This topic would probably be more fitting for a sightings post, but it tied really well to a passage from today’s Station Eleven reading. In Chapter 30, Mandel writes, “On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operations grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes home to work at the power plants or the sub-stations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines” (178).
Last class discussion, Dr. Sample mentioned what would hypothetically happen to the world, specifically to the New York City subways, if humans disappeared from the earth. Having taken a Posthumanism English class this semester, which turned out to complement this class in a really interesting way, I’ve thought a lot about the post-human world and the intersections between humanity and technology. I found this video on what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared from the planet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy7Q6wazD_E
What Would Happen If Humans Disappeared?
Although humans haven’t gone completely extinct in Station Eleven, we still see the devastating effects of the absence of humans in a post-apocalyptic world. I find it interesting that this video, as well as most similar content on the topic, does not address what would happen to the Internet without humans. As we’ve discussed in our blog posts and class discussions, in many ways, technology continues to live as people die. But like other complex technological systems, the Internet still requires human maintenance. I wonder how the Internet would fare independent of people. If new intelligent life occupies the earth after humans have left or gone extinct, would they be able to retrieve the technology saved in “the cloud” when all other traces of humanity have dwindled away?
It’s interesting you bring up the effects of the post-apocalypse on the internet. I think more than anything, I find fascinating the idea of communication using the internet. I know that the internet is in many ways like the hydra, in that it doesn’t have one centralized source which, if destroyed, would end the internet. It’s more like an intricate web of sources, or pillars, which hold the entire infrastructure up. Having said that, it would definitely keep running for at least a little bit after humanity would lose control over its technological infrastructure.
What I find interesting to think about is what exactly we would use it for? In my personal opinion, it’d be useless to try and preserve the data and information that exists online, in an effort to retain all the human knowledge we have garnered so far. Which is pretty huge, in that we kind of depend on the ability to store knowledge and information, and we stopped doing it in books as much as we used to, so most of our knowledge is digital in nature.I think the focus would fall on the communicative abilities of the internet. Being able to reach people and extend current information would seem to me to be the most important aspect of whether the internet existed or not, in a post-human world. However, it would still be only a matter of time where every aspect of the internet is lost. So I wonder then, of all technological blows we could suffer, would this one be the greatest? Technologies develop and evolve and come and go, the internet is much more fluid but also much more influential. Of all technologies, it seems we’ve become dependent on the internet most rapidly, letting it in our lives in a matter of two decades, as if it always belonged there. Which is interesting to think about, the development of the internet and its rapid growth seems almost like it was naturally meant to be.