The problem is this space weather stuff is pretty frequent. We had a near-miss in 2012 and in the long term it's going to happen. I think a better analogy would be to earthquake drills and seismic testing.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
so is your proposal that we could do the same by blacking out specific areas in order to identify which local systems collapse?
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Replying to @Nexuist @muddletoes
I don't know enough about GPS to suggest a method. The point of testing would be to find hidden dependencies. I'm curious whether any patchwork of localized outages could duplicate the effect of turning the system off.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
so essentially GPS is a completely passive protocol, the satellites send their unique signal down to the ground and a receiver collects three or more of these signals to triangulate itself. there’s no request/response communication, the client doesn’t talk to the satellite at all
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which is to say that precise localized blackouts are impossible, if you turn a satellite off overhead all clients within range will suffer equally. you could maybe disable a specific county or small state, but not much granular than that
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if you could see into the future, what broken dependencies would you expect in a post GPS society?
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Replying to @Nexuist @muddletoes
The scary thing in complex systems is the unintentional and unintended couplings that arise between stuff. I'm not afraid of any of the predictable consequences of GPS failure, since those have been designed for. It's the by definition unimaginable dependencies I worry about.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
you have to remember that every GPS receiver starts out tracking 0 satellites; the default mode is also the failure mode. since you have to be moving to benefit from GPS, almost everybody has been in a situation where they can’t “lock” onto enough satellites due to location
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Replying to @Nexuist @muddletoes
That's a good point. But the kind of thing I'm after is systems where the fallback to GPS not working is to ask some other part of the system, which it turns out is (directly or very indirectly) dependent on GPS working, and so on. Lots of things use GPS for time synchronization
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
by “things” we have to mean vehicles or mobile phones, right? no stationary object is using GPS because its location just has to be put in once maybe if you were incredibly lazy, but even then what appliances are sold with GPS integration if the expected destination is a closet?
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Here's an example pulled out of thin air—weather sensors. Are they geocoded by their ID, or do they just send their GPS coordinates along with weather data? What about buoys and weather balloons? What, if anything happens, if this data is degraded? That kind of stuff.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
if weather stations stay stationary you can use their last reported location as their current location until the next set of GPS sats are launched (presumably a priority in this new world) balloons are generally experimental and not meant to be 100% reliable already
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now buoys would be interesting because their reports affect shipping and cruise routes, but ocean based connectivity is very recent so boating hasn’t had a ton of time to adapt to this availability anyways
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