The story of GPS and its impact on our natural homing instinct is both fascinating and unsettling
 |
| With an iPhone to hand, and a signal, no one need ever be without bearings again. |
The desire of human beings to know where exactly they are on the planet, and more to the point how they might get home, has a vivid history. In the opening chapter of his suitably precise and fascinating account of the modern evolution of this desire, Greg Milner goes back to the extraordinary feats of the aboriginal Polynesians, who somehow explored and dispersed across the vast Pacific in outrigger canoes with sails made from woven leaves.
The islanders apparently learned how to navigate thousands of miles eastward, against prevailing wind and current, using mind maps of stars triangulated in relation to known specks of islands; as they neared land they utilised a close knowledge of cloud formations and the patterns of birds in flight andbioluminescence in the sea. They factored all these observations hour by hour against speed and wind resistance, and somehow found their way in the world. Pretty much all that knowledge, the ways of seeing that allowed them to do that, has disappeared.
In its place came technology: from John Harrison’s celebrated chronometer, “which facilitated Britain’s mastery over the oceans” to the various military-accelerated innovations that followed, culminating in the possibilities opened up in space by the first satellites. In 1970, by Milner’s reckoning, “literally hundreds” of different satellite-based navigation ideas were being tested, both by the US and Russian military, in a cartographer’s proxy of the cold war arms race.
A US air force officer named Brad Parkinson became the John Harrison of the prototype global positioning system (GPS) in 1980 but had a hard time selling it. Though the Pentagon kept pressing the advantages of Parkinson’s work, it was not until the Gulf war that the military grasped them. GPS was not a navigation system like those that they already possessed, but an active “guidance” system; the three modest letters initially spelt out “a new and improved way to bring death from above”.
In Milner’s telling, Parkinson comes across as something of a purist in the art of devastation: “what happened in World War II was a travesty,” he observes at one point. “There was no precision weapons delivery. Bombs were delivered helter-skelter everywhere. They were as much an element of terror as an element of actually destroying things.”
 |
| Space arms race: satellite-based navigation opened up endless possibilities for the US and Russian military. |
Parkinson posted the tripartite goal of GPS on his office wall: “The mission of this program office is to: drop five bombs in the same hole – and build a cheap set that navigates – and don’t you forget it.” The 100,000 airborne missions that were the prelude to Operation Desert Storm, delivering 88,500 tonnes of bombs, were the test case of GPS. The system subsequently allowed on the ground the first “large-scale, deep desert advance in the history of warfare”. When the war was over, GPSwas used to map the coordinates of unexploded mines over an area twice the size of greater London. Nothing on the surface of the Earth need ever be lost again.
At least that was the plan. Once the military effectiveness of GPS was proven, it was very quickly adapted to everyday life. Milner outlines the timeline of this trust in the new technology of satnavs and Google maps as a parable of our shifting relationship with digital innovation.
Curiosity became reliance became faith. With an iPhone to hand, and a decent signal, no one need ever be unmoored or without bearings again. Milner expertly deconstructs the implications of this monumental shift in human life. GPS is, of course, not without its unforeseen consequences. There are the inevitable tales of drivers who follow the spoken instruction of their GPS system to the edges of cliffs and into lakes and down footpaths, with the excuse “it kept saying the path was a road”.
There is, too, the mounting evidence that in relying on GPS and the mapping apps on our smartphones to orient us, we lose a part of who we are and how we think. It seems the famous research that revealed how London cab drivers who have done the knowledge actually changed the structure of their brains, may have a converse. If we never use our mind-mapping abilities – our instinctive accumulation of data about where we have come from and where we are headed – but instead outsource that function to our screens, it is quite possible, according to the scientist who did the cab driver study, that “you’d actually get a reduction in the size of the hippocampus”, the part of the brain that remembers our coordinates and stores familiar routes.
And there is, of course, a further implication of the technology, which Milner perhaps innocently concludes to be “neutral”. While GPS lets us know where we are, to within a few centimetres at any one time, it also lets everyone else who cares to – employers, police, whoever – locate us as well. “Let’s get lost”, that persuasive romantic idea, is no longer quite an option.
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment