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Could the World Cope If GPS Stopped Working?

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:06PM   
from the Betteridge-says-nope dept.

upstart writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Prior to 1983 (Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:58PM

  by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:58PM (#918580) Journal

  It was the Flight KAL007 Disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 [wikipedia.org] that served as the impetus for making GPS available to the civilian population. Prior to that time (and for many years after during the transition to commercial availability of GPS receivers), countless billions of vehicle trips had been made without incident.

  In the case of mobile GPS based traffic reporting, the technology hasn’t really offered very much in the way of time saving traffic avoidance except perhaps in the case of a really major accident that closes down a main thoroughfare. And even then, you have share the alternate routes with all the displaced traffic.

  We are certainly better off having it (as an option), but it hasn’t been the boon to the civilian population that I thought it would be.

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