Chad Comello

• “GPS and its competitors meant that for the first time in human history we could see the world as a whole. Suddenly, we really knew where things were – and when. GPS made it easier than ever to kill people, but also to rescue them; to better understand our world, and yet continue to destroy it. This makes it impossible to separate GPS from many of the major technological leaps of the last century.”
• “The Second World War was the first around-the-clock battle fought on land, air and sea – and across the electromagnetic spectrum. Over the course of the war, navigation and radar systems rapidly proliferated, with each surviving piece of kit refined for its own specialities: bombing raids, detecting U-boats, early warning systems.”
• “By the turn of the 20th century, long-distance seafaring was no longer as dangerous as it once was, though it was far from risk-free (Titanic, after all, sank in 1912). But it was really the arrival of aviation – and, nearly in lockstep, the rise of radio in those frenzied years of the 1920s and 1930s – that began to reshape humans’ relationship with navigation and time once again. Every time humans wanted to move faster, we needed new, ever more sophisticated clocks.”
• America’s post-Sputnik satellites: “From a scientific point of view, these discoveries about the earth’s shape were utterly groundbreaking. The satellites’ fine-grained orbits were answering questions that had dogged astronomers since antiquity, and would go on to form the basis of modern earth and climate science. They were building a map of the earth’s shape and gravity at a mind-boggling level of complexity, far beyond what humans had expected from our weird and wonderful earth.”
• Inspired by U.S.’s struggle to precision-bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War, United States Air Force engineers  met at Pentagon in 1973 to plan new satellite system to replace redundant efforts of various branches; birth of modern GPS
• “Once a receiver is in time with the atomic clocks in the satellites circling our earth, it is pulsing in sync with all kinds of other global digital networks that rely on GPS time, from financial networks to energy grids to traffic lights. This is why GPS, although known for being a navigation tool, is perhaps best understood as a tool for transferring and coordinating time.”
• “And so, in 1983, with the world teetering on the cusp of nuclear war, the president of the United States offered up a historically telling contradiction. Here was a US military project designed to more accurately tire nuclear missiles, funded by another US military project designed to make sure such a terrible outcome never occurred. If nothing else, it was a sign of the times. So often, it was impossible to tell where the nuclear arms race stopped and the attempt to rein in nuclear proliferation started. It was never easy to draw the line between a military lab and a civilian map, between science and satellites, computers and missiles, a Cold War and everyday peace.”
• “GPS’s essential paradox has always been its weakness — the limits of physics that make it vulnerable to distortion and manipulation — paired with its absolutely staggering usefulness, its near-irreplaceable elegance in solving all kinds of problems that, for the most part, nobody pre-GPS even thought they had. That GPS is still so dominant is a tribute to the forward-thinking creativity of its architects in the 1970s. But virtually no one, including those same architects, anticipated how widely it would be adopted, and how profoundly we would be shaped in the process. This system of satellites and radio signals has given us new and miraculous ways to experience the world, and new expectations: of precision, of transparency, of accuracy, of trust — expectations that have then been subtly undermined.”