Samanth Subramanian

So that takes up a share of the traffic, but also there's redundancy in the marine cable ecosystem itself.

So like if one cable gets cut, there's enough cables crossing the Atlantic, for example, to take up the burden of the data that was severed.

Oh, it's a big deal.

I mean, first, there's undersea geography, right?

I mean, the topography of the ocean floor is obviously not flat, flat, flat.

There are crevasses and gorges and there's currents that go one way or another.

There's like steep lips of rocky cliffs.

And so you have to kind of avoid all of this.

You know, Tonga, which I mentioned earlier, has the unfortunate.

situation of sitting in that Pacific ring of fire.

So there's an underwater volcano not far away, and that's liable to break its cables.

And it has in the past, even before the one that I talk about.

So undersea geology, geography, big deal.

But even oversea geography is a massive deal.

So for example, if you want to come from

Asia to Europe, as with a ship, it's much cheaper to come through the Suez Canal rather than to go around South Africa.

And, you know, in the Neil Stephenson essay I talked about, he makes a big deal out of this.

It's a really elegant way.

He goes to Alexandria and

where a bunch of cables are sort of crisscrossing over from Asia to Europe and vice versa.