Episode Details

Losing GPS isn’t an X-risk, but would create a huge disaster on the scale of Covid-19 or bigger.

Hi! From 2020 - 2023 I was one of the early employees at Xona Space Systems, a company working on essentially a next-generation version of GPS. I ended up learning a lot about how GPS works and what it's used for, and (due to my personal interest in effective altruism) ended up doing some research into what would happen if today's GPS systems suddenly failed. This post is the product of that research. I discuss:

• What could kill GPS: it would be a tempting early target in a war between superpowers, or it could possibly be taken down by superhuman AI's cyber-hacking capabilities.  On the bright side, it's probably safe from even very large solar storms.
• If GPS was destroyed, how bad would this be?  I describe all the major areas in civilian life that would be disrupted (mostly summarizing some government reports).
• Then I try to crunch some very rough, vague numbers.  It looks like losing GPS would (by itself) be an economic hit to the USA perhaps equivalent to a few billion dollars a day.  On a very [...]

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Outline:

(03:05) "Whoa, GPS comes from space?? I thought it was just a thing in my car..."

(05:56) To be clear, there are multiple satellite-navigation constellations

(09:02) What could kill GPS?

(10:34) Great-power war

(13:18) Hacking by superhuman AI???

(15:02) An unprecedented solar storm, maybe

(18:03) Other stuff

(19:40) What would break in the aftermath of losing GPS?

(21:49) Impact on the cell network & smartphones

(23:08) Impact on the power grid

(25:20) Impact on maritime industries

(26:41) Impact on travel and logistics

(29:03) Impacts on other industries

(30:46) Reckoning an overall cost per day

(36:15) Hard to say, but this feels approximately Covid-19-scale-ish

(38:30) How long would an outage last?

(39:36) Remember: you're still at war with China, or Russia, or AI, or possibly the Sun!

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First published:
June 12th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/a2P7y5sEHFiNNHLt6/how-bad-would-it-be-if-gps-satellites-were-shot-down

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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