Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Could the world cope if GPS stopped working?
What would happen if GPS - the Global Positioning System - stopped working?
For a start, we would all have to engage our brains and pay attention to the world around us when getting from A to B. Perhaps this would be no bad thing: we'd be less likely to drive into rivers or over cliffs through misplaced trust in our navigation devices.
Pick your own favourite story about the kind of idiocy only GPS can enable. Mine is the Swedish couple who misspelled the Italian island of Capri and turned up hundreds of miles away in Carpi, asking where the sea was.
But these are the exceptions.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:19PM (4 children)
Most of the effects they describe are at worst temporary, until people re-learn how to do such things without GPS (and face it, most of the routes you drive are routes you drive regularly anyway, so at any time, most people won't look at maps or slow down for signs).
And taxi companies did very well for decades without knowing exactly where every taxi is.
The real problems are where we rely on GPS technologically. For example, in aviation the pre-GPS positioning systems have been found superfluous due to GPS, and therefore cannot be relied on to be available any more. And an airplane cannot simply stop at the side of the road to study the map.
Also, all places that rely on GPS to accurately determine time would get into trouble.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:59PM (1 child)
There's always the original aircraft navigation system - dead reckoning. You can actually find big concrete... arrows(?) scattered around the U.S. that were used as navigation markers for early aircraft. Fast and easy to make, though not as efficient as a large number of direct routes.
And of course all you really need to figure out exactly where you are in the world is a sextant and an accurate watch.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Sunday November 10 2019, @06:16PM
Modern airline navigation only uses GPS as a backup anyhow. They operate on radio navigation beacons.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Sunday November 10 2019, @01:04AM
Some of them will have serious long-term consequences. Millennials will no longer be able to geotag their selfies, which will require years of counselling and psychological support to get over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:33AM
At least in the US, there are a lot of the old navigation beacons (VORs) still in service, just in case of something like this happening. The other kind of beacons, NDB, have been retired - these were mostly used for instrument approaches anyway although it was possible to navigate with them in a pinch.
The real problem for aviation is that air traffic would mostly have to switch back to the old "highways in the sky" as opposed to being able to just go wherever they want, greatly increasing traffic congestion. (You don't have to use the "sky highways" if you have the right equipment "RNAV" or are not on instrument flight plan, but airliners have to use instrument flying and most don't have the RNAV equipment any more).