Some random questions that have been living rent-free in my head since I was a kid...
So let's see what YOU would do if these things actu...
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Interesting questions!
If you woke up tommorow morning and Everyone in the world had suddenly disappeared.....
What would you do first? π»
Even though i have get used to live alone, i would be bothered to live that alone. To humor the question i would probably do activities that now are pretty daunting to me (like standing in queues, hell no), or general are pretty expensive. I assume i can't travel, since i can't pilot an airplane, but it would be cool to "walk around the earth"
If you suddenly got the chance to became Elon Musk's son/daughter.....
What would you buy first?
I hate this guy, i would probably be very depressed if i was his child (considering all of his children hate him). I wouldn't want to be dependent on that kind of a person.
If you could have any superpower,what would you do with it first?
I like the idea of telekinisis or teleportation, moving objects or moving myself will be amazing. What i would do first? I would teleport myself in a warm beachfront for the winter.
Honestly, even if I got the chance to become Elon Muskβs child, I donβt think I could change my father just for money. Whether itβs Elon Musk or any other billionaire, money canβt replace the bond you have with your family. Maybe thatβs what makes you the person you are. I really admire your way of thinking. Proud of you!!
While it's true that we can't choose family, we can choose who is around us. I don't have a strong bond with my existing family, so probably i cannot relate on what you mean. :)
I understand. I didnβt mean to assume that you would relate to my situation. I was just sharing how I feel. :)
The βeveryone disappearedβ scenario sounds fun for about 10 minutesβ¦ until I realize thereβs no one left to fix the Wi-Fi. π
Superpower? Teleportation, 100%. Not to save the world though. Iβd just teleport to the kitchen whenever Iβm hungry and avoid the walk. Priorities. ππ
And if I became Elon Muskβs child, Iβd probably buy something truly important first: a lifetime supply of snacks. ππ
Your answers are honestly hilarious. If everyone disappeared, I feel like your biggest concern would be, βWaitβ¦ whoβs going to fix the Wi-Fi?β
And with teleportation, youβd basically use a superpower meant to save humanity just to avoid walking to the kitchen. Then becoming Elon Muskβs kid just to build a lifetime snack supply? Your priorities are seriously impressive.
At this point, Iβm convinced you wouldnβt survive the apocalypseβ¦ youβd just turn it into a food vacation.
Back when I was a kid, I was pretty cringeyβedgy. Iβd often daydream in class that Iβd suddenly gain superpowers. Iβd fly around, wield lightsabers, and then the school would fall into crisis with monsters invading. I would defeat the monsters attacking the school, pull off all kinds of cool moves, and leave every teacher and student in total awe of me. Hahaha.π€£
Iβm replying to your comment after going through all the other comments. And honestly, Iβm so mad at you! I was drinking water while reading your comment, and because you made me laugh so much, I dropped the glass and spilled all the water. Then I had to clean it up too. My friend, please donβt make me laugh this much!
By the way, your imaginary world is amazing. I used to live in my own imagination world too, but sadly, none of it is real. Iβve always dreamed of flying in the sky, and honestly, I still do!
Doraemon, I miss you! Please come backβ¦ I just need your Bamboo Copter so I can finally fly for real! π₯Ί
Speaking of Doraemon, I feel exactly the same. When I was little, the more I watched, the more I thought I was Nobita β except I didnβt have Doraemon by my side. But later I realized, I donβt actually need Doraemon. What I want is his fourβdimensional pocket, hahaha.π€£
π€£π€£π€£
Exposing my greedy side, hahaha π€£
Not greedy, just efficient; the pocket does all the work. Skip Doraemon, keep the infinite bag of solutions. Very engineer of you. π
First thing? Iβd check whether the internet, electricity, mobile networks and data centers were still running.
Not because Iβd need Instagram. π
If everyone disappeared but the infrastructure was still operating, Iβd want to know why. Systems donβt run by magic.
So while everyone else is looking for food, Iβd probably be standing in a data center wondering:
βOkayβ¦ who is keeping this thing alive?β
Survival can wait five minutes. I need logs. π
While everyone else is in survival mode, youβd be sitting in a data center reading logs.π§
But honestlyβ¦ if the logs showed that no humans were running the system, yet everything was still operating, would you be scared first or immediately start investigating? π
Scared? Probably for about five seconds. π
Then curiosity would win.
If every human had disappeared but the infrastructure was still running, that would be the biggest anomaly in history. Iβd start checking logs, network traffic, scheduled processes, authentication recordsβ¦ anything that could tell me who β or what β was keeping it alive.
And if the logs started showing activity that shouldnβt be possible?
Wellβ¦ at that point Iβm definitely not leaving the data center. ππ
Could you please reply now?
if possible
Ha, these are great questions. π
On everyone disappearing, @merbayerp has the right instinct, but how long?
Batteries give you minutes. Generators give you days, until nobody turns up with diesel. But power isn't what kills the internet first. Certificates are. Most TLS certificates last 90 days and renew automatically. Nothing renews them now. So about three months in, the web starts locking itself out site by site, on schedule. Servers running perfectly. Every browser refusing to connect.
Last person on earth, looking at a security warning. π
Musk's child: I'd buy back places that are gone. The shop I went to as a kid, the restaurant that closed, the ones you don't realise you'll miss until they're not there. New things are easy to buy. Old ones aren't.
Then an airline, to add one direct route. The annoying part was never the ticket price. It's the connections.
Superpower: two of them, and I'm not choosing.
Knowing instantly why something broke. No logs, no debugging, just the root cause, straight away. And being in two places at once, rather than teleporting between them. Everyone picks teleporting, but that still means leaving. I don't want to travel faster. I want not to have to choose.
Haha, I like the certificate apocalypse theory. π
But Iβm not sure the 90-day mark would kill the web that easily.
If ACME clients, DNS, CA infrastructure and scheduled jobs were still alive, a lot of certificates would keep renewing without a human touching anything.
The interesting part would be finding the first dependency that actually requires a human.
Power grid, cooling, routing, DNS, NTP, PKI, storage, hardware failures⦠eventually something in that chain is going to break and not recover.
So now I have a new problem.
Iβm not just reading the logs anymore.
Iβm apparently doing a postmortem on the entire Internet while being the last human alive. π
Worst on-call shift ever.
You're right about the certificates. If ACME, DNS and cron survive, renewals keep happening without anyone. Too optimistic an apocalypse.
But I think the answer to your question is the GPS ground segment. The satellites don't know where they are on their own. Orbit and clock predictions are computed on the ground and uploaded, refreshed hourly to daily, and GPS defines an extended mode for when uploads stop that only holds reduced accuracy for about 14 days.
This is important because stratum-1 NTP is largely GPS-disciplined. Time drifts, and once nothing agrees on what time it is, certificate validation breaks anyway. Not expiry, just disagreement about now.
So the certs still kill the web. They do it through the ground segment instead of ACME.
Though, the grid beats all of it, and none of us finds out. Worst on-call shift ever, and no handover notes. π
Okay, now weβve officially turned a fun βeveryone disappearedβ question into a global infrastructure failure analysis. π
Iβd make one small correction though: GPS satellites donβt simply become useless because the ground segment disappears. Their onboard atomic clocks keep running, but without fresh ephemeris and clock corrections from the control segment, accuracy would progressively degrade.
And NTP probably wouldnβt collapse as one synchronized domino either. GPS is huge for Stratum-1, but we still have other GNSS sources, local atomic clocks, holdover oscillators and independent timing references scattered around the world.
Which actually makes the thought experiment even better.
The Internet probably wouldnβt βdieβ at one identifiable moment.
It would decay.
One power region disappears. A cooling system fails somewhere else. A router dies and nobody replaces it. Storage arrays lose disks. DNS infrastructure fragments. Timing sources slowly diverge. Automated systems keep healing whatever they were designed to heal⦠until they encounter something nobody designed them to survive.
So forget the postmortem.
Iβd need a distributed tracing system for civilization. π
And yes β no handover notes. Thatβs the real disaster.
Fair enough, you got me on both. π
The GPS one is a bit embarrassing, since my own source said it degrades gracefully and I made looked like there are specific deadlines. I just liked the drama. I made NTP sound like it depends on GPS alone, when there's a lot more holding time together than that.
Your version is the right one. Decay, not abrupt death.
We've already seen a small version, though. Meta, 2021. Their DNS servers were built to pull their own BGP routes if they couldn't reach the data centres, which is sensible enough. Then a command took the whole backbone out, so every location decided it was unhealthy and pulled the routes. Exactly as designed. Servers running fine, just gone. And they couldn't fix it remotely because the tools needed the thing that was down.
Nobody wrote down "this assumes the backbone still exists." You never do.
So your tracing system for civilisation is really tracing assumptions, not requests. Good luck instrumenting that.
Enjoying this thread, thanks for keeping me honest. π
Now that is the interesting part. π
βTracing assumptions, not requestsβ is probably the best description of the problem in this entire thread.
Weβre very good at observing things we already decided were observable: requests, latency, errors, CPU, dependencies, traces.
But the dangerous assumptions are usually invisible.
βDNS will be reachable.β
βThe control plane will be reachable.β
βSomeone can still authenticate.β
βThere will be a human who can physically access the machine.β
βThe clock is approximately correct.β
βThe network path used to repair the network will still exist.β
And the Meta incident is a perfect example: components can behave exactly as designed and still produce a catastrophic system-level result.
Thatβs the uncomfortable part of distributed systems: every component can be βcorrectβ while the system is completely broken.
So maybe I donβt need distributed tracing for civilization after all.
I need ASSUMPTIONS.md.
Unfortunately, judging by most production environments Iβve seen, that file was never committed. π
And likewise β really enjoyed this discussion. This went much further than I expected from a question about everyone disappearing. π
The most intriguing (and scary) one:
"If you woke up tommorow morning and Everyone in the world had suddenly disappeared"
A person honestly wouldn't survive that long - everything you depend on ('normal' things you take for granted) would pretty soon stop functioning, or become unavailable ...
I think I would try to make some sort of survival plan - what are the things (food, etc) which would allow me to live off the grid (in extreme 'survival mode') for as long as I could? Just forget about anything that uses electricity, because that would stop working soon, and become completely useless ...
Interesting thought experiment, but, make no mistake - I won't go into details, but it would be desperate, not funny at all, I don't even want to think about it too much ...
Yeah, this thought is really strange and scary π Itβs interesting to think about, but if it actually happened, it would be absolutely terrifying.
No people anymore - the best way to survive (and somehow retain a sense of purpose, and sanity) would be to befriend the animals - and I'm a cat person, but befriending a dog would be much more useful in these circumstances! :-)
Yes that's a truly weird thought - fortunately there's no way it can become reality!
I would typically like to go into past in 2009 or 2010 and buy few bitcoins
Interesting! :)
You need to take little break from writing articles. You enjoy life:)
Nice to meet you! :D Hope youβre doing well. And haha, I know I get a little carried away sometimes. Taking a little break is important too! :)
I am doing well! Thank you for asking. Yes, it is nice to take a little break sometimes :)
I think I would choose teleportation π I would first go wherever I want without worrying about travel!
Nice wβ (β Β°β ο½β Β°β )β w!!!!!