The pre-widespread-Internet lifestyle relied on institutional support too: phone booths everywhere, banks that had humans willing to talk to you, paper checks. Heck, I rented a car five years ago and asked who to contact if something went wrong, and they said "go to our website; no one answers the phone".
You're absolutely right of course! I never said it would be easy and that institutional support would almost certainly have to be reintroduced. (I too am addicted to my computers and the internet. As I mentioned in a post below, it's just that those of us who've experienced both worldviews would likely adapt more easily).
"...and they said "go to our website; no one answers the phone"."
Right, don't start me on that, but I'll at least add the fact that you're far from being alone. The downgrading (or should that be 'downfall'?) of service and the loss of human interaction is, in my opinion, a truly serious problem.
I recall an instance back in 2012 when a colleague and I spent 17 hours on the telephone over a period of five days (over a full working week) of trying to get a telco to solve an internet account problem (we had no internet access). Over days, we were shunted from one person to another in a call center in India, each time with the new contact not knowing what the previous one(s) had said or done. Late on Friday afternoon our problem had been escalated through the system to the point where we were transferred back across the international boundary onto local support for assistance (seems that all this was the necessary perquisite to speak to a local human). After being rerouted back home and pressing the correct button/number in the automatic answering system we were connected with a number that rang out without answering (there was no redirect to an answering service on no-answer). As the Indian operator didn't bother to stay on the line after transferring us, we weren't aware of the local phone number to call on the following Monday (likely that number wouldn't have been available to local customers anyway had we had the chance to ask—and perhaps, knowingly, he didn't stick around to avoid abuse from us when the local operator failed to answer). The matter was eventually resolved by other means but I won't waste your time with the details.
We ought to be rioting in the streets over atrocious service like that to force politicians to enact laws that would guarantee users a minimum level of service, especially when there are few alternatives available as in this instance (here, the telco could easily have been considered a monopoly).
Just the Internet, or all forms of network or digital communication? If the Internet is gone, I'll probably start browsing dial-up BBS sites. Do you know that the SDF Public Access UNIX system still supports dial-up? Dialing into a NetBSD machine from the other side of the world via an international phone call is a cool way of doing retrocomputing in 2020 (just beware of your phone bills, there are no Blue Boxes anymore)...
If all forms of network or digital communication are gone, I'll probably keep programming just as before (if not for profit, then for fun), but have to rely on public libraries and local user groups for exchanging information.
Reminds me of the Talking Propeller Heads (TPH)[0]. Saw them open up for the Beach Boys[1] at Usenix in '94.
My sister in-law (she and my brother lived in SF back then) is a huge Beach Boys fan, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. Unsurprisingly, it was easy to get a few extra tickets.
She really enjoyed the show and even got to chat with Brian Wilson afterwards. She was thrilled. I have to say that while I'm not a big fan, they did put on a pretty good show.
TPH was mildly amusing, doing covers of popular songs with "Open Systems"[2] lyrics.
...only to discover that there's nobody left in Zone 1 in your LATA and polling a guy across the continent will cost you gobs of cash you'd rather not spend, so you buddy-up with a HAM buddy who's into packet-radio to see if you can find a way to tunnel packets over a long-haul radio link to save money.
It would take a year or two for the network to re-establish itself, and we wouldn't have the kind of bandwidth or instantaneous interaction we have now, but we could rebuild.
If the internet went down for good, I'd expect we were on the way to losing 1/5 or so of humanity due to starvation, the collapse of international trade, etc.
Why? And where do your figures/estimate come from?
…Here's a small selection of what actually happened in the pre-internet/computer era (it's all pretty remarkable and we could do it again if we had to):
• Humanity got through many tens of thousands of years of its existence and into the 1980s without the internet and (mostly without) modern computers and somehow not only managed without them but it thrived and multiplied.
• Even before electrification and the international telegraph across the Atlantic, trade was alive and well between nations (for instance, trade in cotton from the Southern US to Manchester UK).
• Moreover, in ancient times trade between nations was both effective and remarkably well organized (given that even the telephone was still 2000 years away). One only has to look at the trade routes of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire to realize how sophisticated that arrangement was: https://vividmaps.com/trade-routes-of-roman-empire/. Furthermore, there were many other trade routes throughout history, The Silk Road for instance.
• At the beginning of WWII the US was almost completely unprepared for war. Between 1942 and 1945 the US embarked on an industrial ramp-up in production that has never been equalled. That increase was truly phenomenal: https://prospect.org/health/way-won-america-s-economic-break.... All that occurred without either the internet or modern computers.
• As US Secretary of War Henry Stimson said in 1940 "If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.". That actually happened and the results were not only remarkable but truly phenomenal. It's not the internet that drives the world but money!
• There are a few notable exceptions to that rule (but nevertheless commerce was unknowingly and inextricably implicated), and that was the Government-run Manhattan Project and the development of the Atomic Bomb. War has always driven scientific development but what happened between 1942 and 1945 was truly phenomenal and still has never been equalled in both the speed of scientific development and its practical application. It is all the more remarkable that from its outset the Manhattan Project was planned, organized and brought to fruition in complete secrecy—and, of course, this secrecy also extended to all the scientific and engineering research. Not only was there no internet, but mandatory secrecy meant that discussing the project on the telephone was impossible—even speaking to anyone with the exception of security-cleared colleagues in one's own area of specialty was not only problematic but also a major breach of security.
• Another exception was the phenomenal strategic planning and organization behind D-Day—the invasion of Normandy during WWII. This was the biggest and most complex invasion of its kind in all history, nothing like it has ever happened before or since. Again, this remarkable feat was accomplished behind an enormous cloak of secrecy.
• It wasn't only the US that had a phenomenal increase in production in WWII, so did every country engaged in the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor.... For example, in 1939 the world produced ≈38,000 aircraft per year, by 1945 that figure was not only phenomenal but had reached a staggering number in excess of 0.8 million aircraft per year! That's an increase of ≈2105%: mikewarot↗
We, the makers of the world, are very resourceful group. If we couldn't get the internet back up, that to me implies civilizational collapse, and a world without long distance radio, satellite, underseas cables from some unspecified cause that is the start of this thought experiment.
Without internet, or any other instant long distance means of communications, we're back to pre-civil war technology with small pockets of embedded modernity. Heck, Lincoln used telegraph to manage the Civil War in the US.
The most appropriate historical fiction to match the scenario is the 1632 series of books by Eric Flint, at least in terms of what the hurdles are to rebooting a technology base.
Even a year without telecoms would have billions dead as governments would be effectively dissolved, along with the world trade system.
1/5 of humanity dead would be an amazing victory over adversity.
> At the beginning of WWII the US was almost completely unprepared for war. Between 1942 and 1945 the US embarked on an industrial ramp-up in production that has never been equaled.
Yes, that's because there were plans in place from the Army Industrial College, and their graduates including Dwight Eisenhower who had done surveys in advance to figure out the logistics of turning the manufacturing base around.
For Example, there is a Vocational School in Chicago that taught how to work on airplane avionics for the Navy during the war... just happened to be funded by the Navy in 1938.
We didn't turn things around in a year, that wasn't possible, but might be a nice myth, if it weren't so dangerous to believe.
Please note, I agree with almost everything you say, and I too grew up before the internet, and have no desire to return to those days, they sucked!
I don't share your optimism in the short order, long term I'm a bit more optimistic, if we don't nuke ourselves, or let any more gain of function research get out of hand
I agree with you that if we couldn't get the internet back up then it would likely imply civilizational collapse, especially given that the internet was especially designed around rerouting protocols that should bypass major points of failure. As I understand it, 'survivability in the face of failure' was one of DARPA's principle design criteria for ARPANET/internet, if that didn't happen or couldn’t be sustained then things would be pretty terrible.
Let me backtrack for a moment, the title of the original article is 'What Would You Do If The Internet Went Away?' As there is little of substance in the article to cover the many of the potential issues raised in the title, I based my comments (a) principally to address that title, which I did in the context of a Gedanken experiment where the title alone set the conditions/limits on my reply; and, (b) as I was also replying to mikewarot's post, my comments also had to address what he said within that context. The fact that mikewarot also threw in the matter of a world without computers complicated matters because the thought experiment would allow for a world where there were computers and no internet. In fact, my initial draft rely omitted computers; I only added them later to avoid being accused of avoiding his point.
In essence, the thrust of my reply was only to consider a world without the internet, at no time was it my intention to omit any communications facility or service that was in existence up until immediately prior to the introduction of the internet. That's to say my premise was to assume that we would be returning to a world that was essentially identical to the one we had around the mid 1980s (i.e.: the remnants of the telegraph/telex service, facsimile, telephone, radio broadcasting, radio communications including HF/long distance shortwave, television, communications satellites and submarine cables were all still in existence). If I had not assumed this then I'd fully agree with you that my optimism would have been badly misplaced.
The issue of Eric Flint's 1632 series and the rebooting of society from that level is a bridge too far for my rather limited brain to contemplate in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, I have given some contemplation to how far back in years that our present-day society with its knowledge of the internet would, in terms of technology, have to revert before the mid 1980s point before society would break down. I think that point is some 50 years earlier in the mid 1930s, that's the point where AM radio and AM radio broadcasting had reached maturity and where the supporting infrastructure was sufficiently developed to communicate with most of the world. I base this on the remarkable but horrible success that Goebbels and Nazis had in galvanizing the German population, which they did with little more than the cheap, simple-to-build Volksempfänger AM radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger. (For years, I've considered AM radio to be one of the most important and pivotal technologies of the 20th Century, it's simple, cheap and allows effective worldwide communications. It would be the first and most important of the electronics technologies that would be re-established after any civilizational collapse.)*
"<…> there were plans in place from the Army Industrial College, and their graduates including Dwight Eisenhower who had done surveys in advance to figure out the logistics of turning the manufacturing base around. <…> For Example, there is a Vocational School in Chicago that taught how to work on airplane avionics for the Navy during the war."
Right, but that turnaround would not have happened (or happened within sufficient time) had it not been for a small but brilliant and very influential group of experts such as Alfred Lee Loomis,
I find myself in complete agreement, if for some reason just the internet were to go, but we still had telecoms of an analog nature, we'd be ok... there would still be a lot of lives at risk, but if governments did their jobs, we'd all make it through until service was restored/rebuilt.
I'd go further an say that even with telegraph age technology, now that we know the usefulness of computers, we would not have stumbled for 100 years at the hands of Babbage, there are too many things that even a relay based computer could do to benefit mankind.
I daydream quite often about what would change with a solar storm powerful enough to erase any magnetic memory on earth forcing us to go dark.
How long will it take for humanity to bootstrap everything back up again, considering that the power grid is basically useless without computers? What about other services like water and sewage? How many lives lost?
A lot less time than you would think. There are a ton of devices that don't use magnetic memory like SSD and SD cards. So although a lot of data would be gone, the tools to build everything back up would still be intact. Devices like CNC machins usually use SD cards and other forms of non-magnetic storage. Biggest issue would be controlling public unrest until you can restore infinistructure. After that it would be business as usual after not too long.
But if the storm is powerful enough to destroy actual chips and systems it would be very very difficult to recover.
Yes and let's not forget those memories stored in data vaults underground or somewhat magnetically shielded. Mine is just an exercise for the imagination rather than a technically correct scenario.
But to get all these memories working again you need a power grid, to operate which you need all those memories unless isolating sections of the grid and powering them with renewables somewhat.
In a no-more-computers-unless-we-rebuild-them scenario we would have to rush to both get to save all our knowledge somewhere and to preserve the "cold" storage we already have such as written word.
A bigger problem is that there are fewer and fewer living engineers that actually understand things well enough from first principles to be able to reconstruct a technological society. And the social disintegration (think Minneapolois and Portland on steroids) that would follow could make it quite difficult to even get the surviving systems up and running again. Also, note that very little of the past 20 years has been well documented on paper...
"...there are fewer and fewer living engineers that actually understand things well enough from first principles to be able to reconstruct a technological society"
I think that's either true or partially true due to (vertical) specialization that's so prevalent these days and also for other reasons some of which are cultural.
You qualify your comment by saying that 'there are fewer and fewer living engineers'. Here, your inclusion of the word 'living' is interesting. By that, you are not only implying that once engineers could do so (and their modern day counterparts cannot) but also that modern engineers aren't taught first principles—at least not to the extent that they once were.
This is a bold statement, why do you think this true?
> By that, you are not only implying that once engineers could do so (and their modern day counterparts cannot) but also that modern engineers aren't taught first principles—at least not to the extent that they once were.
I think what he means is that complexity today has scaled so much that a new graduate would have a hard time to be able to do and remember and understand everything. We are so vertically specialized that I doubt an electrical engineer could, as an example, build a basic computer fast enough and use it to code a functioning basic web server from scratch.
Yeah, right. I was trying to draw him out on that point because I reckon it's an important one that we often brush under the carpet (as there's no easy/practical solution).
It seems to me that the sheer volume of information today poses special problems for training and I reckon we've not yet found the ideal structure to educate people in ways so that they are taught a hierarchy of information that decreases in relevance as it moves out and away from the core material. The problem is that every teacher (and university syllabus) will have a different view about what is relevant and what is not. Essentially, we don't have a theory about what's relevant in other fields of endeavor and how to connect or relate that information to the core material let alone implement teaching it in practice.
I've been around a while now so I've reasonable experience in my work—and I try to keep abreast of my subjects—but still I often shock myself when I come across information that's close (or relevant) to the core material that I ought to damn-well know but I do not. Somehow, I've missed out learning it. What's even more troubling is that after coming to grips with this 'new' material my view (and understanding) of the core material either alters and or is improved (methinks shades of the Dunning-Kruger effect have been at work here—and that's a real worry). Precious few of us have the intellect, perfect recall and ability to drill down and instinctively search far and wide across other fields then vacuum up every skerrick of information about a subject that's relevant—which the amazing John von Neumann was capable of doing effortlessly—so I don't have a sensible suggestion about what we ought to do to solve the problem. Perhaps eventually AI will come to the rescue.
Let me give you an illustration of this. A few years back I was bemoaning the fact to the head of a university physics department that very few people who I was employing to work in my department had a broad cross-section of general knowledge of relevant/related subjects. He immediately recognized the problem and retorted with the following example. During his evaluation for a PhD, a candidate whose study was on LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) was asked a general question† about how a junction transistor worked and he was completely flummoxed; essentially, he didn't have a clue!
Frankly, this revelation amazed me; I was almost speechless. I claim no special knowledge of LEDs and junction transistors over that which most others in my field would know but do I know enough semiconductor theory to know that he should have been able to field a reasonable answer. I simply do not understand how he managed to get though four years of undergraduate physics and electrical engineering (electronics theory) let alone his PhD research and not have some knowledge of the matter.
The fact that at a well established highly respected university that he even managed to get to the stage where he was being evaluated for a PhD amplifies the fact that we've a serious problem with educating specialists. Tragically, that facetious saying that 'these days, PhDs know more and more about less and less', may have some ring of truth to it. (Yes, I know, there are many exceptions and there are many brilliant people still out there—much cleverer than I am—but you get my gist.)
† I recall a similar instance with a university exam paper where third year physics students were asked a very short 'reality-check' question: 'Derive F=ma' and a significant number either gave the wrong answer or omitted answering the question altogether. Clearly, teaching students to see both the woods and the trees remains a significant problem.
"But if the storm is powerful enough to destroy actual chips and systems it would be very very difficult to recover."
That's not out of the bounds of possibility, during the solar storm of 1859, aka the Carrington event, there were multiple reports of electric sparks coming from telegraph line and terminal equipment and of Morse code operators receiving electric shocks from their keys, etc.
Clearly, modern RFI/EMR shielding would protect much of the susceptible solid-electronics but I'd suggest that with such a high level of induced energy there nevertheless would be huge and widespread destruction of poorly protected/shielded equipment, especially so domestic electronics (which would fall into that category). Moreover, it's likely that most satellites would fail or be severely damaged.
I'm somewhat surprised that I've not yet seen any authoritative modeling of the effect that a solar storm the size of the Carrington event would have on the world's electrical and electronic systems (if anyone knows of any references I'd be grateful if they'd post them here). Perhaps the reason is that if any do exist then they would likely be classified under national security. I suppose that's sort of obvious, isn't it?
I teach some outdoors skills and other self sufficient skills, and people ask me what the best “survival” book is. I tell them One Second After is the most realistic situation that could happen, and not ending up naked in a jungle with a stranger.
Read scripture. Read and write manually. Try to rehabilitate my kids, who doubtless view the pre-Internet era as some sort of Dim Ages that followed the Dark Ages.
Get the Ham radio out, see who's around. Get a better antenna and more powerful radio and see who's around further away.
Though these days 5 watts as a bit of wire will get you a long way with some of the low bandwidth data modes. But is that cheating for the purposes of this discussion?
73 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadBack then, I was more productive than I am now, the chances are that I would be so again.
"...and they said "go to our website; no one answers the phone"."
Right, don't start me on that, but I'll at least add the fact that you're far from being alone. The downgrading (or should that be 'downfall'?) of service and the loss of human interaction is, in my opinion, a truly serious problem.
I recall an instance back in 2012 when a colleague and I spent 17 hours on the telephone over a period of five days (over a full working week) of trying to get a telco to solve an internet account problem (we had no internet access). Over days, we were shunted from one person to another in a call center in India, each time with the new contact not knowing what the previous one(s) had said or done. Late on Friday afternoon our problem had been escalated through the system to the point where we were transferred back across the international boundary onto local support for assistance (seems that all this was the necessary perquisite to speak to a local human). After being rerouted back home and pressing the correct button/number in the automatic answering system we were connected with a number that rang out without answering (there was no redirect to an answering service on no-answer). As the Indian operator didn't bother to stay on the line after transferring us, we weren't aware of the local phone number to call on the following Monday (likely that number wouldn't have been available to local customers anyway had we had the chance to ask—and perhaps, knowingly, he didn't stick around to avoid abuse from us when the local operator failed to answer). The matter was eventually resolved by other means but I won't waste your time with the details.
We ought to be rioting in the streets over atrocious service like that to force politicians to enact laws that would guarantee users a minimum level of service, especially when there are few alternatives available as in this instance (here, the telco could easily have been considered a monopoly).
If all forms of network or digital communication are gone, I'll probably keep programming just as before (if not for profit, then for fun), but have to rely on public libraries and local user groups for exchanging information.
The Day The Routers Died, written and performed live at the 55th RIPE Meeting by Gary Feldman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0
> a long long time ago
> i can still remember
> when my laptop could connect elsewhere
>
> and i tell you all there was a day
> the network card i threw away
> had a purpose - and it worked for you and me...
>
> but 18 years completely wasted
> with each address we've aggregated
> the tables overflowing
> the traffic just stopped flowing...
>
> and now we're bearing all the scars
> and all my traceroutes showing stars...
> the packets would travel faster in cars...
> the day... the routers died...
https://catonmat.net/ftp/gary_feldman-the_day_the_routers_di...
My sister in-law (she and my brother lived in SF back then) is a huge Beach Boys fan, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. Unsurprisingly, it was easy to get a few extra tickets.
She really enjoyed the show and even got to chat with Brian Wilson afterwards. She was thrilled. I have to say that while I'm not a big fan, they did put on a pretty good show.
TPH was mildly amusing, doing covers of popular songs with "Open Systems"[2] lyrics.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talking_Propellerheads
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_Boys
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)
And then it'd be back to sneaker net :)
Then I'd probably re-watch Babylon 5 again. Hmmm, that may be coming this year or next anyway...
It would take a year or two for the network to re-establish itself, and we wouldn't have the kind of bandwidth or instantaneous interaction we have now, but we could rebuild.
NO social media anymore yesss...
Yggdrasil was a good idea. I think another one similar was Ouraborus.
We need computers and internet these days.
…Here's a small selection of what actually happened in the pre-internet/computer era (it's all pretty remarkable and we could do it again if we had to):
• Humanity got through many tens of thousands of years of its existence and into the 1980s without the internet and (mostly without) modern computers and somehow not only managed without them but it thrived and multiplied.
• Even before electrification and the international telegraph across the Atlantic, trade was alive and well between nations (for instance, trade in cotton from the Southern US to Manchester UK).
• Moreover, in ancient times trade between nations was both effective and remarkably well organized (given that even the telephone was still 2000 years away). One only has to look at the trade routes of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire to realize how sophisticated that arrangement was: https://vividmaps.com/trade-routes-of-roman-empire/. Furthermore, there were many other trade routes throughout history, The Silk Road for instance.
• At the beginning of WWII the US was almost completely unprepared for war. Between 1942 and 1945 the US embarked on an industrial ramp-up in production that has never been equalled. That increase was truly phenomenal: https://prospect.org/health/way-won-america-s-economic-break.... All that occurred without either the internet or modern computers.
• As US Secretary of War Henry Stimson said in 1940 "If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.". That actually happened and the results were not only remarkable but truly phenomenal. It's not the internet that drives the world but money!
• There are a few notable exceptions to that rule (but nevertheless commerce was unknowingly and inextricably implicated), and that was the Government-run Manhattan Project and the development of the Atomic Bomb. War has always driven scientific development but what happened between 1942 and 1945 was truly phenomenal and still has never been equalled in both the speed of scientific development and its practical application. It is all the more remarkable that from its outset the Manhattan Project was planned, organized and brought to fruition in complete secrecy—and, of course, this secrecy also extended to all the scientific and engineering research. Not only was there no internet, but mandatory secrecy meant that discussing the project on the telephone was impossible—even speaking to anyone with the exception of security-cleared colleagues in one's own area of specialty was not only problematic but also a major breach of security.
• Another exception was the phenomenal strategic planning and organization behind D-Day—the invasion of Normandy during WWII. This was the biggest and most complex invasion of its kind in all history, nothing like it has ever happened before or since. Again, this remarkable feat was accomplished behind an enormous cloak of secrecy.
• It wasn't only the US that had a phenomenal increase in production in WWII, so did every country engaged in the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor.... For example, in 1939 the world produced ≈38,000 aircraft per year, by 1945 that figure was not only phenomenal but had reached a staggering number in excess of 0.8 million aircraft per year! That's an increase of ≈2105%: mikewarot ↗ We, the makers of the world, are very resourceful group. If we couldn't get the internet back up, that to me implies civilizational collapse, and a world without long distance radio, satellite, underseas cables from some unspecified cause that is the start of this thought experiment. hilbert42 ↗ I agree with you that if we couldn't get the internet back up then it would likely imply civilizational collapse, especially given that the internet was especially designed around rerouting protocols that should bypass major points of failure. As I understand it, 'survivability in the face of failure' was one of DARPA's principle design criteria for ARPANET/internet, if that didn't happen or couldn’t be sustained then things would be pretty terrible. mikewarot ↗ I find myself in complete agreement, if for some reason just the internet were to go, but we still had telecoms of an analog nature, we'd be ok... there would still be a lot of lives at risk, but if governments did their jobs, we'd all make it through until service was restored/rebuilt.
Without internet, or any other instant long distance means of communications, we're back to pre-civil war technology with small pockets of embedded modernity. Heck, Lincoln used telegraph to manage the Civil War in the US.
The most appropriate historical fiction to match the scenario is the 1632 series of books by Eric Flint, at least in terms of what the hurdles are to rebooting a technology base.
Even a year without telecoms would have billions dead as governments would be effectively dissolved, along with the world trade system.
1/5 of humanity dead would be an amazing victory over adversity.
> At the beginning of WWII the US was almost completely unprepared for war. Between 1942 and 1945 the US embarked on an industrial ramp-up in production that has never been equaled.
Yes, that's because there were plans in place from the Army Industrial College, and their graduates including Dwight Eisenhower who had done surveys in advance to figure out the logistics of turning the manufacturing base around.
For Example, there is a Vocational School in Chicago that taught how to work on airplane avionics for the Navy during the war... just happened to be funded by the Navy in 1938.
We didn't turn things around in a year, that wasn't possible, but might be a nice myth, if it weren't so dangerous to believe.
Please note, I agree with almost everything you say, and I too grew up before the internet, and have no desire to return to those days, they sucked!
I don't share your optimism in the short order, long term I'm a bit more optimistic, if we don't nuke ourselves, or let any more gain of function research get out of hand
Let me backtrack for a moment, the title of the original article is 'What Would You Do If The Internet Went Away?' As there is little of substance in the article to cover the many of the potential issues raised in the title, I based my comments (a) principally to address that title, which I did in the context of a Gedanken experiment where the title alone set the conditions/limits on my reply; and, (b) as I was also replying to mikewarot's post, my comments also had to address what he said within that context. The fact that mikewarot also threw in the matter of a world without computers complicated matters because the thought experiment would allow for a world where there were computers and no internet. In fact, my initial draft rely omitted computers; I only added them later to avoid being accused of avoiding his point.
In essence, the thrust of my reply was only to consider a world without the internet, at no time was it my intention to omit any communications facility or service that was in existence up until immediately prior to the introduction of the internet. That's to say my premise was to assume that we would be returning to a world that was essentially identical to the one we had around the mid 1980s (i.e.: the remnants of the telegraph/telex service, facsimile, telephone, radio broadcasting, radio communications including HF/long distance shortwave, television, communications satellites and submarine cables were all still in existence). If I had not assumed this then I'd fully agree with you that my optimism would have been badly misplaced.
The issue of Eric Flint's 1632 series and the rebooting of society from that level is a bridge too far for my rather limited brain to contemplate in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, I have given some contemplation to how far back in years that our present-day society with its knowledge of the internet would, in terms of technology, have to revert before the mid 1980s point before society would break down. I think that point is some 50 years earlier in the mid 1930s, that's the point where AM radio and AM radio broadcasting had reached maturity and where the supporting infrastructure was sufficiently developed to communicate with most of the world. I base this on the remarkable but horrible success that Goebbels and Nazis had in galvanizing the German population, which they did with little more than the cheap, simple-to-build Volksempfänger AM radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger. (For years, I've considered AM radio to be one of the most important and pivotal technologies of the 20th Century, it's simple, cheap and allows effective worldwide communications. It would be the first and most important of the electronics technologies that would be re-established after any civilizational collapse.)*
"<…> there were plans in place from the Army Industrial College, and their graduates including Dwight Eisenhower who had done surveys in advance to figure out the logistics of turning the manufacturing base around. <…> For Example, there is a Vocational School in Chicago that taught how to work on airplane avionics for the Navy during the war."
Right, but that turnaround would not have happened (or happened within sufficient time) had it not been for a small but brilliant and very influential group of experts such as Alfred Lee Loomis,
I'd go further an say that even with telegraph age technology, now that we know the usefulness of computers, we would not have stumbled for 100 years at the hands of Babbage, there are too many things that even a relay based computer could do to benefit mankind.
How long will it take for humanity to bootstrap everything back up again, considering that the power grid is basically useless without computers? What about other services like water and sewage? How many lives lost?
But if the storm is powerful enough to destroy actual chips and systems it would be very very difficult to recover.
But to get all these memories working again you need a power grid, to operate which you need all those memories unless isolating sections of the grid and powering them with renewables somewhat.
In a no-more-computers-unless-we-rebuild-them scenario we would have to rush to both get to save all our knowledge somewhere and to preserve the "cold" storage we already have such as written word.
I think that's either true or partially true due to (vertical) specialization that's so prevalent these days and also for other reasons some of which are cultural.
You qualify your comment by saying that 'there are fewer and fewer living engineers'. Here, your inclusion of the word 'living' is interesting. By that, you are not only implying that once engineers could do so (and their modern day counterparts cannot) but also that modern engineers aren't taught first principles—at least not to the extent that they once were.
This is a bold statement, why do you think this true?
I think what he means is that complexity today has scaled so much that a new graduate would have a hard time to be able to do and remember and understand everything. We are so vertically specialized that I doubt an electrical engineer could, as an example, build a basic computer fast enough and use it to code a functioning basic web server from scratch.
At the start of 1900, not so much.
It seems to me that the sheer volume of information today poses special problems for training and I reckon we've not yet found the ideal structure to educate people in ways so that they are taught a hierarchy of information that decreases in relevance as it moves out and away from the core material. The problem is that every teacher (and university syllabus) will have a different view about what is relevant and what is not. Essentially, we don't have a theory about what's relevant in other fields of endeavor and how to connect or relate that information to the core material let alone implement teaching it in practice.
I've been around a while now so I've reasonable experience in my work—and I try to keep abreast of my subjects—but still I often shock myself when I come across information that's close (or relevant) to the core material that I ought to damn-well know but I do not. Somehow, I've missed out learning it. What's even more troubling is that after coming to grips with this 'new' material my view (and understanding) of the core material either alters and or is improved (methinks shades of the Dunning-Kruger effect have been at work here—and that's a real worry). Precious few of us have the intellect, perfect recall and ability to drill down and instinctively search far and wide across other fields then vacuum up every skerrick of information about a subject that's relevant—which the amazing John von Neumann was capable of doing effortlessly—so I don't have a sensible suggestion about what we ought to do to solve the problem. Perhaps eventually AI will come to the rescue.
Let me give you an illustration of this. A few years back I was bemoaning the fact to the head of a university physics department that very few people who I was employing to work in my department had a broad cross-section of general knowledge of relevant/related subjects. He immediately recognized the problem and retorted with the following example. During his evaluation for a PhD, a candidate whose study was on LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) was asked a general question† about how a junction transistor worked and he was completely flummoxed; essentially, he didn't have a clue!
Frankly, this revelation amazed me; I was almost speechless. I claim no special knowledge of LEDs and junction transistors over that which most others in my field would know but do I know enough semiconductor theory to know that he should have been able to field a reasonable answer. I simply do not understand how he managed to get though four years of undergraduate physics and electrical engineering (electronics theory) let alone his PhD research and not have some knowledge of the matter.
The fact that at a well established highly respected university that he even managed to get to the stage where he was being evaluated for a PhD amplifies the fact that we've a serious problem with educating specialists. Tragically, that facetious saying that 'these days, PhDs know more and more about less and less', may have some ring of truth to it. (Yes, I know, there are many exceptions and there are many brilliant people still out there—much cleverer than I am—but you get my gist.)
† I recall a similar instance with a university exam paper where third year physics students were asked a very short 'reality-check' question: 'Derive F=ma' and a significant number either gave the wrong answer or omitted answering the question altogether. Clearly, teaching students to see both the woods and the trees remains a significant problem.
That's not out of the bounds of possibility, during the solar storm of 1859, aka the Carrington event, there were multiple reports of electric sparks coming from telegraph line and terminal equipment and of Morse code operators receiving electric shocks from their keys, etc.
Clearly, modern RFI/EMR shielding would protect much of the susceptible solid-electronics but I'd suggest that with such a high level of induced energy there nevertheless would be huge and widespread destruction of poorly protected/shielded equipment, especially so domestic electronics (which would fall into that category). Moreover, it's likely that most satellites would fail or be severely damaged.
I'm somewhat surprised that I've not yet seen any authoritative modeling of the effect that a solar storm the size of the Carrington event would have on the world's electrical and electronic systems (if anyone knows of any references I'd be grateful if they'd post them here). Perhaps the reason is that if any do exist then they would likely be classified under national security. I suppose that's sort of obvious, isn't it?
I teach some outdoors skills and other self sufficient skills, and people ask me what the best “survival” book is. I tell them One Second After is the most realistic situation that could happen, and not ending up naked in a jungle with a stranger.
Though these days 5 watts as a bit of wire will get you a long way with some of the low bandwidth data modes. But is that cheating for the purposes of this discussion?