Note this is a joke, a play on the word "underclass" versus "underclassMEN", which is a word used in anglo countries to refer to freshman and sophmores at university.  I'm not actually a fan of the "permanent underclass" idea; I think it's dumb (basically for the reasons explained in the astral codex ten "permanent moon ownership" essay).  Hence my attempt to make fun of the idea.

Definitely agree that shooting down GPS satellites (or satellites of any kind, really) is a really agressive move that would make all countries super mad at you, thus probably only happens in a pretty serious "all or nothing" great-power conflict! 

 I'll try to talk more about the military dynamics around GPS in my later post, although I'm not an expert.  My impression is that although militaries do indeed have lots of backup systems, none of them is perfect and some systems (like many existing drones and guided bombs) do rely exclusively on GPS, so losing GPS would still be a big problem even though the military has done a lot of work to try and ensure that it wouldn't be a totally overwhelming catastrophe.

My advice for smart young people just starting university in 2026: be warned -- if you don't graduate from college within the next four years, you risk getting stuck as a freshman forever, thus joining the ranks of the Permanent Underclassmen.

Commercial planes would probably get lost a little bit more often??  (The original incident that motivated the USA to opening up GPS for civilian use was in 1983 when "Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down when it mistakenly entered Soviet airspace".)  But it's not like planes NEED GPS in order to find their way -- commercial aviation is (rightfully) obsessive about safety and redundancy, so planes have lots of ways to stay oriented (even in storms / at night / etc), including:
- Inertial navigation systems: per claude, "Every airliner carries ring-laser-gyro or fiber-optic inertial platforms that track position by integrating acceleration from a known starting point. They need no external signal at all. They drift — on the order of a couple nautical miles per hour of unaided flight — but modern aircraft run multiple IRUs and blend them, and over a typical flight the drift is manageable and bounded by periodic updates."
- A variety of old-school navigation systems that the FAA specifically requires be kept in place precisely as a GPS backup, including for instance "VOR" beacons which are basically radio-signal landmarks scattered across america, emitting simple radio signals that planes can measure their distance & bearing to. (I assume all other developed countries also maintain similar navigation backups.)
- Ground-based flight controllers (ie the people who hang out in those airport control towers) have access to radar systems and thus can see exactly where all the planes are, and help guide planes even if the planes themselves get confused about their position.

You might think "sure, there are backups, but mightn't you still end up with overloaded systems if everyone suddenly has to switch to using unfamiliar backups?"  But it must be the case that aviation is (like the finance industry which has resilient backups for all their precision-timing needs) sufficiently paranoid that their backup systems are actually up to the task of smoothly taking over -- the UK study looked at aviation but considered that the consequences of a 7-day outage would be negligible.  Overally, the situation might be a little bit like the situation with the power grid -- the power grid doesn't need GPS for any of its normal functioning, but GPS timing information is an important tool for debugging / monitoring / maintaining the power grid, so the system gets more fragile without it.  The civil aviation system in theory should be almost unaffected by the loss of GPS, but in practice you've lost one layer of your multilayered swiss-cheese-defense against accidents, so accidents are going to go up slightly.

Of course, for unmanned drones (which in many cases only have GPS), a GPS outage would be disastrous.

For military rather than civilian aviation, I think the airplanes themselves would probably find their way around fine in most circumstances, but GPS-enabled weapons (like JDAM guided bombs) obviously wouldn't work, and the situation on the ground (tanks, vehicles, logistics stuff) would probably get messy in the same way that civilian ports & logistics stuff would get jammed up.

There are definitely some people out there (and these people are overrepresented among hardcore environmentalist types, of course) who seem to indeed have adopted "nature" as a kind of hippie religion that seems to have originated (or intensified) sometime in the 1970s.  But this doesn't strike me as explaining all or most of how ordinary people value nature:

• even many people who believe ACTUAL religions, or who have other sorts of very strong ideologies that provide structure and meaning to their lives, nevertheless often seem to value nature highly in the ways Tandena outlined (spending time visiting national parks, sometimes voting for and donating to conservation programs, sometimes watching documentaties about the natural world, etc).  So it can't be that valuing nature is purely a religion-substitute filling a psychological hole, otherwise we'd see a much stronger anti-correlation between religious/ideological/etc people vs nature-enjoyers?
• Many people certainly seem to treat respect for nature as a "sacred value", and treat the idea of sacrificing nature for other goals as a "taboo tradeoff".  I sympathize with you that this is annoying and economically inefficient.  But many things are considered "sacred values" or "taboo tradeoffs" in human culture, and this doesn't make them 100% religious \ fake.  For instance, people often treat "saving lives" or "protecting children" as sacred values and act as if any related tradeoffs are taboo (even though we are constantly trading off lives vs other things in many parts of society).  But that doesn't mean that "saving lives" is like a secular religion.  In general, many things can be compared to a religion, but IMO this is often less informative than it appears.  ("EA is like a religion!  It has priests: 80k career advisers, temples: EAG conference venues, commandments: blog posts,...")
• I am forgetting the exact Yudkowsky essay(s) where he lambasts people for simply worshipping the mysterious (aka their own state of ignorance) and acting like additional knowledge inevitably ruins the supposedly sublime experience of ineffability that makes life worth living, or whatever.  I agree with yudkowsky that it's dumb when people are like that, and I agree with you that many people take that attitude to nature.  But many others seem eager to learn more about the natural world and appreciate it in a deeper, more rationalist-approved way.  For instance: scientists studying creatures, birders (and other hobby groups like people who like to fish, or scuba dive, or etc), little kids learning about zoo animals, anybody who watches nature documentaries or reads books about nature-related stuff or reads the posted informational signs at national parks, people who like to learn a lot of detailed skills for backpacking in wilderness areas, etc...
• I also think it's probably possible to steelman some version of the common nature vibe of "we should respect nature for its own sake, and not seek to control everything", such that it might come off sounding less dumb than it usually seems. (Even though I expect, after reading such a steelman, I would still be pretty strongly in favor of controlling most things most of the time, to better achieve various goals.) Joe Carlsmith's essay series "Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI", particularly the essay "On Green" is partly about this.

One big point where I do think "nature as religion" matters a lot, though, is in shaping the *environmentalist movement* itself, since the movement is disproportionately steered by people who are really into nature-as-religion.  Therefore our laws/norms about the environment, the way most academics/intellectuals discuss the value of nature, the sorts of things that are considered taboo within environmentalism (eg geoengineering, gene drives, etc), all end up significantly warped by the perspective you described, even though IMO it isn't the main way most ordinary people relate to nature.

Fooming Shoggoths!  (And, more generally, much of the secular-solstice music -- there's already a database full of this somewhere.)

EcoResilience Initiative (https://ecoresilienceinitiative.com) works on this, in particular on non-climate-related stuff.  They agree with Giving Green that, counterintuitively, Good Food Institute (usually talked about by animal-welfare fans) might actually be one of the most promising charities in terms of protecting biodiversity and the environment, because if plant-based meat ever took off in a big way it would have massive effects on agricultural land use (ie much less deforestation & habitat destruction would happen).

They can keep their old branding if they just put an asterisk after "hours" and explain that 80,000 Hours* now refers to human-worker-hour-equivalent efforts spent on highly-effective cause areas (aka "effective compute"), not necessarily literal human labor hours.