation of the rest of the system, but it might also mean that the initial thrust that ends the system might very well be a complete success in and of itself, but carry in it the seeds of its own destruction. A Fail-Safe is supposed to make us feel more secure, but the invocation of the word itself makes us wonder immediately about our security and the hopelessness and banality of the human condition that lies just below the surface for us all. A Fail-Safe by its very existence is a threat to our well-being because, strangely enough, it reminds us that nothing in life is without the potential for failure or destructive success and that we are all eternally destined to be one inch from greatness while remaining one inch from abject failure. It is that fundamental inevitability that makes optimism so important in the equation of life.
This morning I am sitting here waiting for the HVAC technicians to arrive on my hilltop and begin the process of upgrading the air conditioning system that controls the atmosphere on slightly more than half of my house. One might suggest that the fact that I have redundant systems at either end of the house is, in and of itself, a Fail-Safe of sorts. Should I destroy one half of my system, perhaps I can huddle in the other half of the house and still survive. But just like in the Oppenheimer film, where the Allies had already defeated Nazi Germany and were on the cusp of defeating Japan (strongly suggested and believed, but still debatable since defeat never insures surrender), my air conditioning (even on the half of the house that I am “fixing”) is functioning quite well at the moment. There is a concept in architecture and engineering that is termed “the integrity of material”. I heard the term from my brother-in-law, Bennett, who is an architect. The implication is that when something is in place and working, it tends to keep on working and maintaining its structural integrity. I see this every day here on the high chaparral where piles of boulders stay precarious piled up for millennia. My air conditioning is working, it could continue to work for many years, but it recently showed me that it is quite capable of failing and the cost of failure is pretty miserable in an era of Global Warming when a summer heat dome is the latest meteorological term that is getting as overused as atmospheric river was used in the earlier part of the year.
Three years ago I installed two Tesla wall batteries to add to my 9.7 Kilowatt solar generation system. Those batteries help load-shift my home energy usage so that I use less peak grid output and shift as much as I can to off-peak times. But that is considered an ancillary benefit with the core purpose of the batteries to be a Fail-Safe should the grid go down. In that event, our normally sunny days will allow solar generation of power to run the house by day as well as charge the batteries for use by night, and the cycle will reoccur daily for as long as the grid is down. If I added the additional Fail-Safe of a fuel cell of some sort to kick in should the sun not sufficiently shine, well, then I would have a more Fail-Safe system. I suppose someone will then show me how a fuel generation system (biofuel like Dr. Emmett Brown putting a banana peel in the Back to the Future DeLorean), will give me the next level of Fail-Safe. I have had one three-day grid failure in three years and the battery system did more or less what it was supposed to and, fortunately, the sun kept shining. I was Fail-Safed. Interestingly enough, my emergency energy system was not supposed to cover air conditioning. When it was installed, there was a screw up that left the A/C on the same circuit as the rest of the house, so they had to install soft-start governors on my two A/C units so that they would not surge on and blow the breakers when the system switched from grid to battery power. In theory, I should shut down my A/C manually after an emergency invocation of the battery system so as not to burn through my stored power too quickly. My A/C is considered a non-essential aspect of my emergency power system, just like my Tesla car, which is pretty funny when you think about living well in Southern California. I’ll be able to eat ice cream and watch Netflix, but will have to walk to the store and sweat through the night while I’m at it.
So, today I will ignore the integrity of material of my north-side A/C and watch the technicians rip it apart and rebuild it with a new, bigger coil and new, added air return ducting. They will turn the air handling furnace system on its side and take off the two-zone controls as per the recommendations of Greg, the design diagnostician with whom I am entrusting my cooling future. I met the guy for an hour and am spending $10k based entirely on his say-so. My pal Mike has heard my HVAC storyline and it has rung true to him as he went through a similar retrofit on his new-built home (that must have been particularly annoying for him), so I am not without endorsements for Greg’s thinking and my trust in his wisdom. But I cannot help but wonder if I am dismantling and fixing something that ain’t broken, as they say.
As I look at the weather.com maps that show the heat dome moving slightly eastward towards the Midwest and another heat complex (not yet a dome, but perhaps a small cupola?) heading in from the Pacific, I feel that I am doing what I must to prepare for the brave new world of warmer weather. There is nothing more important in a home than its HVAC system. Without proper cooling, I turn into the nastiest of bears and no one wants that. Now I have to see whether Ricardo, Greg’s installation technician will be able to make enough progress today that we can get the system back up and running for tonight. If these guys are really strategic they will make me have one sweaty night just to prove that I really do need to throw money at them whenever they say, but I am holding my breath that they will be kinder than that. Let’s just say that to me, today is the day the earth stood still waiting for my ultimate HVAC outcome.