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What If The Internet Disappears?


tothemuseum

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I bet just by reading this question gave you some goosebumps (Actually I got a little scared when I thought about it).

What if you wake up tomorrow and the internet is gone?

 

internet is now part of our lives. It's what we do when get home, what what we work on when we're scheduled in for work (Job) and how we communicate.

 

What if it disappears?

 

I can lose my phone but not the internet.

 

How will your day go?

 

First 24 hours, First week (If you make it that far!).

Edited by tothemuseum
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I'd probably just go back to libraries and direct-dial/connect like I did in the 90's. Back in those days, we didn't even get overtime. As long as I'm playing my travel guitar somewhere, I should be fine.

 

That's awesome @eldritch lol So you would STILL find a way to get online. Hate to say it but I sometimes miss that modem connection noise. The 44 kbps modem was it? Something like that. 

Edited by tothemuseum
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That's awesome @eldritch lol So you would STILL find a way to get online. Hate to say it but I sometimes miss that modem connection noise. The 44 kbps modem was it? Something like that.

14.4 and 44 are so fast in comparison to the baud rate I was talking about...that's still AOL dial-up levels of actual internet. I was talking about he aold arpanet and direct dial BBS we had before that. Stuff where you'd be dead-dropping data and phone numbers to other servers on an server in textfile format.

 

OS2 was the big name in home-server at that time, had a GUI and everything.

 

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The crutch that is the ability to look anything up has no inherently negative effect on IQs. It's all in how one uses the internet and whether he's clever enough to apply some scientific skepticism to begin with. Humans can be taught to do this at a very young age. As a 90s baby, I had already naturally adopted an argumentative demeanor pre-exposure with no outside influence and a need to fuel my imagination. That unique combination is perhaps bar-none. Few are born ready for the information age, of that few I stand supreme.

MM, I'm gonna rule that untrue. Being able to on-the-fly armchair-expert in topics leads to inefficient long-term memory. You don't revisit the information in your own mind as much, leading to weaker information retention. That lack of long-term storage most certainly lowers the IQ bar.

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Edited by GAHD
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No it actually raises it for say 006 or myself as we possess an eidetic memory, but what you described & what we do improves short-term working memory. This makes the synaptic structure more efficient. Survival of the fittest. 

I doubt that. If you mean an "external memory module that is in of itself eidetic" in the form of the internet, then yes. I'm talking about meat-space performance. Lock you in a Faraday cage with a pen (no erasing), a Johnson, a Reynolds, and a random selection of jeopardy questions and you'll probably score much lower than someone who uses a land line and re-reads a personal library.

 

It's biology, I think what you call efficiency I'm calling under-used. Example: do you recall the first post of this thread without scrolling up or looking at the display bar? I'm not looking for a pissing contest with that question, I' just leaving it out there for your own personal reference. Go look at it after you think about it for a minute, see how close you are. I wager you only remembered keywords and a general concept.

Edited by GAHD
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I'm guessing you use key locks not number locks IRL

 

Key locks?   Number locks?  What are .....................? :confused:

Well, have no idea.  All I know is that I have a bunch of complicated security passwords that I change every so often and try to commit to memory because I don't want to leave a list of passwords lying around and I don't trust that those password services won't be hacked.  I actually prefer to do my banking in person at a bank where the tellers and managers know me on sight, and I prefer to receive my bills by mail and to pay them with a paper check by mail without need to use any passwords.

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Well, have no idea.  All I know is that I have a bunch of complicated security passwords that I change every so often and try to commit to memory because I don't want to leave a list of passwords lying around and I don't trust that those password services won't be hacked.  I actually prefer to do my banking in person at a bank where the tellers and managers know me on sight, and I prefer to receive my bills by mail and to pay them with a paper check by mail without need to use any passwords.

I am with you on all that except the passwords.  I have to write those down to remember them.  But it's just me and they bring up nothing of value.  Only get me into web sites that insist I use a password.  Like you, I do my banking the old fashioned way and I pay my bills the old fashioned way.  That little padlock means nothing to scurrilous hackers.  Nor does that s on https. 

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I bet just by reading this question gave you some goosebumps (Actually I got a little scared when I thought about it).

What if you wake up tomorrow and the internet is gone?

We'd replace it pretty quickly.  Much of our commerce, our medical care, our transportation, our infrastructure etc now depends on it.

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We'd replace it pretty quickly.  Much of our commerce, our medical care, our transportation, our infrastructure etc now depends on it.

Which causes a twist to the question.  What would (will) happen when the internet suffers a world-wide failure?

 

Well, maybe not exactly a twist on the question but makes the question much more pointed.  If we think of the truly serious losses it's time to stop and ask "Are we prepared?"  Are we relying too much on the internet without building a backup rescue?

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Which causes a twist to the question.  What would (will) happen when the internet suffers a world-wide failure?

Would be hard to see how that would happen without taking out everything (i.e. electricity, all computers.)  It's inherently fault tolerant and will route around outages.  If there's even one link left between two subnets the data will still get through (with horrendous delays of course.)

 

But if it did it would certainly cause at least a recession, if not a full on depression.   Business would slow to a crawl.

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Well, have no idea.  All I know is that I have a bunch of complicated security passwords that I change every so often and try to commit to memory because I don't want to leave a list of passwords lying around and I don't trust that those password services won't be hacked.  I actually prefer to do my banking in person at a bank where the tellers and managers know me on sight, and I prefer to receive my bills by mail and to pay them with a paper check by mail without need to use any passwords.

I'm assuming you lock things, like your house, shed, car, quad, luggage, etc... I was referring to those padlocks using a key...

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...instead of being the "magic numbers" kind...

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...because you hate remembering passwords.

 

See, me, I still remember all 9 of my highschool combo locks sequences. I HAVE however been locked out of various emails, forums, and other accounts after they force some arbitrary degree of complexity onto passwords, or as with yahoo decide they need to authorize every "new device" separately with a secondary account. So I feel you with that crap.

 

On the newer twist to thread direction: Honestly, for me not much would change. I pay with cash, not plastic. I have no outstanding debts that would somehow require said plastic. If i DID need to use plastic I can instruct ignorant youngsters on how to use that slider-machine with a credit card(there's a reason they're still embossed young-uns).

 

All in all, I could see a couple days-weeks of trasition-pain if a system went down, but it's not likely to be THAT big of a deal. For silly people It might be a problem, but really; if you're that dependent on Google-God you should probably get some anti-psychotics for undiagnosed OCD...

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