T-Minus 0: Launch into Chaos

Introducing a new series on planetary technology

For thousands of years, humankind moved at two top speeds: that of a horse on land or the wind at sea. The Ancient Greeks and Romans used something called a “periplus” to navigate this slower world. A simple logbook, listing ports of call and landmarks, a crew armed with the right “peripli” could sail around seas by dead reckoning alone. Our world is not the same. Complicated is an understatement; hyperconnected is not hyperbole. A simple periplus is no longer sufficient for a captain to navigate their organizations through our digital grid. This is the introduction to a new logbook, one intended to help guide readers through our impressive technological innovations and the impending civilizational changes they herald.

First came the Industrial Revolution, where we broke the Tyranny of the Wagon Equation. The steam engine, the iron-horse, shrank the world by rail and paddle-turn. The spread of information accelerated. Then, armed with the internal combustion engine, we took to the road and the sky. On July 16, 1945, in the deserts of New Mexico, we unlocked the power of the atom - a tool we still hesitate to fully employ (for peaceful purposes) due to fear of misuse or mishap. In 1961, fear be damned, Yuri Gagarin rode the fires of a chemically-fueled rocket to orbit as we slipped the surly bonds of Earth. Humankind has now set a new speed record. Last Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe passed within 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) of the Sun, reaching a top speed of 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph); 0.064% the speed of light. We’ve almost broken the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation by raw engineering and economies of scale.

Today, thousands of satellites orbit the Earth at faster than a mile per second. They photograph our planet, route our phone calls and cat photos, track weather systems, and help us navigate. Bigger and more powerful rockets bring more payloads and more people to orbit. Nearly unimaginable quantities of data, much of it gathered and transported by these satellites, stream via radio and fiber optic cable at the speed of light. Insatiable Artificial Intelligence models consume this data, bringing us new tools from automatic email summaries and meeting assistants, to increasingly competent software engineering and self-driving cars. These advances are paving the way for other new technologies that can help explore, monitor, feed, modify, and power our planet on a global scale. Fueled not only by vast amounts of energy and internationally-connected supply chains, these new endeavors require constant streams of capital, sourced from a worldwide financial community. Meanwhile, geopolitical upheavals threaten to roil the markets and disrupt the status quo - held relatively steady since the end of the Cold War - at a rate we haven’t seen in decades.

Space, the final frontier, is the latest step in integrating all other domains - physical, regional, digital, economic, political, and social. According to the Harvard Business Review, every company needs a space strategy. The two largest militaries, those of the United States and the People’s Republic of China, both operate independent space forces, while dozens of other countries are quickly developing military space capabilities. Space-based services have enabled job opportunities, economic development, and education for communities on remote islands and above the Arctic Circle. Commercial space companies now conduct operations previously on the scale of nation-states. Our modern world - from Global Navigation Satellite Systems to social media networks - is now inseparable from space. So is our future.

On the Kardashev scale, imagined by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, a Type 1 civilization is one that has harnessed all the energy available on its planet. We’re not there yet. But we do need a way to start classifying, discussing, and evaluating these technologies with global sources of finance and fuel, advancing at accelerating speeds, with impacts and networks that span continents, the heavens, and even the ocean floor. Let’s call them planetary technologies.

Tech is moving forward; as a society, we’re at a crossroads. In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan described a fearful vision:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

“Chaos” is derived from the Ancient Greek “kháos”, meaning a vast chasm, void, or the empty darkness of space. “Terrain” comes to us from the Latin “terra”, meaning Earth. Together the geological term “Chaos Terrain” refers to areas on a planet's surface where physical features are jumbled and enmeshed together into complicated, tumultuous patterns. Found on Mars, Mercury, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Pluto, these regions generally denote the presence of ice and could provide extremely difficult for future planetary explorers to navigate. In an etymological sense, “Chaos Terrain” literally combines space and Earth.

In this Chaos Terrain series, I’ll look at these planetary technologies: the companies and space infrastructure behind their development; their impact on life on Earth; and the geopolitical implications they hold in store. Our creations span the planet and the skies, and we stand at the threshold of a fundamental civilizational change. Will we cross it, or fall into the abyss?