WI: Y2K.

What if, when the clocks went from December 31st 1999 to January 1st 2000, the entire grid went down? All computers, their functions, their files and their histories go down. All bank accounts freeze. Blackouts all over the world.

Another scenario. All computers that control military functions go into fail safe. Thus every nuclear missile launches, and heads towards their predetermined targets ((Most missiles are have constant targets. IE: Moscow, Beijing, Vladivostok, Washington DC, Cheyenne Mountains, etc.)).

What happens next?
 
Computers going down are not going to cause missiles to launch because they need human intervention. Moreover US, UK and Russian missiles have been detargeted since the early '90s. If by some chance they do launch their RVs will come down in either the Atlantic, or the Pacific away from any habitation.
 
Computers going down are not going to cause missiles to launch because they need human intervention. Moreover US, UK and Russian missiles have been detargeted since the early '90s. If by some chance they do launch their RVs will come down in either the Atlantic, or the Pacific away from any habitation.

I'm pretty sure this belongs in ASB more than a Sealion thread (if done right).


Sorry. :eek:

Scenario One: Keep the same.


Scenario Two: An ASB makes it work.


What happens next?
 
Personally, I'm surprised that Y2K was as uneventful as it was, given the numbers of e.g. embedded processors that couldn't be reprogrammed, and which date back to before it was thought to be a problem.

However, the gobs and gobs of money that was thrown at the problem did mean that most things would have been OK. Certainly you're NOT going to get missles firing themselves!


Given the fragility of the electrical grid - look at the last fiasco that took out electrical power in most of the Northeast in 2003 - a few components somewhere that weren't updated COULD have taken down the grid (in places) for a while, for instance.

OTOH, once the problem was isolated, the offending devices would be quickly taken out of the loop, and things would likely have been back to normal 'soon'. It COULD have caused a recession if enough stuff went south, but probably not anything much more than that.
 
Y2K was a lot of hype. It certainly could have been worse if the big corporations hadn't spent money on fighting it, but the worst it might have done was some disruption in a few basic services for a couple of hours. The economy probably suffered more from 9/11/2001 than it could have from anything that Y2K could have thrown at it.

The only way you could get Y2K to be worse is if you got the preparations for it started late. But that's unlikely to happen, as they had already started very late considering the problem was first reported all the way back in the 1960's. And no, you can't get the problem to be noticed later either: experienced programmers are very good at looking for inefficient code, and frankly, any storage format that would be effected by the Y2K bug is going to be inefficient even long before 1999.

Now, 2038... that's a different story :)
 
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