Never underestimate the power to adapt

The power outages increased in frequency and duration; however, if anything, these unscheduled interruptions to daily life rekindled the human spirit to arise to the cold realities of a mightily inconvenient challenge. Indeed, if humanity had a motto, it would be something like: “If you don't like your environment, then change it.” - though, admittedly, that environmental challenge was often met by concreting over landmasses and then poisoning its water bodies. But back to the blackouts: as ever, technology had found a way and, thanks to increasingly efficient solar panels and energy cell storage, people could still watch their televisions and miss not one second of their favourite game shows, soap operas and adverts. This probably explains why there hadn't been large-scale scenes of social unrest, though there was one curious phenomenon to emerge: when the lights first began switch off en masse, groups of people were to be seen leaving their homes to stand in the streets and stare at the night sky only to obverse in wonder with their own, naked, eyes - many for the first time outside of technicolour facsimiles - the Milk Way, upon whose spiral arm their collective galactic home was cosseted against the infinite void (at least the one outside). The novelty soon wore off.