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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, reading this makes me nervous - it's scary just how fragile our modern way of life is.

It really is. We've become insanely dependent on the internet, massive electrical grids and GPS.

GPS is especially interesting because the USAF didn't even want it and it almost never happened yet ever shipping company, every cargo ship, every semi, ever FedEx and UPS truck, many pieces of large farm vehicles and most of us use GPS daily. The larger farming operations even use GPS to harvest as GPS is far more accurate than a human being trying to make optimal rows and optimal rows end up in huge time & fuel savings as each acre goes by.

And take the internet... all of those delivery/freight companies use the internet to manage their shipments all across the world and to adjust routes on the fly, and most commerce is conducted via the internet either via websites or servers.

Then power. If you don't have power you don't have water pressure, you can't pump gasoline, you can't make gasoline, you can't use the internet, etc. If you even just manage to take down one region (like happened in Canada in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm ) for even a day you have a massive disruption.

It can honestly be terrifying if you let your mind obsess about it, just how fragile our technological civilization is. More and more I want to live as simply as possible but man, it's hard, we rely so much on gadgets and SAAS and the general convenience of an electricity/GPS/internet driven society.

I'd much prefer if things were more self-contained and self-reliant rather than so deeply interconnected; I don't yearn much for simple (pre-industrial) life. But given the reality we have, it makes it extremely important to protect our civilization from shocks and reinforce the most fragile aspects of it. That's why I often speak up against revolutionary changes, for good or bad. I'm for more gradual changes, and strongly against those that risk breaking civilization, because that would be game over for everyone.

I wholeheartedly agree. Society has it's fair share of flaws (and they absolutely should be fixed!) but all of the alternatives are way worse.

GPS is also used heavily in banking and fiancee for timing purposes, so any storm big enough to jam the network could essentially halt the entire economy for however long the storm lasts. The lucky thing though is that the satellites themselves are hardened against storms, so restoring service would be as "simple" as resynchronizing the entire constellation versus launching a new one

> GPS is also used heavily in banking and fiancee for timing purposes

Fascinating. Is this to measure the lag time between ordering and executing a trade?

I highly recommend James Burke's Connections (the original series if this kind of thing interests you) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

Depending on how you view some aspects of this modern way, it can also make you hopeful.

Nah, I see nothing hopeful in enormous suffering and death of billions of people, which is what would happen in days following our civilization breaking to pieces.

(And to be clear: I'm not exaggerating when I say billions.)

If by whiskey... :)

Thank you for teaching me a new term. That said, I'm having a hard time seeing its relevance here :).

Well, if by modern way you mean modern healthcare, ease of communication and travel, varied food throughout the year, etc. then I'm certainly for its continued existence. If by modern way you mean the degradation of nature, the plastering with ads of every inch of the world, the addictiveness of facebook, and time spent in company-meetings, then its collapse could not come one second too soon. (Just some random picks to illustrate the analogy, not to be taken too seriously :)

If you could surgically cut out bad slices while retaining the good, I'd be first to support it (e.g. I've written about my stance on advertising elsewhere[0]). It's not something I believe is possible without going about it very carefully, and very piecemeal.

I meant my comment in the context of the comments about fragility of our civilization (e.g. GPS being tied to power grids and agriculture and trade). Severely disrupt the systems that feed and warm us daily could easily topple the entire civilization, and I wanted to highlight that "toppling" here is a synonym for billions of deaths from starvation in a very short time frame, followed by not having a technological civilization for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

At least our C02 emissions would be reduced.

That's putting cart before the horse. The only reason to care about CO₂ emissions is because they threaten our technological civilization. The planet doesn't care about CO₂.

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