I spent nearly eight hours this past week tearing apart my garage door opener. Unexpectedly, the process made me think about humanity's relationship to the physical world.
The garage door opener quit Tuesday night. After troubleshooting the door and tracks, I gave in to my omnipresent temptation when presented with a malfunctioning mechanical object: "Rip it apart! See how it works!"
And since the opener was busted anyway....
The device was essentially a small electric motor, which drove a worm gear, which in turn drove a toothed wheel co-axial to a sprocket, which pulled on a chain. The chain ran over a track to just above the door, looped around another sprocket and pulled a small trolley, which was what actually attached to the door. It was, in short, somewhat like a motor-driven bicycle with tiny wheels, bolted to the ceiling and the garage door.
The worm gear and toothed gear wheel held the problem: The former was worn, and the latter's teeth were pulverized. Most likely, a bearing around a relevant axle had seized, or the wear on the worm gear had led to a misalignment. It needed replacement parts.
For better and for worse, you can find anything on the Web. Two days later, the parts were in my hands, and Friday night and Saturday I replaced the parts and tested the system.
Much to my relief, it worked.
But once I got past the puzzle of how all the parts worked, and I labored to detach, replace and reattach one piece after another, my mind wandered.
That worm gear was a modified Archimedes screw, invented 4,000 years ago to lift water uphill; that motor was prominently labeled "1/3 horsepower"--a term harkening back to a different era in transportation headaches. The gear ratios and other mechanical parts went back hundreds of years in principal; the electrical motor dated to Faraday, and the optical sensor and circuit board all spoke of the late 20th century.
There in front of me was the entire history of human mechanical innovation. It was, for a moment, quite thrilling. Granted, that was late Friday night, and I was pretty tired. But thrilling it was.
And then the next thought: Was it foolish of me, to try to fix something this complex by simply dissecting the problem into small pieces, testing each, fixing the apparent problem, then testing the results? But that approach approximates the scientific method, a revolution in human thought, a profound way of empirically validating ideas.
That approach has allowed us to cobble together so many little bits and pieces that we can do remarkable things; as Nietzsche once wrote, "Man is a prosthetic god."
We routinely drive a mile a minute. We speak to each other wherever we are. We watch athletes perform across continents. Long, healthy lives are becoming increasingly routine. We fly to Singapore--or to the moon--in less time than it would take to walk from Durham to the Atlantic Ocean.
Granted, people haven't come as far as their inventions--the empowering devices we have invented are too often used for harmful acts. And there are severe imbalances of technology between rich and poor.
But the devices and the abilities they endow have changed our relationship with the world. Modern technology, whether mechanical, electronic or biological, has made us think of ourselves differently. Yes, there are random acts that evoke a fickle universe, a sudden tornado or a car accident. But we are now freer actors, and no longer merely pawns of fate.
Increasingly, we feel in command of nature, not suppressed by it.
"Conquering nature" was the phrase once used to define multiple fields of endeavor. Now, it is clear that although the effort continues, we have largely succeeded. Instead, a corollary looms: We are so in control of this planet that we actually threaten it.
In our modern technological lives, we seem to have forgotten, as one writer put it, that our world is losing species "like an airplane losing rivets"--we may keep flying, or we may not. We don't know.
We know that global warming is happening, that ecosystems are changing, and that much of the evidence strongly suggests human causes. But very little is being done.
So our mindset must change: We must not simply conquer nature anymore, we must co-exist with it: We must save nature, or we will face consequences literally unimaginable.
More importantly, that change in mindset must be a conscious choice to save the natural world, and bring our societies into sustainable patterns of growth and consumption.
That's a big order, but we seem to have little choice.
And besides, working to save the planet should be a reasonable goal for a species that bothered to invent garage door openers.
Edward Benson is a Durham resident. His column appears every other Tuesday.
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