The red flash of the traffic lights, the hum of the great planes overhead; follow writer Guan Jie uncovers the everyday wonders we rarely stop to appreciate — and why it’s time to bring back our sense of awe.
Seated in a silent bus and thinking about the school day ahead of me, I overheard a conversation between a father and his son. With the bus stopped at the rush hour’s red light, the son, dressed for another day of primary school, turned and asked a question only a child would ask: “Papa, why do we stop at red lights?”.
His father understood what he really meant. Why can’t other colours be used to represent the stop light? Why must it be red? The father went on to gently explain that red represented danger, thus it’s an appropriate colour for stop lights. The tender questioning didn’t stop there. Seemingly unconvinced, it sounded like the son was about to uncover the fallibility of adults.
As the red light turned green, my mind shifted from worrying about arriving late for class to wondering whether I’ve needlessly abandoned my sense of child-like awe—the type of which I’ve just witnessed (1). After all, I spent my childhood absorbed in books designed to capture the curiosity found in children and build on their budding sense of wonder (2). I started to come to the conclusion that my age and its inexorable tick upward has calcified my sense of awe.
But it need not be like this! And to my wallet’s relief, I do not need to shell out a small fortune to squeeze myself onboard a flying metal can and spend four hurried days of travel in Bali or Tokyo to rebuild that sense of awe. You and I can do it right here, right now.
When I woke up that morning to catch that bus, I had already opened more gifts than a Sultan on his wedding day. Unless I live in a home which I built myself, my undisturbed sleep (to put it mildly) depended on the competency of its builders and engineers and the web of regulations that uphold it. We may live in a concrete jungle but the concrete building does not exist in nature. One wrong calculation could make rubble out of the towers we sleep in. Do I periodically think about this and give thanks to the Building and Construction Authority which requires residential buildings to undergo a Periodic Structural Inspection every ten years by a Professional Engineer (3)? No. When these things in the background operate properly, we notice nothing. It’s only when they don’t work, that things collapse.
Besides the structural integrity of buildings, the territorial integrity of our city-state relies in part on a handful of people monitoring a dozen displays. I have no inside knowledge, but I assume these screens highlight any airborne threats encroaching on Singapore’s airspace. When they come across something suspicious, they rapidly escalate it through the chain of command who will have minutes to make a decision. As beneficiaries of this system, we don’t see this. But we do get occasional peeks behind the curtain. When ill-intentioned people make bomb threats on flights bound for Changi, armed fighter jets intercept the plane in mere minutes (4). The system worked.
So I wasn’t woken up by the collapse of my building nor by an invasion of Singapore. Instead, my phone rang as instructed. Behind a glossy screen and serving as the brains of my Pixel 8 is what Google calls a Tensor G3 chip. Whatever the marketing department of Mountain View, California calls it, it is a piece of modern-day alchemy. To help explain this, here’s an excerpt from Chip War by Chris Miller:
At the core of computing is the need for many millions of 1s and 0s. The entire digital universe consists of these two numbers. Every button on your iPhone, every email, photograph, and YouTube video—all of these are coded, ultimately, in vast strings of 1s and 0s. But these numbers don’t actually exist. They’re expressions of electrical currents, which are either on (1) or off (0). A chip is a grid of millions or billions of transistors, tiny electrical switches that flip on and off to process these digits, to remember them, and to convert real world sensations like images, sound, and radio waves into millions and millions of 1s and 0s.
My Tensor G3, a silicon square no larger than a Hup Seng Cream Cracker, is packed to the brim with billions of transistors. How is that possible? Back to Chip War to explain:
In 2020, as the world lurched between lockdowns driven by a virus whose diameter measured around 100 nanometers—billionths of a meter—TSMC’s most advanced facility, Fab 18, was carving microscopic mazes of tiny transistors, etching shapes smaller than half the size of a coronavirus. [...] It was only 60 years ago that the number of transistors on a cutting-edge chip wasn’t 11.8 billion, but four.
Reaching this point required a herculean amount of human ingenuity and effort. Each time it appeared that we had reached the physical limits of transistor density and further progress seemed thoroughly impossible, engineers proved otherwise. 2D transistor design developed into 3D designs (5). The machines designed to etch transistors on chips started using smaller wavelengths of light to carve ever smaller transistors. From deep ultraviolet light with wavelengths of 248 nanometers to extreme ultraviolet light with wavelengths of just 13.5 nanometers (6). For context, a mitochondria is usually 1000 nanometers wide and the space between the folds of its inner membrane (if one can remember the ubiquitous diagrams found in our biology textbooks) seem gigantic at 100 nanometers (7).
Do I think about this when my phone rings to wake me up? Again the answer is no. I get to enjoy my phone and all of the lights for a tiny fraction of the total research and development cost of that entire process. I have no idea who these people are—the ones who have dedicated their entire professional lives to ensuring that this progress continues. If they stop, all other technology which hinges on that hardware, ceases.
I could go on. When I made my cup of hot teh that morning, I relied on a hidden network of pipes and power lines that criss-cross the city. We may be an island surrounded by water, but Singapore is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. Previous generations of Singaporeans recognised this and acted on it. It’s why two-thirds of our land surface area funnels rainwater via a network of over 8,000 kilometers of drains into our 17 reservoirs for water treatment and eventual use (8). It’s a similar story for Singapore’s second most important liquid. At Jurong Island, ships arrive with tanks full of liquified natural gas and discharge it there for Singapore’s power stations.
I’m aware that my attempt at an awe-inspiring post can quickly turn into an awful recitation of “be awe-struck by what we cannot see”. So I shall stop here (9). I hope this has helped. If not, I hope the next time we do end up travelling to Bali, Tokyo, or elsewhere to seek that sense of wonder, we can start by recognizing that the plane is much more complicated than a “flying metal can”.
Footnotes:
I’m making use of the difference between childish and child-like. The former implies immaturity while the latter is used in a positive sense.
One such humbly titled book I read was the World’s Best Book which listed all sorts of fun facts and figures.
Source: https://archive.is/PuKaM.
Read more on FinFETs: https://archive.is/JWWzR.
Read more on DUV and EUV: https://archive.is/0i2dv.
Source: https://archive.is/NbDWt.
Source: https://archive.is/lUVdf.
Even though, in the story I’ve shared, I haven’t even left home yet. I haven’t mentioned the public transport network and its system of public-private partnership, the diesel that powers the bus, the financial system that allows me to tap and pay for it, on and on.
Comentários