Out in Front - Say You Want a Revolution

June 1, 2008 By: Alan Cameron GPS World

Well, you know.

We all want to change the world.

The new signals in orbit augur a new age. Galileo’s satellite now transmitting the interoperable MBOC, and GPS L5 broadcast capability rising soon, together will usher in applications like unto which we have not yet seen.

Increased accuracy, availability, integrity, robustness — these words have been used so often to advertise future GNSS capabilities, perhaps we don’t fully grasp what they will mean. I believe they carry full revolutionary fervor and import. The logistical and social landscapes of the future will radically change as a consequence of these new signals and all they will bring.

Transportation, land and air, will become more automated and efficient, to an extent we can hardly imagine today. Personal communications and location services will afford an awareness of people and things that is nearly extrasensory. Survey and construction, already precise, will lock and load this driver for untold advantage.

It’s not that we haven’t already tasted some of these benefits. But what’s to come as a result of these new signals I liken to the full-on Industrial Revolution of the second half of the 19th century, when factories ineradicably altered the face of the Earth and changed the course of nations and peoples, as compared to the early stages of industrialization, the first mills, smelters, iron bridges, and railways of the 1820s to 1850s.

Or to take a more current example, automobiles appeared commercially around 1905, and by the 1920s were fairly prevalent. Not until technological and infrastructure advances took hold in the late 1940s and ’50s did car culture sweep everything else aside to dominate modern society. A parallel timeline, staggered a decade later, would show how aviation’s second great advance altered business forever.

We behold a similar shift to overdrive for global navigation satellite systems. Or rather, for the highly precise, anywhere, anytime measurement that they supply.

In the nick of time. Crises besetting the world — I log these chiefly under the headings environment and war — could conceivably be resolved with the help of GNSS teamed with other high-precision sensors. And a good deal of wisdom.

Truly efficient use of resources in transport and other logistics, orders of magnitude higher than today. Visionary planning of communities, land and marine agriculture, and infrastructure, far beyond today’s most advanced stages. Precise real-time monitoring and equitable distribution of material and thus wealth, to undermine the causes of war. The next wave of GNSS, driven by the new signals we witness today, could make it happen.

Thus might come to fruition other words of the late John Lennon.

“Imagine . . .”

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