The future is quiet

Cycling into campus today -- and by the way, did you know UBC was ranked the best place in Canada to do a postdoc by The Scientist magazine last year? -- I was enjoying the mild weather, the gravelly feel of the trail under my tires, and the running loop of thoughts in my head. This all made for a gentle whrring sound -- the gears on my bike, the gears in my head -- until I was interrupted. Trucks came grinding by, one after the other. And then I almost ran over horse poop. (The trail's multi-use which apparently means pedestrian, bike, and horse in Canada.)

This got me thinking about something I'd read before, about how the greatest contributor to noise pollution was the modern combustion engine. There just doesn't seem to be any way to convert fossil fuel into kinetic energy quietly. No matter how much technology you throw at it, you still fundamentally have to blow the damn thing up, and that makes noise.

Then I started thinking about how there's all this talk about hybrids and even (gasp!) fully electric vehicles. Have you ever ridden in one of these? If you have, you know they get eerily quiet at stop lights and intersections. I mean, suddenly you're just sitting there doing nothing. And if you're with someone you don't get along with, this is when it gets really awkward.

And that brings me to this, an unintended consequence of the eventual switch to hybrid and electric vehicles: The future is quiet. And with that quietude, I bet driving/riding fundamentally changes. Gets more relaxing, less stressful, maybe even more thoughtful.

The WHO says one consequence of noise pollution is "annoyance". (A quantitative study comes out in December.) Could this spell the end of road rage? Other studies point to a link between noise, cardiovascular disease, poor sleep, and (duh) hearing loss.

It's no coincidence that low rumbly sounds -- like the ones I heard pass me this morning -- evoke bad reactions physiologically. To our prehistoric ancestors low sounds meant thunderstorms, bears, and earthquakes. They're the go-to when sound engineers want to scare us at the movies. Take The Haunting with Liam Neeson. Audiophiles routinely test their subwoofers to the low growls from this movie. Take away those sounds and you're left with forgettable Sunday afternoon fare.

So it goes with our electric future. Imagine the road trip of the future: You won't hear the engine. You'll hear the wind as you whoosh through it. And the gentle whrr of those thoughts in your head.