The Digital ClusterF***
 

I recall a couple of years ago, when i was watching some random show on Discovery wheer they mentioned that over half the world's money only exists as Digital data. I found that curious and never really forgot, although i never gave it much though either...

Then, as time passed by i was noticing just how much web-dependent we are, and electronic dependent. Ever since the Y2K ( the "oops i didn't though we would be around for so long" bug ) and all the web revolution and web culture we developed so quickly on the last 10 years...

It's kinda funny if you think about it... how it could all be gone in the blink of an eye. Noone could stop Global Warming until the weather decided to go Ape shit insane on us, the majority of people in the financial system didn't see the maelstrom coming too, and so on and so on... we are not very good on actual preventive measures as a race, are we?

And so i was left wondering just how much we would lost and how much of an "Backstep" we would take, globally, if something like... i don't know... an unpredictable colossal Magnetic storm crashed on earth making all Hard Drives and Electronic systems going "Kaput"...

Or even if we were eradicated and thousands of Years later a new race would find our remains, and all these "Black boxes" of data, but they could study any of it because all the computers in the future aren't Windows compilable... and when they actually get the remains of our civilization that they can study, we would look waaaaaaaaaaaaay more primitive than we actually are.

And it even goes without saying the "Mad Max Like" future scenarios were you can replace the "Fuel Reserves" with "WiFi Hotspots"

If a giant magnetic storm hit us, and was powerful enough to knock out our entire electronic infrastructure, wouldn't it kill us, too?

I dunno... i guess it would be a "by-scenario" kind of thing... i mean, can a large burst of electromagnetism kill a human being?

Yes...or at least cause problems with the Bioelectromagnetic organ we call our brain probably making mankind incapable of useing computers for a few years at least...

That's generally the lines I'm going along here... It seems like our infrastructure isn't nearly so tenuous as Bells put it in his first post. I mean, if something could knock it out completely, it would probably kill us, too, anyway.

All of which is beside the point!

I would imagine that, if such a scenario were to come about, it would be not just a clusterfuck, but rather, an unimaginably intense clusterfuck.

Computers are fairly sensitive to EMPs. I had a computer rendered completely useless when a power transformer exploded about 30-50 feet away from the wall that it was up against. All other electronics were fine, though the TV's colors were a bit screwey until I turned it off and back on, but the motherboard on the computer was toasted.

Cut, oh, a few dozen cables, knock out a couple of satellites.

BAM

99% of Internet communication gone. Seriously. The entirety of the Internet is held together by a series of cables undersea (something like 500,000 miles, if I remember right). The way they work makes several cables particularly vulnerable. Cut those cables, most of the network goes down, except for the small (less than 10%) that's satellite based.

My impression of the redundancy in the internet was apparently very inaccurate!

It dosen't even have to reach down to earth... if something happened that were to knock down every single satellite we have up there, the damages to security, communications and economy would be pretty painfull.

I just find it to be... ironic at a certain level. That we live connected to this system that needs 24/7 maintenance at several levels just to be there. and ultimately it's a big chunk of our culture and civilization that can't be really preserved

We made due fine without it a few years ago. It's not as if it'd be impossible to go back.