‘Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World’ by Katherine Dunn

“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…