Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n The experts warned that Australians are unaware just how dependent they are on space, and how vulnerable that connection is to enemy attacks and solar flares.<\/p>\n It\u2019s \u201cnot science fiction\u201d, the Optus satellite and space systems head, Nick Leake, said.<\/p>\n He described ATM networks going down, emergency services losing their situational awareness, aircraft navigation degrading, Defence losing secure communications and remote communities being entirely cut off.<\/p>\n Aviation, freight and energy grid communications all rely on satellites and financial systems could face \u201cimmediate cascading failure\u201d, he said. People may only realise their service is being delivered by a satellite when they lose it.<\/p>\n \u201cMost Australians have no idea that space is part of their everyday life,\u201d Leake said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t science fiction. This is how critical satellite infrastructure is. Australia has one of the highest per capita dependencies on satellite infrastructure in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, it\u2019s largely unguarded.\u201d<\/p>\n Flinders University adjunct professor Jackie Craig AM is an expert in cyber and virtual warfare and an incident management team leader with the South Australian state emergency service.<\/p>\n She said emergency services are \u201cincreasingly dependent on increasingly vulnerable systems\u201d.<\/p>\n Australians are not aware of how dependent they are on space and how vulnerable that connection is to solar flares, experts say. Photograph: Solar Dynamics Observatory\/AP<\/p>\n She said they now teach members to navigate with street directories and maps instead of phones \u2013 a once ubiquitous skill that has become lost in the age of Google Maps.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we discovered is the young people of the digital revolution can\u2019t actually use a UBD [street directory]. They\u2019re also very poor at reading and using maps,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of us can\u2019t navigate.\u201d<\/p>\n
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