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Somewhere up there in space, about 12,000 miles above the surface of the planet, more than 30 GPS navigation satellites orbit Earth. Thanks to them, you don’t need to use the sun, moon, and constellations to find your way!
People depend on GPS much more than you might think. One of the reasons why GPS satellites are so crucial for people is because they carry onboard atomic clocks. And those are the very clocks which are responsible for all the time in the world! Should they malfunction, it would bring an end to pretty much everything, from electric power grids to the internet, digital TV and radio, and cellular communication. So how bad would it be if GPS suddenly stopped working?
– You don’t notice anything unusual at first. You wake up, take a hot shower, and prepare your breakfast as always.
– You get into your car and find out that your GPS doesn’t work.
– You finally arrive at the office and switch on your computer. The first thing you notice is that the internet is excruciatingly slow.
– What you DON’T know is that all the GPS satellites in the world stopped functioning at night, and now, the world is struggling to live without them.
– All over the world, planes go off course and crash, and ships head straight toward rocks, cliffs, and icebergs.
– The world governments started to arrange emergency meetings. They’re trying to figure out a way to deal with the disaster of losing GPS.
– All the traffic lights have switched to the default red, and the streets of the city have turned into one big, unmoving traffic jam.
– Transport, finance, communications, computers – the loss of GPS satellites has influenced all areas of life
– If all the GPS satellites went out of order in one day, the world’s technological development would go back decades.
– This very situation has already happened once, and it was in January of 2016!
– Due to a maintenance error, sixteen satellites had their clocks set incorrectly.
– Luckily, specialists managed to tackle these problems fast enough.
– So far, people have launched 74 GPS satellites.
– The minimum number of GPS satellites needed to support the whole Global Positioning System is 24.
– Before being called GPS, this system had the name Navstar.
– And although it seems like your car has been using GPS forever, this innovation didn’t appear for everyday vehicles until 1996!
– Nowadays, you can buy GPS shoes to make sure someone will find you if you get lost. But jokes aside, these shoes have been designed to track people with memory problems.
