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This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Wailin Wong, here with friend of the show, Nate Hegyi. He is the host of the public radio podcast Outside/In. Welcome back to the show, Nate.
这里是THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY，我是Wailin Wong，与节目的朋友Nate Hegyi一起。他是公共广播播客Outside/In的主持人。欢迎回来收听节目，Nate。
Ah, it's so great to be back, Wailin. And I have a question for you. How often do you use GPS? Oh, in the car? Yeah. I am Michael Scott driving into a lake. I...
很高兴回来，Wailin。我有一个问题要问你。你多久使用一次GPS？在车里吗？是的。我是Michael Scott，开车驶入湖中。我……
I'll do whatever the GPS says - can't live without it. Well, you are not alone. A recent survey found that nearly half of all Americans say they could not live without GPS in their car.
我会按照GPS的指示去做，没有它就活不下去。你并不孤单。最近的一项调查发现，近一半的美国人表示，如果没有汽车上的GPS，他们就活不下去。
And it turns out the American economy could not live without GPS either.
事实证明，美国经济也不能没有GPS。
Satellite navigation systems ensure that the clocks on Wall Street all align, that commercial fishermen know where to go and, of course, that your Lyft driver knows where to pick you up.
卫星导航系统确保华尔街的时钟都对齐，商业渔民知道去哪里，当然，你的Lyft司机知道在哪里接你。
But our access to GPS is becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks from foreign adversaries.
但是，我们对GPS的访问越来越容易受到外国对手的攻击。
A study from a few years ago found that an outage could cost our country at least $1 billion a day. And we don't have a backup. Russia does. China does. But we don't.
几年前的一项研究发现，一次停电可能每天给我们国家造成至少10亿美元的损失。而且我们没有备用方案。俄罗斯有，中国有，但我们没有。
Today on the show, we're going to explain who owns GPS and why we don't have a plan B if it fails.
今天在节目中，我们将解释谁拥有GPS，以及为什么我们没有在GPS失效时采取B计划。
OK. So GPS stands for a global positioning system. It was invented around 50 years ago by the U.S. military.
好的。GPS全称是global positioning system。它是美国军方大约50年前发明的。
We now have a constellation of about 30 satellites owned by the feds that zip around the Earth. Russia, China and the EU all have their own versions.
我们现在拥有一个由联邦政府拥有的约30颗卫星组成的星座，它们环绕地球运行。俄罗斯、中国和欧盟都有自己的版本。
And works like this. The satellite sends radio signals that tell the GPS receiver in your phone or smartwatch where you are and exactly what time it is down to a fraction of a second.
工作原理如下。卫星发送无线电信号，告诉您的手机或智能手表中的GPS接收器您的位置以及精确到几分之一秒的时间。
Nowadays, almost all of our critical sectors, from banks to telecommunications to energy, use it. So if the U.S. lost access to satellite navigation...
如今，从银行到电信再到能源，几乎所有关键行业都在使用GPS。因此，如果美国失去卫星导航……
It would ripple through society like a horrendous, damaging tidal wave. Oh, is that all?
它将像可怕的破坏性海啸一样席卷整个社会。哦，就这些吗？
So that is Dana Goward. He is the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation.
这是Dana Goward。他是弹性导航和授时基金会的主席。
Which is kind of a horrible name for most people. But essentially, we advocate for policies and systems to protect the GPS satellites, signals and users.
对于大多数人来说，这个名字有点可怕。但本质上，我们提倡制定政策和系统来保护GPS卫星、信号和用户。
Dana says a potential GPS outage could throw the U.S. economy into free fall. Your cellphone might stop working.
Dana说，潜在的GPS故障可能会使美国经济陷入自由落体。你的手机可能会停止工作。
Farms, many of which rely on GPS-enabled equipment, could lose crops or miss entire planting seasons. Large shipping ports would come to a standstill. It could cripple offshore drilling operations.
许多农场都依赖GPS设备，它们可能会损失农作物或错过整个种植季节。大型航运港口将陷入停顿。这可能会使海上钻井作业陷入瘫痪。
A member of the president's National Security Council has called GPS a single point of failure for America.
总统国家安全委员会的一名成员称GPS是美国的单点故障。
So if it were to go away, we would be in a near existential crisis because there are just so many things that we depend on that depend upon GPS that folks don't realize.
因此，如果它消失了，我们将面临生存危机，因为我们所依赖的太多东西都依赖于GPS，而人们却没有意识到这一点。
A GPS outage can seem like a far-fetched idea, but it's actually happening in many places around the world right now.
GPS中断似乎是一个牵强的想法，但它实际上正在世界许多地方发生。
In war zones in the Middle East and Ukraine, combatants are using jammers or spoofers to mess with the signals from satellite navigation systems.
在中东和乌克兰的战区，战斗人员正在使用干扰器干扰卫星导航系统的信号。
It's actually freaking out pilots flying over those zones because they rely on GPS to help them navigate.
这实际上让飞越这些区域的飞行员感到恐慌，因为他们依靠GPS来帮助他们导航。
What you essentially do is you begin broadcasting a GPS-like signal that is even fainter than the real GPS signal, and then you crank it up slowly, slowly, slowly until it reaches up the same strength as the real GPS signals in the environment.
你所做的基本上是开始广播一个比真正的GPS信号更微弱的类似GPS的信号，然后你慢慢地将其调高，直到它达到与环境中真正的GPS信号相同的强度。
Then go a little bit past that, and then most receivers will go from the real signal to the slightly stronger signal and say, oh, that's the real one. I must be over here.
然后再超过这个强度，然后大多数接收器会从真实信号转到稍强的信号，然后说，哦，那是真正的信号。我一定是在这里。
But these jammers only work in a localized area. What the U.S. is really worried about is someone trying to blow up the actual satellites. That is just a Bond movie villain right there.
但这些干扰器只能在局部区域起作用。美国真正担心的是有人试图炸毁卫星。那只是邦德电影里的反派角色。
It totally is. But earlier this year, the chair of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee warned that Russia was developing a nuclear antisatellite weapon - one that, if detonated, could put most of the satellites in orbit out of commission for at least a year.
确实如此。但今年早些时候，美国众议院情报委员会主席警告说，俄罗斯正在开发一种核反卫星武器——如果引爆，可能会使大多数在轨卫星至少一年内无法使用。
Here's that chair, Republican Mike Turner, at a panel talk in June.
这是该委员会主席、共和党人迈克·特纳在6月的一次小组讨论会上的发言。
This threat would mean that our economic, international security and social systems come to a grinding halt.
这种威胁意味着我们的经济、国际安全和社会体系将陷入停滞。
This would be a catastrophic and devastating attack upon Western economic and democratic systems. Vladimir Putin knows this - checkmate.
这将是对西方经济和民主体系的灾难性和毁灭性的攻击。弗拉基米尔·普京知道这一点——将军。
At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. The explosion would be pretty indiscriminate. After all, the U.S. isn't the only country with satellite navigation systems in space.
乍一看，这似乎违反直觉。爆炸将非常不分青红皂白。毕竟，美国不是唯一拥有太空卫星导航系统的国家。
The European Union, China and Russia have their own ones, too. So if Putin actually used this weapon, he could potentially destroy some of his own satellites.
欧盟、中国和俄罗斯也有自己的卫星导航系统。因此，如果普京真的使用了这种武器，他可能会摧毁自己的一些卫星。
But as we said earlier, Russia and China both have something we don't - a backup plan. Dana Goward says this is a major problem.
但正如我们之前所说，俄罗斯和中国都有我们没有的东西——备用计划。Dana Goward说，这是一个大问题。
Russia and China both have terrestrial systems that can give them GPS-like information in the event that signals from space are not available.
俄罗斯和中国都有地面系统，可以在太空信号不可用的情况下为他们提供类似GPS的信息。
Unfortunately, in the U.S., we shut ours off in 2010, and we have no sign of starting up something like that again.
不幸的是，美国在2010年关闭了地面系统，而且我们没有再次启动类似系统的迹象。
Before GPS, the United States had a system called LORAN. That's an acronym for Long Range Navigation.
在GPS出现之前，美国有一个名为LORAN的系统，全称是Long Range Navigation。
It was a relic of World War II - a couple dozen 700-foot ground towers spread across the country that transmitted powerful radio signals - not as accurate as GPS, but it got the job done.
它是第二次世界大战的遗物——几十座700英尺高的地面塔遍布全国，发射强大的无线电信号——不如GPS准确，但它完成了工作。
In 2004, the Bush administration not only wanted to keep LORAN as a backup to GPS. It wanted to upgrade it to make it more precise.
2004年，布什政府不仅想保留LORAN作为GPS的备用，还想升级它以使其更精确。
The money for that was taken away in the various budget processes, and the old system was shut down without new replacement.
这笔资金在各种预算流程中被拿走了，旧系统被关闭，没有新的替代品。
That shutdown happened during the Obama administration. They had a completely different view than the Bush administration and called LORAN obsolete in the era of satellite navigation.
那次关闭发生在奥巴马政府时期。他们的观点与布什政府完全不同，称LORAN在卫星导航时代已经过时了。
But then, a few years later, they said, oops, our bad. We shouldn't have shut down that old system. We should have upgraded. We're going to do that. But again, nothing happened.
但几年后，他们说，哎呀，这是我们的错。我们不应该关闭那个旧系统。我们应该升级。我们会这么做的。但同样，什么也没发生。
So in 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to build a backup to GPS by the year 2020, but then they didn't appropriate enough cash to do that.
因此，在2018年，国会通过了一项法律，要求交通部在2020年前建立GPS备份，但当时他们没有拨出足够的资金来做到这一点。
And so in 2020, President Trump issued an executive order that told people, you know, you really need to make sure you're not relying too much on GPS and go out and protect yourselves and find other sources of timing and location information.
在2020年，特朗普总统发布了一项行政命令，告诉人们需要确保不会过度依赖GPS，出去保护自己，寻找其他时间和位置信息来源。
That's where we are now. There are companies that provide GPS alternates to businesses and consumers. But Dana says they're hard to come by, and, unlike GPS, if you want to use it, you got to pay for it.
这就是我们现在的处境。有些公司为企业和消费者提供GPS替代品。但Dana说，它们很难买到，而且与GPS不同，如果你想使用它，你就得付费。
What we really need is something that can be widely and broadly adopted by everybody that uses GPS in the United States so that our economy and national security are protected and not just the folks that can afford to subscribe to a commercial system.
我们真正需要的是能够被美国所有GPS用户广泛采用的东西，这样我们的经济和国家安全才能得到保护，而不仅仅是那些有能力订购商业系统的人。
Here in the U.S., Dana and other advocates say the most cost-effective way for the country to get on similar footing to Russia and China is for the government to rebuild and upgrade that old system we already had in place - LORAN.
在美国，Dana和其他倡导者表示，让美国与俄罗斯和中国站在同一条战线上的最经济有效的方式是政府重建和升级我们已经拥有的旧系统LORAN。
This new system, by the way, would have the very clever name of eLORAN. Oh, my gosh. The government literally has no ideas about how to name anything in a clever way. It should have been iLORAN.
顺便说一句，这个新系统将有一个非常巧妙的名字，即eLORAN。哦，我的天哪。政府真的不知道如何巧妙地命名任何东西。它应该是iLORAN。
Dana says it would cost less than $100 million a year to operate - much less than the couple billion dollars we spend every year operating GPS. But again, there are no concrete plans to build this.
Dana说，每年的运营成本不到1亿美元，比我们每年运营 GPS 所花费的数十亿美元要少得多。但同样，没有具体的建设计划。
We're hoping that the government reconsiders that and helps everyone find a way forward where we can have a widely adopted alternative
我们希望政府重新考虑这一点，并帮助每个人找到一条前进的道路，让我们能够拥有一种被广泛采用的替代方案，
so that when GPS is not available or global navigation satellite system signals are not available, they will have an alternative, and we won't all be out of business.
这样当GPS不可用或全球导航卫星系统信号不可用时，他们就会有替代方案，我们也不会全部破产。
But I guess, until then, Wailin, maybe we should buy some atlases just in case.
但我想，在那之前，Wailin，也许我们应该买一些地图集以防万一。
I remember when I first started driving, it was, you know, pre-smartphone - like, years before the smartphone, years before Google Maps. Yep.
我记得我刚开始开车的时候，那是在智能手机出现之前——就像在智能手机出现之前的几年，在谷歌地图出现之前的几年。是的。
And we just had this big spiral-bound book in the glove compartment that had maps of the city of Chicago and all of the surrounding suburbs. Yeah.
我们刚刚在手套箱里放了一本大螺旋装订的书，里面有芝加哥市和所有周边郊区的地图。是的。
Like, you had maps in the glove compartment. We survived, like, as a civilization, right?
就像，你在手套箱里有地图。我们作为一个文明幸存了下来，对吧？
Absolutely. Absolutely - not without stressors. I remember driving through Chicago with my dad pre-smartphones. There was a lot of swearing. A lot of swearing.
绝对不是没有压力。我记得在智能手机出现之前和爸爸一起开车穿过芝加哥。有很多脏话。很多脏话。
