I Know Where I'm Going (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine September 2002

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The Hard Way
I Know Where I'm Going (Cont.)

THE GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM is a network of 24 satellites that circle the globe once every 12 hours, ceaselessly transmitting precise location, velocity, and time information via low-power radio signals. The system was conceived by the U.S. government as a Cold War military project, cost $10 billion to develop, was inaugurated in 1973, and is operated by the Department of Defense. GPS technology was first made available to the public in 1983.

Who hasn't at some point in his life been seduced by a map? Maps are like mirrors in the room of your mind, expanded to the very edges of the globe.

In recent years, GPS receivers have become as compact and lightweight as cell phones. Switch one on, wait just a minute (while the battery-powered receiver interpolates the distance and time from a minimum of three satellites), and the little screen will give you your exact coordinates. Military receivers can achieve close to a one-meter level of accuracy, while civilian receivers are now accurate to within 15 meters. Day or night, rain or shine, anywhere in the world, you can pinpoint where you are.

Since time immemorial, human beings navigated by the stars, stories, and rudimentary maps—frequently getting lost, often not returning home. It's unclear exactly when the compass was invented, but by the 12th century Chinese mariners sailing from Canton to Sumatra were using some kind of magnetic device to set their course. By the 13th century, Arab merchants and Viking explorers were wielding primitive compasses as they traded and pillaged. By 1519, when Magellan's fleet embarked on its circumnavigation of the globe, marine compasses were standard sailing equipment, revolutionary tools for exploration, if not safety. (Only one of the explorer's five ships managed to limp back into Seville in 1522, carrying a crew of 18 survivors, a tiny remnant of the 270 sailors who'd left three years earlier. Magellan was not one of them. He was killed in a skirmish in the Philippines.)

Meanwhile, rough-and-ready precursors of the sextant—a mariner's device for celestial navigation—had been used for hundreds of years. But the modern sextant, the second revolutionary navigational tool, wasn't invented until the mid-18th century.

Hence, for much of the past millennium, the heavens and the simple, unassuming compass guided mankind across oceans, over continents, through deserts, into wars.

GPS technology is the next revolution in navigation. When I return home from the Himalayas, I get one.

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