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One of the early uses of Arpanet was to link together seismic monitoring stations around the world to track nuclear detonations

• kristopolous 4y ago
  You're talking about Norsar right? You know you can read the reports, they're all at internet archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=Norsar https://archive.org/search.php?query=Norsar . They even have a website: https://www.norsar.no/home/ https://www.norsar.no/home/ Everyone loves a Tom Clancy secret spy story but here it gets substituted as if it were the primary sole purpose It's true that one of its uses is to verify nuclear test ban treaties because that's how you got government money for research in the 1970s You can see from the documents the myriad of scientific use cases for these systems such as moving towards a global computer based weather model You can also see from say, the Wikipedia page, it was how people got SATNET up so there could be a European link to systems like JANET The problem with the Clancy stuff is it's supposed hidden. So when the evidence isn't there that it's a central player, well that's because it was secret Then in cases when there's really no evidence and it's genuinely absent well that's because it was super duper tippity top secret. So we get these narratives of "well the real reason was a clandestine program with sunglasses and trenchcoat wearing feds that of course there's only rumors of and all of the computing time and resources are allocated for but I swear it's being downplayed" Alright, sounds totally real