Physical systems that support modern civilization
The invisible infrastructure enabling real-time synchronization across critical systems vanishes—not just faster phones, but the precise timing signals that synchronize power grids, financial transactions, autonomous vehicle coordination, and industrial automation, creating a silent breakdown of modern society's temporal backbone.
The connective tissue of modern civilization vanishes—not just concrete and steel, but the reliable, high-capacity arteries that enable just-in-time supply chains, daily commutes, emergency services routing, and regional economic integration, fundamentally altering spatial relationships between cities and suburbs that have been engineered over a century.
The foundational layer of digital trust vanishes—secure authentication systems, private financial transactions, confidential business communications, protected healthcare data, and anonymous browsing capabilities all collapse simultaneously, leaving every digital interaction exposed and verifiable only through increasingly fragile physical verification methods.
The silent, rhythmic pulse of synchronized mass transit vanishes—the morning commutes of millions, the overnight freight deliveries, the just-in-time supply chain arteries, and the predictable movement patterns that allow modern cities to function at density without gridlock.
The instantaneous, global, algorithmically-curated communication layer that connects billions of people, businesses, and institutions vanishes, erasing the primary infrastructure for real-time information sharing, social coordination, and digital identity verification that modern society has come to rely upon as a utility.
The global Domain Name System (DNS) collapses, instantly severing the translation between human-readable website names (like google.com) and the numerical IP addresses computers use to find each other on the network, rendering the web as we know it completely inaccessible.
The systematic preservation of digital history—billions of web pages, software versions, academic papers, government documents, and cultural artifacts stored by organizations like the Internet Archive, national libraries, and specialized repositories—vanishes, erasing humanity's collective digital memory and the ability to verify past information.
The fundamental trust layer of digital civilization vanishes—the mathematical certainty that protects financial transactions, secures communications, verifies identities, and ensures data integrity collapses, leaving every digital interaction vulnerable to undetectable manipulation and exposure.
All GPS satellites go offline or lose accuracy. No location services, no precise timing.
Electricity generation and distribution systems collapse. No power to homes or businesses.
