I’m kind of surprised that Musk hasn’t proposed turning Selective Availability back on.
GPS isn’t just for google maps. I’m a land surveyor and we literally use GPS every single day. Without it we’re basically fucked. We do hydrographic surveying and without GPS we’d have to basically go back to analog as 90% of the equipment on our boat would be useless. Good luck figuring out how much water is left in the Colorado river without it.
Im not exactly an expert on this, but i am very familiar with what my job requires. The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) will be completely fucked without it as it’s built on decades of data and monitoring. You can’t just look for “alternatives.” Whatever Elmo has is not robust enough for the precision that is required for what we use GPS for. And without shit like that you couldn’t hit the broad side of a city.
One interesting alternative would be the Visual Positioning System (VPS) that Niantic has built from Pokemon go player data. Basically you can take a picture outside and your phone will know exactly where you are:
https://www.nianticspatial.com/locate#vps
Too bad they’re getting close to being bought out by a company that’s notorious for squeezing out every penny from their player base.
Would this work in a war zone if everything that used to be there was gone now?
I doubt it would work well, but with enough training data it would be able to pick up on some areas. Especially if there are large landmarks in the frame (mountains/hills/rivers, etc.).
It’s also what Google Maps live view is using. Street view imagery plus rough location plus on-phone camera sensor calibration data allows it to compute highly accurate positions relative to surroundings.
The article is pretty vague, but I bet stellar navigation is a strong contender. Although, it works best only when there’s good visibility of the night sky
Understood! Anyway, thanks to the ruzzian GPS, I made a left over the canyon. Currently dangling. I think its wrong!..oh wait, it’s because I didn’t tell it to not fly or avoid bodies of water. Got it!
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