Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet?

#11

Post by Ixiaus » Wed, Jun 02, 2010, 9:20 AM UTC

RevRal wrote: post #10

There was a time a few years ago when I was absolutely certain that the world was going to return to sustenance level living really soon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe ). And then I read The Road and got extremely depressed. So I've thought about this a lot, and even asked someone (who you may have heard of) if there was already a system or procedure in place so people could keep in contact aft…

For communication purposes, Amateur radio would be the most common and accessible. Although, I have a feeling the internet would be much more resilient than it may be given credit for; it just might not be a World Wide Web, maybe a Regional Wide Web or City Wide Web....

Someone else had it right too, if there were a large enough catastrophe to knock out the infrastructure supporting the internet entirely - you would be concerned with many other things.

Re: Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet?

#12

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Jun 02, 2010, 9:22 AM UTC

foenix wrote: post #6

jacquesm wrote: post #3

You'd be worried about a lot of other things before you were worried about building another internet. How to grow food, how to stay alive, how to hold on to any posessions and how to avoid being murdered/raped/drafted and so on. File sharing and email would be the last on your to-do list. Also, the internet and any global span network would require a fair amount of power. The one thing I'm fairly sure of would not be…

I think my primary concern would be to preserve the mnemonic qualities of the Internet; storing the knowledge within the Internet is not just a question of a physical apocalypse, but a cognitive one as well. Another concern I have is the growing government sentiment on censorship: New Zealand and Australia have already made strong legislation on censorship, and South Africa is considering this as well. I myself faced…

You could do worse than to download wikipedia and print it out.

Paper is pretty resilient, electronics are not. That's why it took a burning of the Alexandria library to wipe that knowledge.

And better use acid free paper. And print it out several times and spread as many copies as you can.

Re: Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet?

#13

Post by petervandijck » Wed, Jun 02, 2010, 2:33 PM UTC

Carrier pigeons?

Re: Ponder HN: if the Earth suddenly went arwy, how would we build an Internet?

#14

Post by csomar » Wed, Jun 02, 2010, 2:51 PM UTC

I think this will be rather simple: Export Servers to the Space along with satellites. Let the earth burn or boil, your servers are always safe and Internet is Up as long as sun is empowering it with Energy.

You the users, with a high speed connection you can securely and safely connect to the internet and access your data. People who care a lot about privacy, can send their private hard drives to the space too. A good idea for a startup ;)