I've done a bit of reading over the years and it has often occurred to me how fragile Bitcoin is when it comes to network outages - especially considering that something such as China's firewall can essentially split their  hashing power from the network with something as trivial as bigger block sizes...

So that begs the question: Shouldn't Bitcoin be more resilient against network disruption or outages? These are, after all, easy to engineer on a global scale given access to enough software/network security vulnerabilities.

Has this been discussed or addressed in any level of detail? Or is the consensus that Bitcoin will be allowed to die along with the internet, should that ever happen?

Isn't this a near term doomsday scenario worth picking apart?

As I understand, the difficulty will just decrease if less nodes are online... and the network will fragment - and when it links up again, there will be a lot of orphaned blocks in the smaller islands... (so anyone spending Bitcoin after a hasrate- or difficulty drop is doing so at their own peril - BTW I've not seen this made clear anywhere, shoudn't wallets detect- and warn of these situations? )

Is there any proposal to mitigate this, for example, by instead of dropping difficulty, simply increasing block time, so as to give isolated nodes time time to chime in? Say someone or something takes out the internet... and all we have is sporadic bursts of communication via satellite or long-range radio links... shouldn't Bitcoin cater to this sort of asynchronous operation? Or will that be left to the more conventional commodities...? What is Bitcoin's vision of its own future and what is within the scope of its reasonable capabilities?

This would make sense to me - as once a certain hashrate has been reached, we can be fairly confident that more hashing power is much more likely to follow. Even if we lost the ability to improve hashrates... and a significant portion of hashing hardware gets destroyed, it's unlikely to push us back beyond a certain margin. Can this be intelligently- and reasonably be estimated, accommodated and incorporated into the protocol?

And while on that topic... are there any possible mechanisms by which to enforce or incentivise certain protocol ideologies?

Or can it be fairly proven in a simulation that any such attempts are only likely to cause more harm than good?

(And off topic - has anyone seen any thought work on interplanetary currency exchange?)