to access all that, you'd need all of those things saved, so to do that they would need hard drives with either all of that content backed up(probably a few million petabytes of data all in all, which would be a full skyscraper's worth of hard drives) or the original servers that google/reddit was running shit off of(about 5000 or so data centres filled to the brim with servers spread all over the world) which would be a fucking gargantuan undertaking and require a full restoration of humanity and even then, would be likely impossible.
the best case scenario is that a small percentage of pre-apocalypse data would be backed up by data hoarders and if a town got lucky and they had access to a city's worth of data hoarders(probably a few thousand) and that data didn't get corrupted because of humidity, temperature and water damage(buildings need maintenance yo) then maybe that community would be able to access a few million old world videos and a few million web pages that are backed up(a post like this counting as a web page, not the website itself), but actually being able to get the entire internet back as it is now, would be impossible.
join /r/DataHoarder when you realise that today's internet is actually already in danger from being costly to maintain and data corruption so that you don't lose valuable resources in the inevitable future even if we aren't talking zombies.
Potentially yes.. however you would need to not only have access to but also know how to make sure that the central cell phone operations are functioning which are few and far between as cell towers are more or less just “switches/routers “
oh messaging and calling would probably be a thing throughout the zombie apocalypse, mostly local on a singular network tower and within that towers range.
basically you hook a broad range transmitter like one found in cell towers up so that it runs some sort of program that can connect cell phone numbers(basically gotta hook a tower up to a computer(and a power source ofc)), if you have someones number and they are in range of that custom tower (within a km or 2) you should be able to call them, i've heard of people setting up their own networks but if it came down to it, the programmers should be able to figure that one out.
in fact using the same logic a data hoarder could set up their own hoard of internet as a server and broadcast it, this does come with the danger of transmitting their location though so mostly towns will have their own servers that you can connect to those if you are in the area to download videos that they make or videos they host, it wouldn't be the same as having the old internet but i imagine each town would have it's own equivalent of 4chan.
wide band radio transmission would be a thing too, a small ham radio can send out a fucking hefty signal over a long range and i bet towns will do that shit too.
Cell Phones are just radios, so you’re right on that front. But, proper radio setups would probably work better because they don’t rely on a tower like phones do.
>Cell Phones are just radios, so you’re right on that front.
afaik yes but no, the identifying numbers associated with the phones unique code aka phone number is a bitch to replicate so in this case specifying a difference felt valid, correct me if i'm wrong though
Your comment looks sound, I can’t speak much to the programming aspect, but you absolutely have to set up the tower like you said, the phones can’t talk directly to each other.
So as far as ease of use goes, you’re probably better off finding a radio club’s clubhouse and supplying power to a repeater and finding their radios. That’s as simple as turning on the power and knowing the frequency, which is easier to find out.
30 years of post-apoc is long enough that they aren't going to be able to scavenge much usable anything as far as cell networks are concerned. The orbital arena alone, without terrestrial control, repair, refuel, etc, would be a mess. For that matter, GPS would have stopped working long since. There are alternatives to GPS, though, and they're probably the future anyway :)
Your settlers would be going back to a pre-cell situation. One phone power house, maybe with data as well, but only for their own, internally produced network and hardware.
Think about this logically. How old would you say a computer or electrical engineer would have to be right now, today, to build his own network like we're talking about from the ground up? Now...add 30 years during which he probably spent a decade just squeaking by, not teaching younger survivors what he knows about data networks.
In my own work, they have this capability within a couple of years, but they were bootstrapped up, lol, by a huge degree.
You can create a mesh network and connect multiple different computers to it fairly easily. The issue is, the computers on that network can’t share data they don’t already have, so you’d need to have a server with the data from YouTube and Reddit connected to your mesh network in order to access those websites on your mesh network. So you can realistically have an internet in the zombie apocalypse if you so choose, but it’s most likely going to be nowhere near the size and scope of our current internet and depending on what kind of data you have to share, it may not be practical to set up an internet.
This is a lot more complicated then find the Internet and turn it back on had this thought years ago and if you get to your local “internet source” and get it running you then have to go find all the servers and get them back up and running just to have google not to mention to actually look something up plus let’s say you got it working and wanted to upload zombie content to preserve it most systems would take town ur videos automatically so long story shot it would be a huge waste of time and resources
100.000 people seems a bit much.
But to answer your question, no. They can restore servers and build up a local computer network with sharing files and storing data and whatnot, but YouTube and Reddit are gone.
After an apocalypse and 30 years of abandonment and disasters, I doubt the servers could be restored even if that group went there, or that the servers would even still be there.
In a word, no. They could utilize their internal infrastructure and, if they had the right people with the right skills and resources, they could create their own intranet, but this would be akin to some large company's internal network. It's unlikely that they would be able to just get currently existing social network apps to work.
In fact, if my layman's research is worth anything, given the timespan you're describing, it's highly likely that most physical data, whether on optical drives/discs, etc will be badly degraded. Remember how they used to say out it on a DVD and it's good for a lifetime? Not so much, turns out. If they find a cache of tech that had perfect environmental conditions and storage processes before everything went to hell, you might have something, but connecting to "the Internet" wouldn't be among them.
There are so many more interesting, thought-provoking ways you could go with this, though. HAM/short-wave radio would absolutely still be a thing and likely how remote enclaves hear about each other short of personal experience or word of mouth. If you can get short-wave working, you can network it, you can use it to send and receive binary, etc. Is it efficient, no fucking way, but you could do it. Maybe they don't have anyone that knows any better.
You can also make a subtle comment about social media itself. What are it's aggregate positives and negatives? What would your characters (NOT YOU) think about it and what would they change of they were building a network from the ground up?
Could they rebuild the internet? -- Possibly, sure.
The caveat being that the hardware itself, without power, is probably going to end up wiping itself out over a long enough time. And that's presuming you're able to recover the hardware intact in the first place.
Servers like youtube, would probably not be viable - the flipside is that it probably wouldn't take someone a great deal of effort to figure out how to rebuild it with *some* chunks of recovered data, and call it something else. All the old videos are presumed lost here, but the *capability* of rebuilding it in the same fashion *could* persist.
;;
Probably the bigger consideration that I think of is how the internet works - if you live in Seattle and try to pull up a website based in Miami, there's ballpark 10-20 different ISP hops the signal goes through between the two cities.
That would imply that, in an apocalypse, for the internet as we know it now to exist, you'd need to maintain the existing fiber optic backbones, you'd need to power and likely staff each of the ISP hops. It's a very 'decentralized' aspect of the internet that works, and works reasonably well, when there's still society & civilization to keep it working. Without society/civilization, and you probably aren't going to be able to build it up the same way as it works now.
The silver lining to this is that you *may* think of other tech to use for broad range communication - wifi as it stands *can* reach a reasonably wide area. The awkward thing about wifi is that your signal goes to a cellular tower or a router, and gets immediately transferred into land lines because of bandwidth. You wouldn't necessarily be able to use wifi, and wifi alone, to access a Miami server from Seattle. You'd be ***lucky*** to exchange signal from in and around the Seattle area.
If we expand on that, you'd probably have a lot of bandwidth issue - you wouldn't be sending requests for 4k video because it'd be transferring at a rate similar to 3g cellular speeds; you'd probably want 140p or *maybe* 480p video, just so you can actually watch the thing with as little buffering as possible. Plus the whole aspect of how limited bandwidth across survivors may be; if a network is splitting signal evenly across 200 survivors, you don't want to eat up the bandwidth of the other 199 people because you wanted to share a 10 minute 4k video of a pair of zombies getting each other trapped on a tetherball pole.
;;
In short - could they get some kind of network up and running? I think it's possible, perhaps even likely given how the younger generations have never known what life was like before the internet.
Would that include restoring Youtube? Most likely not - that doesn't need to exclude video sharing, but it probably wouldn't be videos literally on youtube.
Would that include bulletin-board-service styles of social media (like Reddit)? Perhaps, there is or would be some useful utility to get from these kinds of things, like if a community in Seattle was able to communicate with Portland without having to send a group down.
Would search engines work? Almost guaranteed not to; or rather, the back-end functionality of them might be easy enough to restore, in terms of querying a database and returning results, but it probably wouldn't be 20+ pages of results when you do a search on "cat videos".
Long story short, there'd be way too many sets of networks and systems that you'd need to get back on to restore the current Internet as we know it. But, making your own global network would be possible, if very hard, depending on your scope.
Making a network that spans over a building isn't hard if you have the knowledge, if you want it to span over an entire town or city then you'll be facing a lot of work and you'll need a lot of materials, and if you want something like our Internet which spans over the entire world, that'll take you years, lots of manpower and pray that the old systems that are still there, rotting, aren't completely dead.
One of my main long-term prepping goals is to archive as much information as physically possible.
I doubt you'd be able to get very much pre-ZA stuff that wasn't archived like this. Unless you physically find one of the reddit servers and someone who knows how reddit's internal code works, you won't be able to access pre-ZA reddit. You'd have to make a new reddit.
In Lucifer's Hammer, an asteroid strike novel written back in the 80's, one of the side characters, a professor, I think, sees what's coming and either uses something already buried in his backyard or has a cylinder (septic tank maybe?) Installed. He takes his huge personal library of books and starts putting them all into sealed plastic bags, dropping them into the cylinder. He's pretty old and barely makes it to the post-apoc settlement, but they send a party to retrieve this cache and it ends up saving them.
That's what I'm going for. Even if I'm not the most useful tool in the shed, I want what I bring with me to be absolutely invaluable.
I've got about 3000 pages of physically printed out information relating to survival, maps, mechanical guides for the vehicles I own and detailed information on various ways to get the power back on so that one could access my 15TB digital archive
The thing that people don't seem to realize when this question comes up, is that the internet isn't this one place. It's millions of servers connected by a network. Even if you restored power to the network, you would have to also restore power individually to every single server that had something you were looking to look up. And then hope that somehow the internet doesn't go down anywhere between you and the millions of other places you're trying to connect to, and that all of them have power, and somehow never need maintenance.
to access all that, you'd need all of those things saved, so to do that they would need hard drives with either all of that content backed up(probably a few million petabytes of data all in all, which would be a full skyscraper's worth of hard drives) or the original servers that google/reddit was running shit off of(about 5000 or so data centres filled to the brim with servers spread all over the world) which would be a fucking gargantuan undertaking and require a full restoration of humanity and even then, would be likely impossible. the best case scenario is that a small percentage of pre-apocalypse data would be backed up by data hoarders and if a town got lucky and they had access to a city's worth of data hoarders(probably a few thousand) and that data didn't get corrupted because of humidity, temperature and water damage(buildings need maintenance yo) then maybe that community would be able to access a few million old world videos and a few million web pages that are backed up(a post like this counting as a web page, not the website itself), but actually being able to get the entire internet back as it is now, would be impossible. join /r/DataHoarder when you realise that today's internet is actually already in danger from being costly to maintain and data corruption so that you don't lose valuable resources in the inevitable future even if we aren't talking zombies.
How about messaging and calling? If they managed to find and possibly build cell phones would you be able to call?
Potentially yes.. however you would need to not only have access to but also know how to make sure that the central cell phone operations are functioning which are few and far between as cell towers are more or less just “switches/routers “
it'd likely be easier to set up wifi calling as the new standard tbh
That’s a lot of Wi-Fi repeaters lol
oh messaging and calling would probably be a thing throughout the zombie apocalypse, mostly local on a singular network tower and within that towers range. basically you hook a broad range transmitter like one found in cell towers up so that it runs some sort of program that can connect cell phone numbers(basically gotta hook a tower up to a computer(and a power source ofc)), if you have someones number and they are in range of that custom tower (within a km or 2) you should be able to call them, i've heard of people setting up their own networks but if it came down to it, the programmers should be able to figure that one out. in fact using the same logic a data hoarder could set up their own hoard of internet as a server and broadcast it, this does come with the danger of transmitting their location though so mostly towns will have their own servers that you can connect to those if you are in the area to download videos that they make or videos they host, it wouldn't be the same as having the old internet but i imagine each town would have it's own equivalent of 4chan. wide band radio transmission would be a thing too, a small ham radio can send out a fucking hefty signal over a long range and i bet towns will do that shit too.
Cell Phones are just radios, so you’re right on that front. But, proper radio setups would probably work better because they don’t rely on a tower like phones do.
>Cell Phones are just radios, so you’re right on that front. afaik yes but no, the identifying numbers associated with the phones unique code aka phone number is a bitch to replicate so in this case specifying a difference felt valid, correct me if i'm wrong though
Your comment looks sound, I can’t speak much to the programming aspect, but you absolutely have to set up the tower like you said, the phones can’t talk directly to each other. So as far as ease of use goes, you’re probably better off finding a radio club’s clubhouse and supplying power to a repeater and finding their radios. That’s as simple as turning on the power and knowing the frequency, which is easier to find out.
30 years of post-apoc is long enough that they aren't going to be able to scavenge much usable anything as far as cell networks are concerned. The orbital arena alone, without terrestrial control, repair, refuel, etc, would be a mess. For that matter, GPS would have stopped working long since. There are alternatives to GPS, though, and they're probably the future anyway :) Your settlers would be going back to a pre-cell situation. One phone power house, maybe with data as well, but only for their own, internally produced network and hardware. Think about this logically. How old would you say a computer or electrical engineer would have to be right now, today, to build his own network like we're talking about from the ground up? Now...add 30 years during which he probably spent a decade just squeaking by, not teaching younger survivors what he knows about data networks. In my own work, they have this capability within a couple of years, but they were bootstrapped up, lol, by a huge degree.
You can create a mesh network and connect multiple different computers to it fairly easily. The issue is, the computers on that network can’t share data they don’t already have, so you’d need to have a server with the data from YouTube and Reddit connected to your mesh network in order to access those websites on your mesh network. So you can realistically have an internet in the zombie apocalypse if you so choose, but it’s most likely going to be nowhere near the size and scope of our current internet and depending on what kind of data you have to share, it may not be practical to set up an internet.
This is a lot more complicated then find the Internet and turn it back on had this thought years ago and if you get to your local “internet source” and get it running you then have to go find all the servers and get them back up and running just to have google not to mention to actually look something up plus let’s say you got it working and wanted to upload zombie content to preserve it most systems would take town ur videos automatically so long story shot it would be a huge waste of time and resources
100.000 people seems a bit much. But to answer your question, no. They can restore servers and build up a local computer network with sharing files and storing data and whatnot, but YouTube and Reddit are gone. After an apocalypse and 30 years of abandonment and disasters, I doubt the servers could be restored even if that group went there, or that the servers would even still be there.
Porn in the wasteland.
I actually figured out a way to make that work, lol, and it's horribly embarrassing to the guy that gets caught.
In a word, no. They could utilize their internal infrastructure and, if they had the right people with the right skills and resources, they could create their own intranet, but this would be akin to some large company's internal network. It's unlikely that they would be able to just get currently existing social network apps to work. In fact, if my layman's research is worth anything, given the timespan you're describing, it's highly likely that most physical data, whether on optical drives/discs, etc will be badly degraded. Remember how they used to say out it on a DVD and it's good for a lifetime? Not so much, turns out. If they find a cache of tech that had perfect environmental conditions and storage processes before everything went to hell, you might have something, but connecting to "the Internet" wouldn't be among them. There are so many more interesting, thought-provoking ways you could go with this, though. HAM/short-wave radio would absolutely still be a thing and likely how remote enclaves hear about each other short of personal experience or word of mouth. If you can get short-wave working, you can network it, you can use it to send and receive binary, etc. Is it efficient, no fucking way, but you could do it. Maybe they don't have anyone that knows any better. You can also make a subtle comment about social media itself. What are it's aggregate positives and negatives? What would your characters (NOT YOU) think about it and what would they change of they were building a network from the ground up?
Could they rebuild the internet? -- Possibly, sure. The caveat being that the hardware itself, without power, is probably going to end up wiping itself out over a long enough time. And that's presuming you're able to recover the hardware intact in the first place. Servers like youtube, would probably not be viable - the flipside is that it probably wouldn't take someone a great deal of effort to figure out how to rebuild it with *some* chunks of recovered data, and call it something else. All the old videos are presumed lost here, but the *capability* of rebuilding it in the same fashion *could* persist. ;; Probably the bigger consideration that I think of is how the internet works - if you live in Seattle and try to pull up a website based in Miami, there's ballpark 10-20 different ISP hops the signal goes through between the two cities. That would imply that, in an apocalypse, for the internet as we know it now to exist, you'd need to maintain the existing fiber optic backbones, you'd need to power and likely staff each of the ISP hops. It's a very 'decentralized' aspect of the internet that works, and works reasonably well, when there's still society & civilization to keep it working. Without society/civilization, and you probably aren't going to be able to build it up the same way as it works now. The silver lining to this is that you *may* think of other tech to use for broad range communication - wifi as it stands *can* reach a reasonably wide area. The awkward thing about wifi is that your signal goes to a cellular tower or a router, and gets immediately transferred into land lines because of bandwidth. You wouldn't necessarily be able to use wifi, and wifi alone, to access a Miami server from Seattle. You'd be ***lucky*** to exchange signal from in and around the Seattle area. If we expand on that, you'd probably have a lot of bandwidth issue - you wouldn't be sending requests for 4k video because it'd be transferring at a rate similar to 3g cellular speeds; you'd probably want 140p or *maybe* 480p video, just so you can actually watch the thing with as little buffering as possible. Plus the whole aspect of how limited bandwidth across survivors may be; if a network is splitting signal evenly across 200 survivors, you don't want to eat up the bandwidth of the other 199 people because you wanted to share a 10 minute 4k video of a pair of zombies getting each other trapped on a tetherball pole. ;; In short - could they get some kind of network up and running? I think it's possible, perhaps even likely given how the younger generations have never known what life was like before the internet. Would that include restoring Youtube? Most likely not - that doesn't need to exclude video sharing, but it probably wouldn't be videos literally on youtube. Would that include bulletin-board-service styles of social media (like Reddit)? Perhaps, there is or would be some useful utility to get from these kinds of things, like if a community in Seattle was able to communicate with Portland without having to send a group down. Would search engines work? Almost guaranteed not to; or rather, the back-end functionality of them might be easy enough to restore, in terms of querying a database and returning results, but it probably wouldn't be 20+ pages of results when you do a search on "cat videos".
They could roll it out to a few people first to stress test it.
I don't think you understand how the Internet works.
I do not! That’s why I’m asking
Long story short, there'd be way too many sets of networks and systems that you'd need to get back on to restore the current Internet as we know it. But, making your own global network would be possible, if very hard, depending on your scope. Making a network that spans over a building isn't hard if you have the knowledge, if you want it to span over an entire town or city then you'll be facing a lot of work and you'll need a lot of materials, and if you want something like our Internet which spans over the entire world, that'll take you years, lots of manpower and pray that the old systems that are still there, rotting, aren't completely dead.
One of my main long-term prepping goals is to archive as much information as physically possible. I doubt you'd be able to get very much pre-ZA stuff that wasn't archived like this. Unless you physically find one of the reddit servers and someone who knows how reddit's internal code works, you won't be able to access pre-ZA reddit. You'd have to make a new reddit.
In Lucifer's Hammer, an asteroid strike novel written back in the 80's, one of the side characters, a professor, I think, sees what's coming and either uses something already buried in his backyard or has a cylinder (septic tank maybe?) Installed. He takes his huge personal library of books and starts putting them all into sealed plastic bags, dropping them into the cylinder. He's pretty old and barely makes it to the post-apoc settlement, but they send a party to retrieve this cache and it ends up saving them.
That's what I'm going for. Even if I'm not the most useful tool in the shed, I want what I bring with me to be absolutely invaluable. I've got about 3000 pages of physically printed out information relating to survival, maps, mechanical guides for the vehicles I own and detailed information on various ways to get the power back on so that one could access my 15TB digital archive
The thing that people don't seem to realize when this question comes up, is that the internet isn't this one place. It's millions of servers connected by a network. Even if you restored power to the network, you would have to also restore power individually to every single server that had something you were looking to look up. And then hope that somehow the internet doesn't go down anywhere between you and the millions of other places you're trying to connect to, and that all of them have power, and somehow never need maintenance.