What We Thought This Decade Would Be Like Vs. Reality

The Internet Would Collapse

Tech experts have long been speculating over the collapse of the Internet pretty much since the Internet was invented. In 1995, Robert Metcalfe (the guy who invented Ethernet) wrote an article stating that by 1996, the Internet would “go spectacularly supernova” and “catastrophically collapse.” Surely, this would happen by 2018, but nope.

Though most of us have had our gripes with Verizon and Optimum, any rare Internet outages only ever last a couple of hours. If Y2K wasn’t enough to tear down the machine, what would be? A lot of people believe that if the Earth’s magnetic poles change, it could cause a similar catastrophe. It’s unclear how long those related outages would actually last for before we were living in The 100, but it hasn’t happened yet.