Prospects for some type of
Internet continuing well into peak oil are in my opinion pretty good.
Phone
However, there will be changes. Instead of a computer on every desk, we will probably go back to the "computing center" model where central computers would be in high value locations such as libraries, universities and of course the military. Servers will still transfer data - but might only do so during selected hours of operation rather than a 24/7 model that we use now. Messages destined for a computer that is turned off will simply be queued up then delivered when service resumes. (already, email systems do this for computers undergoing maintenance) As we go really deep into post-peak oil, it's very likely that the home PC and possibly home telephone service may become a thing of the past. Assuming civilization survives, we may evolve into more of a western-union type of model for long distance communication. However, instead of Morse code, we'll use computing stations and perhaps digital imaging delivered by traditional wire, cellular, WiFi type systems and perhaps even free space optics. But that is years in the
future. This section of the site is concerned about what can be done
for the next 10,20 and 30 years to justify the existence of computing in
a post-peak-oil world.
About the author:
|
||||||||