Bloomberg:
It’s tough to overstate how GPS-dependent the world economy has become since the U.S. Department of Defense started giving the service away to the public in 2000. There are 2 billion GPS receivers in use around the world, a number that Europe’s satellite navigation agency estimates will hit 7 billion by 2022. Along with the telecommunications industry, banks, airlines, electric utilities, cloud computing businesses, and TV broadcasters require constantly precise GPS timing. Emergency services do, too, as do military forces. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated 16 sectors of infrastructure as “critical,” and 14 of them depend on GPS.
The world economy is increasingly dependent on these kinds of chokepoints. Heaven help us if/when they fail. It will make Y2K look like a walk in the park.
I think this article is bit overly sensationalist.The European Galileo project is only mentioned in passing, but it’s a real alternative. After many years it is finally reaching full operability. It’s supposed to be more accurate than GPS (up to 20cm compared to 4 meters with GPS) and will cover the entire globe by 2020.
How did the chicken ever cross the road without GPS?
Maybe these critical infrastructures should have some sort of fallback if GPS fails. Lord knows many of them existed long before GPS became ubiquitous.
Don’t know about the chicken, but in the mid-80’s the wealthy had this:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgotten-story-of-etaks-amazing-1985-car-navigation-system