Well Mike. I think you have hit the nail on the head there. I think that global warming and climate change are masking the true danger to civilisation. The Internet.
renton may be correct in some cases, but in general, modern civilisation would go into meltdown. If anyone does not realise the pervasiveness of IP in the control of our social infrastructures by now, then the chances are they probably never will. Apart from the fact that our modern societies are tied into more and more everyday.
I fear the Internet crashing will be akin to a reallife 28 days later scenario. Can it crash? Of course it can and there are a number of vectors that could caused it to crash. Botnets, a viral pandemic, Coronal Mass Ejections from the Sun shutting down electricity and the possible "Technological Singualrity" could indeed crash the Internet in a few years time. At a time when our social infrastructure is even more integrated into IP.
Modern society does not have a backup for the Internet. The functions it fulfills are not backed up by anything else and if it crashes our civilisation will probably crash with it. Just removing money from our society will be enough to topple the entire house of cards, let alone water, electricity and fuel.
Make no mistake metropolitan areas with dense populations will suffer greatly. Human society will move down on the hierarchy of needs very quickly as our "just in time" delivery systems, systematically fail, one failure causing many more. Water and food supplies dwindling rapidly and mass migrations from urban areas. Looting will be wholesale, riots and choas as the developed city dwellers of the world became refugees in weeks.
It would not be a pretty picture for a minority of the world's urban populations, but to pretend this would not have a massive impact on rural dwellers and developing world farmers with goods for markets that just ceased to exist, is in a word naive.
The Internet (or electrictity) crashing would have such a massive and immediate effect on the entire world, it would be remembered for ages to come. It would quite possibily be the largest scale disaster that the world has ever experienced. Millions would die, 100s of millions more would be displaced. No government in the world has a plan for this scenario as it is unthinkable of how to deal with.
The only thing we could hope for and know would occur is that there would be pockets of humanity that shone out brightly as their shared and rebuilt. We know that quality in humaity exists and there is no reason why it would not present itself in times of dire straits. It usually does, however unfortunately it would not reach everyone.
When you look at it that way, the Internet crashing seems like a much more serious problem on our horizon than some other things that we are focused on. We can only hope that modern society wakes up to this fact and starts addressing it. Depending on when it happened and how much we had done to mitigate that type of event, would be the deciding factor in how bad it actually was. Sci-fiction Terminator's and Matrices are all good and well, but the reality may be a whole lot more brutal, animalisitc than we care to contemplate.
I have been part of managing fairly large Internet infrastructures since 1996 and this is where I get my perspective, it may be out of left field, but it seems like a possible and probable route that our evolution may take. All previous civilisations have crashed for one reason or another, thinking ours is going to be so different in quite naive. The Internet is a very good vector for that crash.
But that is just my opinion, not many people seem to agree or see it as such. But it is food for thought.
