SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_03: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_01: What would happen if GPS stopped working? For a start, we'd all have to engage our brains and pay attention to the world around us when getting from A to B. Perhaps this would be no bad thing. We'd be less likely to drive into rivers or over cliffs to misplaced trust in our navigation devices. Pick your own favorite story about the kind of idiocy only GPS can enable. Mine is the Swedish couple who misspelled the Italian island of Capri and turned up hundreds of kilometers away in Carpi asking where the sea was. But these are the exceptions.
SPEAKER_01: Prices that use GPS usually stop us getting lost. If it failed, the roads would be clogged with drivers slowing to peer at signs or stopping to consult maps. If your commute involves a train, there'll be no information boards to tell you when to expect the next arrival. Phone for a taxi and you'll find a harassed operator trying to keep track of her fleet by calling the drivers. Open the Uber app and, well, you get the picture. With no GPS, emergency services start struggling. Operators can't locate callers from their phone signal or identify the nearest ambulance or police car. There are snarl ups at ports. Container cranes need GPS to unload ships. Factories stand idle when their inputs don't arrive just in time. Farming, construction, fishing, surveying. These are other industries mentioned by a UK government report that pegs the cost of GPS going down at about a billion dollars a day for the first five days. If it lasts for much longer, we might start worrying about the resilience of a whole load of other systems that might not have occurred to you if you're thinking of GPS as a location service. It is that, but it's also a time service. The global positioning system consists of 24 satellites that all carry clocks synchronised to an extreme degree of precision. When your smartphone uses GPS to locate you on a map, it's picking up signals from some of those satellites and it's making calculations based on the time the signal was sent and where the satellite was. If the clocks on those satellites stray
SPEAKER_01: by a millionth of a second, you'll mislay yourself by two or three hundred kilometres. So if you want incredibly accurate information about the time, GPS is the place to get it. Consider phone networks. Your calls share space with others through a technique called multiplexing. Data gets timestamped, scrambled up and unscrambled at the other end. A glitch of just a hundred thousandth of a second can cause problems. Bank payments, stock markets, power grids, cloud computing all depend on different locations agreeing on the time. If GPS were to fail, how well and how widely and for how long would backup systems keep these various shows on the road? The not very reassuring answer is that nobody really seems to know. No wonder GPS is sometimes called the invisible utility. Trying to put a dollar value on it has become almost impossible. As the author Greg Milner puts it, you may as well ask, how much is oxygen worth to the human respiratory system? It's a remarkable story for an invention that first won support in the US military because it could help with bombing people and even they were far from sure they needed it. One typical response, I know where I am, why do I need a damn satellite to tell me where I am? The first GPS satellite launched in 1978, but it wasn't until the first Gulf War in 1990 that the sceptics came around. As Operation Desert Storm ran into a literal desert storm with swirling sand reducing visibility to 5 metres, GPS let soldiers mark the location of mines, find their way back to water sources and avoid getting in each other's way. It was so obviously life saving and the military had so few receivers to go around, soldiers asked their families in America to spend their own money shipping over thousand dollar commercial devices. Given the military advantage GPS conferred, you may be wondering why the US armed forces were happy for everyone to use it. The answer is that they weren't, but they couldn't do much about it. They tried having the satellites send two signals, an accurate one for their own use and a degraded fuzzier one for civilians, but companies found clever ways to tease more focus from the fuzzy signals and the economic boost was becoming ever plainer. In the year 2000, President Clinton bowed to the inevitable and made the high grade signal available to all. The American taxpayer puts up the billion odd dollars a year it takes to keep GPS going and that's very kind of them. But is it wise for the rest of the world to rely on their continued largesse? In fact, GPS isn't the only global navigational satellite system. There's a Russian one too called GLONASS, although it isn't as good. China and the European Union have well advanced projects called Baidu and Galileo. Japan and India are working on systems too. These alternative satellites might help us ride out problems specific to GPS, but they might also make tempting military targets in any future conflict. And you can imagine a space war knocking everyone offline. A big enough solar storm could also do the job. There are land-based alternatives to satellite navigation. The main one is called E-Lorraine, but it doesn't cover the whole world and some countries are putting more effort than others into their national systems. One big appeal of E-Lorraine is that its signals are stronger. By the time GPS signals have made their 20,000 kilometre journey to Earth, they're extremely weak, which makes them easy to jam or to spoof, if you know what you're doing. People who are paid to think about these things worry less about the apocalyptic scenarios, waking up one day to find the whole thing offline, and more about the potential for terrorists or nation states to wreak havoc by feeding inaccurate signals to GPS receivers in a certain area. Engineering professor Todd Humphreys has shown that spoofing can down drones and divert superyachts. He worries that attackers could feasibly fry electricity grids, crippled mobile networks or crash stock markets. The truth is that it's hard to be sure how much damage spoofing GPS signals might do. But just ask those Swedish tourists in Carpi. Knowing that you're lost is one thing. Being wrongly convinced that you know where you are is another problem altogether.
SPEAKER_04: The natural world is full of problems, they've had millions of years to test them down. Now it's our turn to take inspiration from them. Thirty Animals That Made Us Smarter from the BBC World Service, the podcast which investigates the amazing ways in which animals have inspired us. Just search for Thirty Animals That Made Us Smarter wherever you found this podcast and teach us how to extract water right out of the air. This stuff is better than science fiction.
