The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

  “All the apparatus of surgery” Jacobs 1969, pp. 447–48.

  “The most devastating damage” Owen, p. 47. Owen describes the environmental impact of his family’s move from Manhattan to rural northwest Connecticut: “Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of electricity went from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year, toward the end of our time in New York, to almost thirty thousand kilowatt-hours in 2003—and our house doesn’t even have central air-conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and don’t have a second car, you can’t retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it’s been repaired; the third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.) My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand miles a year between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly everything we do away from our house requires a car trip. Renting a movie and later returning it, for example, consumes almost two gallons of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the BTUs produced by our brand-new, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.”

  But we don’t have that option One “third-way” solution to this problem would be to adopt the medieval system of distributed density, still visible in hill towns of northern Italy: a network of tightly packed mixed-use nodes of finite size, separated by large stretches of low-density vineyards and farms. This is not the decentralized approach of edge-of-city sprawl; the towns in the medieval system were not as dense and economically diverse as most modern city centers, but they had a ceiling on their overall growth, usually defined by the walls that outlined the town limits. A post-9/11 city could be built along similar lines: the density of traditional metropolitan space in distributed nodes limited to 50,000 to 100,000 people each, separated by expanses of low-density development: parkland, nature preserves, sports facilites, even vineyards where the climate allows. Such a model would reverse the Olmsted vision of urban greenery: rather than carve out a park in the middle of an immense city, the new model builds a space for nature on the edges of the city center—Peripheral Park, instead of Central. In medieval times, the walls protected the town population. In these theoretical settlements, the open spaces separating the nodes would keep the city safe. Imagine a city of 2 million people, built out of twenty nodes. In a worst-case scenario, a terrorist with a backpack full of smallpox might well be able to do extensive damage to a single node, perhaps killing tens of thousands in the process—not millions. The remaining nodes would be largely unaffected, not unlike the Arpanet and its now folkloric skills at routing around damage. An attack like those on the Twin Towers could still do a lot of damage, but there wouldn’t be a centralized, symbolic node to target. Life in such a metropolitan complex would not feel suburban, by any means: the generative force of sidewalk culture and urban density would be preserved, possibly even enhanced.

  In September 2004, health officials in Thailand “Asian Shots Are Proposed as Flu Fighter,” New York Times, October 13, 2005.

  It needs the CTX phage to switch over Mekalanos et al., pp. 241–48.

  but detection is hardly a fail-safe option I described some of the latest advances in radiation detection—and speculated on how they might be employed to defend large metropolitan areas from nuclear terrorism—in the essay “Stopping Loose Nukes,” published in Wired, November 2002.

  But if the trends of asymmetric warfare continue The one thing we can do now to prevent such a dark future is to radically reduce, if not eliminate, the current stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world. The United States alone has around 10,000 weapons in its active arsenal. This is madness in an age of asymmetric warfare, where mutually assured destruction is meaningless. (It was madness in the cold war too, but for different reasons.) If all the nuclear powers agreed to limit their stockpiles to no more than ten weapons per country—thereby reducing the total number of weapons in the world from 20,000 to less than a hundred—we would reduce by more than an order of magnitude the risk that a weapon would fall into the wrong hands. We would still retain the ability to kill 100 million people and do untold environmental damage with those ten nukes, but at least we would be making significant progress against the growing menace of proliferation. It would be an epic undertaking, yet history shows we are capable of projects on this scale, if we apply ourselves. We eliminated smallpox from the wild, after all. If we can rid the world of a microscopic virus, we can eliminate weapons the size of tractor-trailers. We hear a lot of war-on-terror rhetoric cajoling us to be realistic about the threats that face us, to confront those threats without pity or foolish idealism. That’s why we have elective wars and unauthorized wiretapping: because we’re realists now, or so we’re told. But wherever each of us stands on the wars and the wiretaps, we need to agree that maintaining a stockpile of 10,000 nuclear weapons is the very opposite of realism. It is, in fact, an idealism of the most starry-eyed sort: the ideal that says we’re better off spending billions of dollars maintaining devices that would, were they all detonated, potentially end life as we know it on planet Earth. We are, as a species, sleeping with a gun under our pillow. It may make us feel safe to know that we have all that firepower so close at hand, but someday it’s going to go off.

  Angola is suffering through the worst outbreak “Angola is suffering its worst outbreak of cholera in more than a decade, recording 554 deaths and 12,052 cases in just over two months, according to Doctors Without Borders. The disease has spread unusually fast, even for Africa, where cholera epidemics are common and often hard to control, said Stephan Goetghebuer, an operational coordinator for the organization. It has set up eight clinics in Angola to treat the sick and plans to open more.” “Angola Is Hit by Outbreak of Cholera,” New York Times, April 20, 2006.

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  INDEX

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