[Softback]
AA Concise Road Atlas: Britain 2026
OK, so I didn’t actually read this book, as such. I bought it as part of a personal mitigation against the effects of Kessler Syndrome.
I have loved maps for many years, and can spend hours lost in daydreams about journeys I might take or places I might go. So it was quite jarring for me to notice that the last road atlas I bought was from our time in Sweden, specifically the 2009 vintage Europa Vägatlas we used for planning our departure and subsequent road trips across the continent.
Since then my cars have included navigation systems and we, as a society, have become more dependent on the technological solutions. These have been useful and certainly more convenient than postit notes on pages of paper maps, but what happens when we get a collision cascade that rips through the constellation? I don’t know lots about how the GPS protocols work, but it seems unlikely that they will cope well with collision avoidance – that would seem to add a significant complexity to the timing nature of the protocols (if anyone knows about this stuff, I’d be up for a geeky conversation about it at some point).
Besides, even putting aside Kessler, there are more and more situations where GPS signals are not to be trusted, with minor perturbations in the received position as a consequence of military activity, even moving the position by a few hundred meters makes the navigation systems next to useless.
And now I have a paper map, one which cannot be disabled by factors far out of my control, allowing me to know where I am even as everyone around me becomes lost.
