Can Humans Survive Without The Internet?

I am reading the Brian Clegg's Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction. In chapter seven the author envisions information meltdown as one of possible reasons of mass destruction of human race. At first this idea seems stretched a little too far for me. Is bringing down the Internet really going to wipe our civilization?

I have been contemplating a long lasting failure of electric supply grid as a very serious threat. Theoretically there is such danger. A severe solar eruption can induce enough energy in power transmission lines (acting as huge antennas) to burn many transformers simultaneously. Recovery from such accident world wide may last several months. In the meantime nothing would work. It would not be just dark. Everything would stop. Factories. Agriculture. Transport. Communication systems.

The loss of power can be devastating. But the Internet?

Most of us are on the Internet for fun. At least partially. We could certainly survive without the Facebook. At least today. There is nothing mission - critical there. Yet. It would be much more difficult without Google. Many of us navigate the Net using the Google search box, not even bothering trying to type a URL (BTW: this is why good search positioning starts to be more important than a domain name...). Google is also the email host and IM and phone number provider to many. They would be cut out. The final level of an Internet malfunction for consumers would probably be the loss of DNS (a service that translates domain names to IP addresses).

But the truth is a shutdown of the Internet would shut down majority of businesses. Almost every computer and every piece of networking equipment today assumes there is the Internet. Even if they work over private networks. VPNs (virtual tunnels) over the Internet have killed dedicated leased lines long time ago. It is so much more cost effective. And of course there is redundancy - in the access area. If a branch office has a fiber line to the Internet, it is enough when they have a microwave radio link for backup. Both connecting to the Internet, as - everybody knows that - the Internet itself is redundant. Such setup works in cases like the fiber being cut by a stray digger. But nobody today assumes the entire Internet can go down. Actually it happened - on a regional basis - in New Zealand in 2005. Two coincidental but simultaneous cable cuts paralyzed the country. For five hours. The stock exchange, the mobile phones, banks, airlines, retail shops... all were shut down. Almost unbelievable, but true. So many systems were affected.

A few days ago I have experienced something similar at home. I mean there was no disaster, but I was shocked to see how many, potentially disconnected systems, were affected. It all started by a cut of the cable that goes to my country cottage. I have cameras set up there - they display near-live images on several photo frames at my city apartment. I woke up in the morning and instead of a nice view on the wall had some error report. It was pretty self describing (host xyz cannot be reached), but was followed by a series of alarms coming from a router sitting in my mother's house. I logged on remotely there to see the router, configured to maintain two VPN connections was exhausting its resources trying to reconnect a VPN to the country cottage. This must be a bug in the router's OS (a leak of some kind), but I had to reconfigure it to stop reconnecting. Just in time, as my Mom called in complaining her Internet was lousy. Then I had an alarm from my weather station. The weather data logger stopped and the supervisory data collector sent me an SMS it could no longer connect. Strange. True, both devices were in the cottage that was cut off the Net, but they were on the same LAN. It appeared later the logger was also configured to send the readouts to one of the weather sensor networks. Again this connection was cut, so it hanged itself (another bug) and stopped reporting to the local recorder.

Everything went back to life when the cut cable was replaced by the phone company. But nevertheless this was an interesting lesson for me. A broken communication line to a remote place resulted in two other, potentially not related failures. The truth is we rely so deeply on connectivity, so none of us really thinks of how many services and devices would stop working when the Internet was suddenly not available. And this dependence will only worsen in time.