Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet?

25 pointsfoenix13 comments

To be clear as to the extent of Earth's "supposed" damage: think "Worldwide Burning of Alexandria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_alexandria#Destruction_of_the_Library)". How could we cope with a sudden breakdown in infrastructure and still hold the Internet together? I'm thinking that it would involve a lot of wifi hopping. I was looking to discuss some other hackerish ways.

Thinking about it more, what about:

* A lot of dedicated space on computers for p2p/reversion control gracefully degrading storage. To preserve knowledge.

* An ability to utilize any computer with a unified OS.

* Power and battery systems: UPS and a preservation of laptops and netbooks? Perhaps some mobile phones (though the iPhone doesn't come to mind, for obvious reasons).

* Mailing beacons? A way to Old Pentium II boxes with some puppy Linux and a wireless antenna?

* A change in culture: growing a hacker ethic in children and getting people to pass on their knowledge, rather than use it for profit (or limit the growth of such use to 3rd-world nations; etc).

1) I think we can all agree that porn would find a way!

2) It seems to me that the better part of building any technology is just knowing that's its possible in the first place. If memories of the internet "before the crash" were still fairly vivid in the people trying to recreate it, it could be done much faster the second time around.

Ethernet, and the Internet, were build from the ground up to survive such a catastrophe. My best bet, although boring, would be that surviving copper pairs would be used, power generation would be very local (generators, solar, battery-operated microservers, etc.) and worldwide routing would coalesce slowly from there. We'd see random pockets of the world appear and disappear from the global connectivity since there would be little redundancy, akin to the old days of FIDOnet. With time, any dark fiber that survived would light up, redundancy would build up, and more people would have access. Wireless transmission, IMO, would take a longer time to appear since they are more power-hungry: first packet radio, and wifi only if laptops survived relatively intact (although short range would make wifi pretty useless, except in larger population areas).

You'd be worried about a lot of other things before you were worried about building another internet.

How to grow food, how to stay alive, how to hold on to any posessions and how to avoid being murdered/raped/drafted and so on.

File sharing and email would be the last on your to-do list.

Also, the internet and any global span network would require a fair amount of power.

The one thing I'm fairly sure of would not be what would be the first to come, but what would be the last to go, which is the radio amateur AX25 network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX.25

I think my primary concern would be to preserve the mnemonic qualities of the Internet; storing the knowledge within the Internet is not just a question of a physical apocalypse, but a cognitive one as well. Another concern I have is the growing government sentiment on censorship: New Zealand and Australia have already made strong legislation on censorship, and South Africa is considering this as well.

I myself faced censored Internet in Syria — I used a server back in the States to get to sites like youtube (it got to a point where I just used youtube-dl and rsync after additional compression).

Thanks for the link.

You could do worse than to download wikipedia and print it out.

Paper is pretty resilient, electronics are not. That's why it took a burning of the Alexandria library to wipe that knowledge.

And better use acid free paper. And print it out several times and spread as many copies as you can.

There was a time a few years ago when I was absolutely certain that the world was going to return to sustenance level living really soon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe). And then I read The Road and got extremely depressed.

So I've thought about this a lot, and even asked someone (who you may have heard of) if there was already a system or procedure in place so people could keep in contact after a global catastrophe. His answer was a simple "no." My thought was that if people could keep in contact, they could better manage their survival, to access information on crop growing and to get updates on any "nomads" who might be roaming around.

The best answer really is amateur radio. And hopefully information can be recovered from hard drives after the world becomes stable again.

But please don't get me wrong. I don't advocate people freaking out. My dad was a missile engineer (programmer?) who really pounded the peak oil thing into us, and his predictions on "wars over energy" really influenced my thinking, so it's hard for me to gauge how biased I am.

For communication purposes, Amateur radio would be the most common and accessible. Although, I have a feeling the internet would be much more resilient than it may be given credit for; it just might not be a World Wide Web, maybe a Regional Wide Web or City Wide Web....

Someone else had it right too, if there were a large enough catastrophe to knock out the infrastructure supporting the internet entirely - you would be concerned with many other things.

You just read When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, didn't you?

http://craphound.com/?p=1678

I think this will be rather simple: Export Servers to the Space along with satellites. Let the earth burn or boil, your servers are always safe and Internet is Up as long as sun is empowering it with Energy.

You the users, with a high speed connection you can securely and safely connect to the internet and access your data. People who care a lot about privacy, can send their private hard drives to the space too. A good idea for a startup ;)

Question: Do we still have tubes?

Carrier pigeons?

awry

danm

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