Of all the disasters that could strike us the hardest ...
..... the loss of the mobile and Internet network would probably hurt the most.
Just imagine the sense of bereavement that the majority of social media users would feel when Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram disappeared? How would these millennial's communicate with each other, without texting, or emails? In fact how would most of us manage without our own personal devices such as Smart-phones, Tablets or even Personal Computers?
To give us some idea what a shock this idea is, in 2009 at Stanford University in the US, a professor asked his students to stay off the Internet for 48 hours (all devices including smart-phones, but excluding mobiles that had no Internet access), and then discuss how it affected them. They all refused point blank, citing that it would prevent them from completing work in other classes, ruin their social lives, and make their friends and family worry that something terrible had happened to them. This despite the fact that phones without the internet could be used to ring their friends and family (and actually speak to them!).
So if for many, its impossible for them to see how their lives would carry on without the Internet, then what would this do to our modern society, such is the dependence we have on this functionality? Yet within my lifetime we had none of these devices, and the world got on just fine. In 1995, fewer than 1% of the world’s population was on-line, and that was nearly all in the Western world. Now, more than half of all humans on the planet have that access, via a phone (never mind other devices).
So just as an intellectual 'What if' exercise, what might happen if the Internet and Wifi stopped worldwide?
Now the first thing is to point out that the Internet is a very robust system worldwide, but its just possible to conceive of some sort of cyber-attack as one possible way in which the Internet could be brought down by crashing all the routers via a virus .... then combine this with an extreme solar-flare (overwhelming gamma radiation or electromagnetic fluctuations coming from the sun), stopping all satellites, power grids and computer systems from working. The infrastructure for basic services like text messaging, and the cell phone service network, would also likely become unavailable as these services are also part of the Internet infrastructure.
This has actually happened at a localised level, when on March 13, 1989 the entire province of Quebec, Canada (as well as parts of the USA), suffered an electrical power blackout which was caused by a solar storm.
Now if our imaginary double disaster happened, then US studies have suggested that if the full-scale outages lasted no more than three or four days, then the impact would be insignificant in a global sense, although locally it would be rather more significant. The financial impacts would hit Internet sales, banking, hotels, airlines and brokerage firms, but they would largely recover their losses later. Facebook and Google would lose £300m in advertising sales on day one. Bank transactions would cease until systems were restored.
Planes would continue to fly without the internet (but rely a lot on satellite tracking) - however as radar is more important, and would be unaffected, they could continue without the Internet or satellites. Similarly cars, trains and buses would also continue to run, as long as there was a fuel supply.
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| We Would All Miss The Internet If It Went ....... |
..... the loss of the mobile and Internet network would probably hurt the most.
Just imagine the sense of bereavement that the majority of social media users would feel when Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram disappeared? How would these millennial's communicate with each other, without texting, or emails? In fact how would most of us manage without our own personal devices such as Smart-phones, Tablets or even Personal Computers?
To give us some idea what a shock this idea is, in 2009 at Stanford University in the US, a professor asked his students to stay off the Internet for 48 hours (all devices including smart-phones, but excluding mobiles that had no Internet access), and then discuss how it affected them. They all refused point blank, citing that it would prevent them from completing work in other classes, ruin their social lives, and make their friends and family worry that something terrible had happened to them. This despite the fact that phones without the internet could be used to ring their friends and family (and actually speak to them!).
So if for many, its impossible for them to see how their lives would carry on without the Internet, then what would this do to our modern society, such is the dependence we have on this functionality? Yet within my lifetime we had none of these devices, and the world got on just fine. In 1995, fewer than 1% of the world’s population was on-line, and that was nearly all in the Western world. Now, more than half of all humans on the planet have that access, via a phone (never mind other devices).
So just as an intellectual 'What if' exercise, what might happen if the Internet and Wifi stopped worldwide?
Now the first thing is to point out that the Internet is a very robust system worldwide, but its just possible to conceive of some sort of cyber-attack as one possible way in which the Internet could be brought down by crashing all the routers via a virus .... then combine this with an extreme solar-flare (overwhelming gamma radiation or electromagnetic fluctuations coming from the sun), stopping all satellites, power grids and computer systems from working. The infrastructure for basic services like text messaging, and the cell phone service network, would also likely become unavailable as these services are also part of the Internet infrastructure.
This has actually happened at a localised level, when on March 13, 1989 the entire province of Quebec, Canada (as well as parts of the USA), suffered an electrical power blackout which was caused by a solar storm.
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| No Internet Would Be A Shock ..... |
Now if our imaginary double disaster happened, then US studies have suggested that if the full-scale outages lasted no more than three or four days, then the impact would be insignificant in a global sense, although locally it would be rather more significant. The financial impacts would hit Internet sales, banking, hotels, airlines and brokerage firms, but they would largely recover their losses later. Facebook and Google would lose £300m in advertising sales on day one. Bank transactions would cease until systems were restored.
Planes would continue to fly without the internet (but rely a lot on satellite tracking) - however as radar is more important, and would be unaffected, they could continue without the Internet or satellites. Similarly cars, trains and buses would also continue to run, as long as there was a fuel supply.
The loss of communication that the Internet and smart-phones represent, might be disconcerting (a bit like forgetting your mobile when you go out for a day - upsetting, but you can manage) .... however telephone landlines would likely continue to work, but may be overwhelmed by the usage and stop for a while. So we could soon be back to writing letters and sending them through the post office ... snailmail again, if the disruption lasted more than a few days.
Television programming sent via broadcast towers would still work if you had an antenna, but most digital channels would be down if they relied on cable and satellite systems that had been affected ... so back to the old main channels again. Computers would work, but as separate units, and not networked, unless connected with a physical cable in some offices e.g. those with a server.
Financial services like electronic banking or PayPal would also be down. Every Web site would be off-line of course, so companies like Google or Amazon would become obsolete instantly. Even companies like Microsoft would see enormous sections of their operations disappear e.g. Cloud Storage (which is increasingly relied on by companies). So many companies would struggle to manage business on a daily basis. But most would recover after a few days ....
However, if for some reason this denial of Internet and phone services was long-term (a week or more), or even permanent, then the world would be very changed indeed. Many companies in the developed world would go out of business within a week or so. Hundreds of thousands of people would be out of a job inside a month, and maybe millions more ..... in the US in 2007, e-commerce accounted for 35 percent of all shipments from manufacturing industry, and its much more than that now in 2019.
Massive power outages could become a problem across any country using Smart-grids, and the main systems would collapse after that first week, as the Internet is used to coordinate substations with power stations. Local outages would become national, then cross borders, crashing the global systems. Gas pipelines would auto-close down as they need the electric power and the Internet to pump gas along the pipes etc. So if this happened in the Northern winter, then heating would be a real issue.
Petrol stations need electricity for pumps and levels etc, so by the end of that first month, fuel supplies would be exhausted and there would be no further deliveries, as the military and security services appropriate what's available. Supermarkets would have been stripped after a week (actually a day, as the recent events have shown), and so food riots would soon be breaking out .... the army would be firing live rounds, but would run out of supplies themselves after a couple of weeks or so.
National foreign security would become more difficult, as Intelligence agencies rely on the web for much of their information ... its possible that local wars may breakout e.g. Iran and Israel may fire nukes at each other while they still had system control, or North Korea might invade South Korea to steal its food and fuel. This as countries over reacted to the little information they were getting. All countries would feel vulnerable if military and intelligence internet and communication services were gone .... there might also be a short nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan as paranoia grips, if the Kashmir erupted into violence again.
But assuming the world survives the nuclear threats, then after about a year (assuming the loss of Internet was permanent), the developed countries would have started redeveloping non Internet systems again i.e. 1975 technology (with some PC's in linked systems), and the old phone lines would soon be back in place .... society would be being rebuilt, but only after possibly millions could have died in the fighting and food shortages .... some epidemics may also have broken out, as hospital drug supplies ran out, and starvation gripped some areas.
You might think that the undeveloped countries would do better, but aid and trade would be gone, and whilst many people in agrarian countries such as Cambodia, and Mynmar (Burma) would be largely unaffected, their capitals and governments would be affected, leading to chaos and warfare. They and many other countries globally would most likely have all reverted to agrarian societies again .... some more successfully than others.
Overall the death toll worldwide after a year could be anything between 1 billion to 3 billion, depending up what types of warfare broke out in the dying few days of government control, in the subcontinent and elsewhere. The world economy in trade value terms, would be probably something like the 1930's again in absolute numbers. Many of the newly wholly agrarian countries, would not be a major part of the revised world trade system, and it would be the oil and the developed countries who would be trading ... oil would still be needed for petrol, but the reduced populations would have reduced demand for both food and oil products.
But remember in the permanent wipe out scenario, say via a solar flare, the Earth itself would probably have become a lifeless hulk (all that gamma radiation), so the loss of the Internet is not the main problem really.
But What Ifs are my favourite genre, so well worth the intellectual exercise of the assumption. Ironically of course, if such an event had occurred prior to the 1980's (assuming the radiation and gamma rays didn't kill us), then we would have hardly noticed it at all and there would have been no impact.
Such is the price of progress.😉
Television programming sent via broadcast towers would still work if you had an antenna, but most digital channels would be down if they relied on cable and satellite systems that had been affected ... so back to the old main channels again. Computers would work, but as separate units, and not networked, unless connected with a physical cable in some offices e.g. those with a server.
Financial services like electronic banking or PayPal would also be down. Every Web site would be off-line of course, so companies like Google or Amazon would become obsolete instantly. Even companies like Microsoft would see enormous sections of their operations disappear e.g. Cloud Storage (which is increasingly relied on by companies). So many companies would struggle to manage business on a daily basis. But most would recover after a few days ....
However, if for some reason this denial of Internet and phone services was long-term (a week or more), or even permanent, then the world would be very changed indeed. Many companies in the developed world would go out of business within a week or so. Hundreds of thousands of people would be out of a job inside a month, and maybe millions more ..... in the US in 2007, e-commerce accounted for 35 percent of all shipments from manufacturing industry, and its much more than that now in 2019.
Massive power outages could become a problem across any country using Smart-grids, and the main systems would collapse after that first week, as the Internet is used to coordinate substations with power stations. Local outages would become national, then cross borders, crashing the global systems. Gas pipelines would auto-close down as they need the electric power and the Internet to pump gas along the pipes etc. So if this happened in the Northern winter, then heating would be a real issue.
Petrol stations need electricity for pumps and levels etc, so by the end of that first month, fuel supplies would be exhausted and there would be no further deliveries, as the military and security services appropriate what's available. Supermarkets would have been stripped after a week (actually a day, as the recent events have shown), and so food riots would soon be breaking out .... the army would be firing live rounds, but would run out of supplies themselves after a couple of weeks or so.
National foreign security would become more difficult, as Intelligence agencies rely on the web for much of their information ... its possible that local wars may breakout e.g. Iran and Israel may fire nukes at each other while they still had system control, or North Korea might invade South Korea to steal its food and fuel. This as countries over reacted to the little information they were getting. All countries would feel vulnerable if military and intelligence internet and communication services were gone .... there might also be a short nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan as paranoia grips, if the Kashmir erupted into violence again.
But assuming the world survives the nuclear threats, then after about a year (assuming the loss of Internet was permanent), the developed countries would have started redeveloping non Internet systems again i.e. 1975 technology (with some PC's in linked systems), and the old phone lines would soon be back in place .... society would be being rebuilt, but only after possibly millions could have died in the fighting and food shortages .... some epidemics may also have broken out, as hospital drug supplies ran out, and starvation gripped some areas.
You might think that the undeveloped countries would do better, but aid and trade would be gone, and whilst many people in agrarian countries such as Cambodia, and Mynmar (Burma) would be largely unaffected, their capitals and governments would be affected, leading to chaos and warfare. They and many other countries globally would most likely have all reverted to agrarian societies again .... some more successfully than others.
Overall the death toll worldwide after a year could be anything between 1 billion to 3 billion, depending up what types of warfare broke out in the dying few days of government control, in the subcontinent and elsewhere. The world economy in trade value terms, would be probably something like the 1930's again in absolute numbers. Many of the newly wholly agrarian countries, would not be a major part of the revised world trade system, and it would be the oil and the developed countries who would be trading ... oil would still be needed for petrol, but the reduced populations would have reduced demand for both food and oil products.
But remember in the permanent wipe out scenario, say via a solar flare, the Earth itself would probably have become a lifeless hulk (all that gamma radiation), so the loss of the Internet is not the main problem really.
But What Ifs are my favourite genre, so well worth the intellectual exercise of the assumption. Ironically of course, if such an event had occurred prior to the 1980's (assuming the radiation and gamma rays didn't kill us), then we would have hardly noticed it at all and there would have been no impact.
Such is the price of progress.😉
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