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If you find this at all interesting, you must read Mother Earth, Mother Board by Neal Stephenson - https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/. It's long but so, so good, both in the content and the writing.

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walterbell

2 days ago

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https://archive.is/cMW2Q

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ambarp2

2 days ago

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Gave away my original print copy but it was such an amazing read for 23-yr-old me. It changed the wiring in my brain to think about truly global-scale infra problems differently.

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r2_pilot

2 days ago

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So good and so long that I have a printed paper copy from around the early 00's. Younger Me must have bought a ream of paper to justify the expense of printing it lol

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thecosas

2 days ago

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After reading this, I don’t know if I can rightly describe myself as being in infrastructure engineering.

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rascul

2 days ago

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> Ninety-nine percent of the world's digital communications rely on subsea cables.

I'm skeptical of this claim. It seems way too high to me, and the reference is a paper about "Fast and destructive density currents created by ocean-entering volcanic eruptions" which I'm unable to view but seems unrelated.

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pxeger1

2 days ago

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I have access - that paper says:

> Such an incident has wider implications because subsea cables carry >99% of all international data traffic, including the internet and trillions of dollars per day in financial transactions

and in turn cites "L. Carter, R. Gavey, P. J. Talling, J. T. Liu, Oceanography 27, 58–67 (2014)", which I can't find a working link for.

So it's actually talking about international traffic. Although even then, that's a little hard to believe.

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stanski

3 days ago

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I saw an episode of "Mighty Ships" just this weekend, which followed such a ship around as they were working on splicing one of these cables.

Very cool stuff.