Macroscopically sustainable networking: on internet quines

Abstract

The Internet stands atop an unseen industrial system required for its continued growth, operation, and maintenance. Its scale could not have been achieved without this reliance, and its dependencies---ranging from sophisticated manufacturing facilities to limited raw materials---make it vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions, which are more likely as human society faces global ecological limits. We introduce the concept of an Internet quine, a metaphor that represents a collection of devices, protocols, manufacturing facilities, software tools, and other related components that is self-bootstrapping and capable of being used (by engineers or autonomously) to reproduce itself and all the needed components of the Internet. In this paper, we study the nature of Internet quines and discuss how they could be built. We also attempt to identify a collection of such tools and facilities, and how small and inexpensive they can be made.