GPS

Episode Summary

GPS has become an essential technology that we rely on for navigation, timing, and location services. It was originally developed by the US military, who were skeptical about sharing it publicly. But the economic benefits became clear during the Gulf War in the 1990s, when soldiers desperately needed it. By 2000, GPS signals were made accessible to civilians worldwide. Now GPS technology underpins critical infrastructure like phone networks, banking, transportation, and more. An outage would cost billions per day. Complete failure could cripple modern systems. Alternatives like Russia's GLONASS exist, but aren't as robust. Land-based systems have limitations too. The vulnerability of GPS signals from space concerns experts. Solar storms or an attack could disrupt services globally. Spoofing fake signals already affects drones and vehicles. Attackers might target power grids, mobile networks or stock markets. With so much reliance on GPS, it's hard to predict the potential damage from signal sabotage. Losing GPS would force us to rediscover traditional navigation skills. But far worse would be following false signals that convince us we're on track when we're not. Modern life depends on this invisible utility beaming reliably from satellites. We take for granted how vital and vulnerable it has become.

Episode Show Notes

How dependent is the world on GPS - and what would happen if it stopped working? Tim Harford explains why it's not just our ability to navigate that would be affected.

Episode Transcript

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. SPEAKER_02: Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless. SPEAKER_01: How did he get 30 30 30 30 20 20 20 20 15 15 15 15 just 15 bucks a month. So give it SPEAKER_02: a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. New activation and upfront payment for three month SPEAKER_05: plan required taxes and fees extra additional restrictions apply. See mintmobile.com for full terms. Hello, I'm Emma twin. I'm a virtual twin for Dassault system. My job, simulate multiple medical conditions on myself to develop new treatments for all. Basically, I'm like a crash test dummy for healthcare. It may sound like science fiction, but in fact, it's just science. I explain it all on my LinkedIn account. Look up Emma twin from Dassault system. 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. 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