Dr. Plastikaa, I presume
Here you've conflated the physical Internet with its information content, right? And you've got all this binary encoded information either zipping around in packets or lying resident in some archives somewhere, correct? Now you're wondering whether there is a plausable scenario in which all of this data and its support infrastructure can go away? Well, as you know, IP packets have a TTL (time-to-live) parameter so that they can't reasonably be expected to float around forever. And the archives on HDs have to be stored somewhere (tapes, optical disks) which in turn have to be nursed along, error checked, and recopied every decade or so because the physical media deteriorates. Which in turn requires competent human technicians tasked with that functionality. And that last link in the chain is the problem worrying all the academics I know who even bother to think about the future. Right now in the US the National Education Association bemoans the fact that the functional illiteracy rate is pushing 55 percent (!). Functional literacy is defined as the reading skills required for an entry level clerical job and the average high school graduate can't even meet that milestone. If this trend continues worldwide then who's going to be around in 20 years to maintain and run all the machines? The information space will just fade away.
On that gloomy note, I kind of liked the alien invasion idea better
