Overkill

absurdly advanced tech, explained badly, used for dumb stuff

All overkills

The Overkill scale

or: ranking miracles by how badly we waste them

1234567891011121314151617181920212223334455667788991010how much engineering it tookhow dumb the payoff is

Both scores run from 1 to 10, the numbers on the chart match the list, and are opinions, not measurements, so each one comes with a reason. The facts behind them are on each topic’s page.

  1. GPS: effort 9, dumbness 8. Orbiting atomic clocks corrected with both of Einstein’s theories, mostly watched for a delivery car.
  2. The power grid: effort 8, dumbness 6. Split atoms and a continent-wide synchronized machine, ending at a fridge with three beers in it.
  3. Undersea cables: effort 8, dumbness 8. Glass across ocean floors and lasers in dozens of colors, carrying dogs falling off couches.
  4. Computer chips: effort 10, dumbness 6. Tin plasma hotter than the sun and the smoothest mirrors ever made; email is a fair use, just a boring one.
  5. Weather forecasting: effort 8, dumbness 5. Balloons, satellites and supercomputers; deciding on a hoodie is dumb, but forecasts also save lives.
  6. Internet routing: effort 6, dumbness 7. Global trust between rival networks, sketched on napkins, used to find pizza.
  7. Bananas: effort 5, dumbness 8. Clones, a refrigerated sea voyage and ripening gas, for a snack that often gets forgotten.
  8. The blue LED: effort 8, dumbness 9. Thirty years of failure and a Nobel Prize, now lighting phones at 3 a.m.
  9. Barcodes: effort 4, dumbness 6. A sketch in the sand turned global standard; the payoff is a self-checkout that yells at you.
  10. The microwave oven: effort 6, dumbness 9. A wartime radar tube, used to reheat the same coffee three times.
  11. Jet engines: effort 9, dumbness 7. Single-crystal blades in gas hotter than their melting point, flying people home to argue.
  12. Card payments: effort 7, dumbness 8. A one-time code and a millisecond fraud check across a global network, for one latte.
  13. Lithium-ion batteries: effort 8, dumbness 7. Explosive chemistry tamed into a Nobel Prize, and the phone still dies at 14%.
  14. Smoke detectors: effort 6, dumbness 8. A radioactive speck from plutonium guarding every ceiling, mostly famous for chirping at 3 a.m.
  15. Wi-Fi: effort 7, dumbness 8. A hunt for exploding black holes turned into the thing behind cat videos on the toilet.
  16. Phone motion sensors: effort 7, dumbness 8. Springs carved into silicon that feel the Coriolis effect, used to flip the screen in bed.
  17. Noise-cancelling headphones: effort 6, dumbness 7. Anti-sound computed in real time, first for pilots, now for ignoring a roommate.
  18. Phone cameras: effort 9, dumbness 8. A Nobel-winning sensor and a burst of merged frames, aimed at a sandwich.
  19. CAPTCHAs: effort 6, dumbness 9. Millions of people trained computers for free, then lost to the bots at their own test.
  20. Inkjet printers: effort 7, dumbness 9. Microsecond ink explosions from hundreds of nozzles, defeated by an empty yellow cartridge.
  21. Toilets and water treatment: effort 8, dumbness 9. A whole city chemistry plant makes drinkable water, and we flush it.
  22. Song recognition: effort 6, dumbness 8. Sound turned into constellations and matched in seconds, to name a song we never play again.
  23. Air conditioning: effort 6, dumbness 6. A fix for swollen paper that now uses a tenth of the world’s electricity; dumb in July, vital in a heat wave.