For arguments sake let us assume that the internet or www in its current form was destroyed and not recoverable. How easily could mankind revert to the pre internet days. What year is considered pre internet. Many societies probably still live their lives internet free even today. Will we just be able to adapt easily. How many lives will be directly lost as a consequence.
Back in the early 1990’s internet connections were at least a little bit limited for the average person. We still had dial-up BBS’s, services like Genie, AOL and Compuserve. Do you mean those are also gone? Back in the day, when my friend was on Prodigy, and we still used the Internet Yellowpages (it was a book,) I once created a connection to my computer, called PRO-DID-GEE. Ah, good times. Do you mean that as well, no one connects to anyone via modem? What if someone calls me on the phone and I read what I have on my hard drive? Is that not allowed?
So, go beyond 1990. Mainframe linked computers via ARPANET were important for universities. Do you mean that not available.
Predating that, in the 1960’s and 1970’s computers were hard wired to provide distributed computing power. Do you mean, not that?
I’m unsure, as I was born in 1968, however, I believe humans were able to maintain a technological society before then.
Let me emphasise that technology is not destroyed, just the www. So your phone will work as the hardware in it does not really need the internet to function. The internet function obviously wont work on the phone. It will make calls etc that does not rely on internet like voip.
How many lives lost… i meant how many people in hospitals rely on internet based services for their treatment. I dont know is the answer.
What else in our daily lives depnds on the internet? Does wifi need the www. Can my netflix work out of my roku box asit is justconnected to broadband. Is the www needed for that? Online banking and shopping will be kaput as will be allthe forums, google searches, social media, etc etc.
Your question is not consistent. The Web <> the internet in the least. The web is what we are on now but it is only a small part of the internet as a whole. You can’t say that your cell phone would still work because it probably wouldn’t, at least for very long. There are remote servers and connections to the cell towers that power the phone networks and shutting off the internet as a whole would shut down most of those connections too.
I consult for a mega-corp that everyone has heard of. We make and distribute medical devices for the whole country and the world. The vast majority of processes are controlled by connections to remote servers and there is no manual backup process in place. We lost both of our internet lines one day due to a truck accident and we just had to send everyone home and shut down until it was fixed the next morning. That type of risk is more common than not these days. Large companies, hospitals, schools, airlines, shipping companies and most everything else cannot function for an extended period of time without a reliable internet connection.
Much of civilization would shut down. Remember that pesky Y2K problem? It was real but companies spent big money to fix it back in the late 1990’s. Now imagine it is 100x worse and it hits with no warning. That is a scratch on the surface of the magnitude of the problem we are looking at. Everything from utilities to the stock market would be greatly affected or shut down.
Utilities…dont care about stock markets. So if utilities shut down we are going back to pre WW1 days. No light, heating, transport,…
Are all these recoverable ie…can we go back to pre connectivity days or will have to build from scratch.
You better care about the stock market. If it shuts down for very long, we would be looking at economic chaos and then collapse. Your mistake is not realizing how interconnected all of these complex systems are. Without utilities, we won’t be rebuilding anything at least in the short to medium term. People will be trying to grab whatever perishable food is still left before it is gone. Food distribution requires a very complex production and distribution system that is generally remote to major population centers. There isn’t a reasonable way to get food to cities like NYC if those systems are disabled. We would have to go through a lengthy period of starvation and anarchy before we could even think about reorganizing all of society back to a prior state.
On the bright side, the economic collapse would be slowed by the fact that any economic news would only travel at the speed of a first-class letter.
Or the newspaper.
That’s another bright side: print journalism (what survives of it to that point) rebounds.
Since this requires speculation, let’s move it to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Actually, I take that back: There would still be one mode of electronic communication that would still work. Ham radios will work in almost any conditions, and that’s why they’re allocated a band of the precious spectrum: In the event of emergency, ham operators are expected to maintain communications with otherwise cut-off areas.
Pretty much everything else, though? Yeah, it’s all internet, nowadays.
Exactly. The OP and a lot of folks don’t really understand how interconnected everything is these days…interconnected and interdependent. Basically, destroy the internet (which as noted is more than just the world wide web) and it would a major disaster on par with, say, a major asteroid impact or a supervolcano eruption.
There have been a bunch of threads like this, but I’ve never been able to convey just how bad it would be in any of them because people still think of things like their web access in terms of it being a toy or just something to entertain them, not understanding the broader ramifications or how their logistics and distribution, their emergency response, their water, sewage, food and everything else that empowers their modern lives are all connected in a chain. Break a major link like magically destroy the entire internet (and all the infrastructure that implies) and we are basically fucked. Oh, humans will survive, and perhaps even societies. But it will be incredibly ugly and millions, possibly billions will die. I haven’t gamed out this exact scenario, but I’ve been to enough disaster planning events and sandbox games to know it would be really, really ugly.
I suspect that much of print journalism today relies on the Internet or the WWW and might not function in this scenario. But in 2011, after the massive earthquake in Japan, one publisher resorted to handwritten newspapers. So that’s one option. Or they could dig out the typewriters.
Simply put, those without a reliable backup plan or those put in a situation where internet access is required (hospitals etc.) will be in jeopardy. Humans as a whole would move on and persevere and prosper either way. That being said there needs to be backup plans just in case. I don’t understand why so many places don’t keep hard copies or store everything in the cloud. Especially in life and time sensitive situations, it doesn’t make sense. I would actually welcome a short period where I needed books and candle light. It would be a reminder of how life can really be and to not take things for granted. I’m weird though.
One difficulty in figuring out how bad this would be is you need to figure out how you would kill the internet. One of the key features of the internet is that packets find their own way around it. Cut the internet in half, and each half continues to work. Cut out a huge chunk, and packets just route around the hole. It’s darn near impossible to kill the internet without massively destroying computers and technology.
This isn’t to say that you can’t cause disruption to the internet. One of the big vulnerabilities in the internet is how it does its addressing. An address like www.straightdope.com is meaningless to a computer. In order to convert that into something that the computer can use, your computer issues what is called a DNS request (DNS = Domain Name System). This request goes to your internet provider’s DNS server, but your internet provider just has cached copies of DNS entries from higher up the chain. Your internet provider does not have the master list of DNS entries. If your internet provider doesn’t happen to have a particular request cached, then it sends a request further up the chain. At the top of the chain are what are called the root DNS servers. There are 13 of these, and these have the master list of all internet addresses. Take out all 13 of these root servers, and the internet grinds to a halt.
Of course, these aren’t 13 random computers just sitting on someone’s desk in places like Bangladesh. These are well-guarded computers running in a redundant configuration, and they have backup plans in case someone does manage to take one down. Taking out the root DNS servers of the internet isn’t as easy thing to do. Technically though, it’s not impossible.
The thing is, the damage would only be temporary. Data can be reconstructed, servers can be rebuilt, etc. You could cause a fairly massive disruption on the internet, but from a practical viewpoint you can’t permanently take down the internet.
Anything else on the internet can also be recovered. Cut a few strategic major trunk cables and you can isolate huge sections of the internet from each other, but those can be repaired.
This is actually the whole point of the internet. Contrary to popular belief, the internet wasn’t created for porn or cat videos, or on the whim of Al Gore (don’t worry, I’m joking). It came out of a DARPA research project to create a distributed, rugged, self-healing network system. There’s no head to chop off to kill the monster. Cut it up into little pieces and the little pieces keep working. Connect the little pieces together again and they reform into bigger networks automatically, even if you don’t connect them back the same way they were originally. Blast big holes in it, and it just routes around the holes and the whole thing keeps going. It’s really, really, really, really hard to kill.
The technology behind the “internet” was running long before what the OP probably thinks of as the division of pre-internet days. The underlying packet routing and computer networking protocols were developed in the 70s. People like me were playing around with early versions of the internet in the 80s. We didn’t know what to do with it, though. Finding information was difficult. Interfaces were clunky and difficult to use. Modern web pages hadn’t been invented yet, and no one recognized that web pages would make the internet easy enough for the public in general to be able to use it. I remember when someone explained this brand new thing called hypertext protocol to me. I thought it was interesting, but I definitely did not see its potential.
If you want to destroy the internet, you have to somehow destroy this knowledge of what works. The underlying technology is 70’s era computer tech, absolutely primitive by today’s standards. It took decades of fiddling to figure out what software would make it usable. Now that we have that knowledge, we can easily re-create any hardware or software that gets destroyed. Again, you can easily cause some pretty major temporary disruptions, but completely destroying the internet is all but impossible.
I can’t come up with a scenario where we would willingly revert to doing everything as we did in pre-internet days, not permanently. Temporarily, sure, but not permanently.
I assumed sufficiently advanced alien space bats used their magical technology to destroy every piece of infrastructure that is associated with the internet. Would be the only way. So, every piece of fiber or copper connected to the internet, every server, router, switch and firewall. All of the telco. Poof. Gone. Satellites too. Oh, and all of the warehouses with CISCO and every other vendors equipment? Poof, all gone as well. The machines might still be there to build all of it again, but how do you feed everyone and keep society going while you rebuild? Answer is you can’t…you will have other priorities. It’s basically Dies the Fire, since the electricity will probably be out as well, though in theory at least some of the grid is on their own networks (though…would this count as well? I mean, would space bats really distinguish between public and private networks? I think not, so…we are screwed). At the very least it would take years, probably decades to recover economically as well as technically, and most likely it would scar society to the extent we would never allow ourselves to become that dependent on systems like the internet again, which means whatever re-emerged wouldn’t be like what we have today.
The phone system and the Internet are the same thing except at the endpoints. They’re using the same protocols on the same hardware. They’re all just data throughout most of their runs.
Because I happen to like this quote.
This is blather. Storing backups in the cloud means they become inaccessible and useless exactly at the instant the internet disappears.
You’ve handily demonstrated the fact that many people have become complacent to the point that the internet seems like a permanent feature of Nature, not a device of Man. You hadn’t noticed that you’d written “We should use the internet as a back-up to the internet in case it fails”.
If the internet comprehensively disappeared overnight there would be mass starvation in US cities within a week. Then the fuel will run out and the fun really begins.
The overall economy can operate with small outages at some places and some times. It makes headlines when e.g. an airline’s networks all crap out for a few hours. But the rest of that industry and most other industries press on mostly unhindered.
But the overall economy can’t operate at anything lose to current output with everybody simultaneously having to switch to backup administrative procedures. Doubly so in a world where the telephones and the electricity also depend on the internet operating and they promptly collapse too.
Lots of rural Americans like to think they’re self-sufficient. A few are for awhile. But without diesel & truck parts and all the other stuff that flows like a cornucopia from the citified part of the planet they’re gonna start going hungry too. Or at least get real tired of eating whatever they can grow. Assuming they can get seed for something besides whatever plant monoculture is local to their area.
I lived in Havre, Montana, for ten years, and before the White people came, nobody lived in that part of Montana year-round. If you’re in that part of the world in the winter, and you don’t hibernate or go torpid in deep water, you die. Humans followed bison herds and everything else south for the winter, because there is absolutely nothing there except snow and wind, and the wind occasionally stops when it gets really, seriously cold.
Even in the growing season, the only things that grow in large quantities are variations on the theme of grass, such as wheat. Other things grow, but not a whole lot, and certainly not enough to sustain a large or even medium-sized population, if you take Great Falls to be medium-sized. And the people relied on buffalo jumps, which are cliffs they stampeded bison over so they could pick at the corpses. (Yeah, I didn’t believe the “The Noble Indians Used Every Part Of What They Killed Out Of Deep Respect For Mother Nature” story after hearing about Wahkpa Chu’gn. It simply isn’t possible for humans to use every part of a mass slaughter.) Now that the bison herds are gone… well, cattle would probably stampede, too, but I wonder how long they’d last without humans feeding and watering them.
But even aside from that digression, there is such a thing as comparative advantage: Focus on the thing your region’s better at, otherwise you’re just eating opportunity costs from turning resources towards something that some other region could do better as opposed to the thing which will give the best return in your specific location. This is economically sound and utterly anathema to self-contained regions, even up to the national level.
Finally, even if you take it all as an Earth Abides or Alas, Babylon style exercise in fiction, it’s still under-examined fiction if it allows individuals to remain rugged and isolated and alive. Rugged, isolated individuals become corpses once the violent gangs blow through and loot anyone who doesn’t put up enough resistance. And an individual can never put up enough resistance to stand down a whole gang. That’s the ultimate foundation of Weberian sovereignty.
:smack: wrong wording. I meant that it doesn’t make sense to put everything in the cloud and people should keep hard copies of things in case the net goes down. I meant backups as pen and paper, files and folders (the real tangible ones). My apologies.