alt Hacker Newscould you list 3 things that you think are more important than the internet? (I know the internet is going to be fine; I just want to understand what you think ranks higher globally...)
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The ability for humankind to communicate across the entire globe at nearly 1/4 of the speed of light has drastically accelerated our technological advancement. There is no doubt that the internet is a HUGE addition to society.
It's not super important when compared to basic needs like plumbing, food, electricity, medical assistance and other silly things we take for granted but are heavily dependent on. We all saw what happened to hospitals during the early stages of the COVID pandemic; we had plenty of internet and electricity but were struggling on the medical part. That was quite bad... I'm not sure if it's any worse if an entire country/continent lost access to the Internet. Quite a lot of our core infrastructure components in society rely on this. And a fair bit of it relies on a common understanding of what time "now" is.
I think it wont be affected by this but on the top of my head:
- GPS
- industrial complex that synchronize operations (we could include trains)
- telecoms in general (so a level higher than the internet)
Mostly scientific stuff like astronomical observations — e.g. did this event observed at one telescope coincide with neutrinos detected at this other observatory.
Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.