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The internet(s) are made of meat in the sense that it takes constant human attention from millions of people to keep the networks and its services running. If Google's "meatware" were to stop maintaining it, the hardware and services would fail quickly (hours at the most).



I've recently finished watching almost the entire run of Life Without People from the History Channel. One thing that amazed me at first was how quickly the power grid would fail; generally, the estimate is 1-2 days. With emergency generators and enough fuel, a data center might be able to manage a few hours beyond that (say, a day at most). So, even if absolutely nothing went wrong with the software or the actual computing hardware, power considerations put an upper bound of about 3 days on how long the internet could continue without us.




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