Page 33 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

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World population has expanded by over 3 billion people in the last 40 years. Fur-
ther, according to UN projections, the people to be educated in the next 40 years
outnumber all those people educated since the dawn of human society. Satellites, in
terms of expanding international business, broadening international scientific inter-
change, increasing media distribution, and extending Internet to the world commu-
nity, have often driven this curve of change.
In fact if we look at the 5-million-year history of humankind and proto-humans
as being represented by a 10,000-story building that is 20 miles high, we find that
the last 40 years (the time that we have had broadband global communications ca-
pability via satellite) represent only a matter of some inches of space on the top
floor of this imaginary megastructure (see Fig. 1.1).
Yet if we were to envision a building representing not human history, but the
accumulation of global information (Fig. 1.2), we see a dramatically different
building from this perspective. The top 8,500 stories of the building of global in-
formation would have been built since the launch of the first operational satellite,
and some 6,000 floors would have been added since the advent of the Internet. In
the next 15 years, if we maintain the same index scale of "progress," the currently
projected amount of information in our building of global information would soar
outward at an even more astonishing rate. In fact the information in our global da-
tabase is now doubling perhaps every 3 years (and some would argue it is dou-
bling in only 9 months time). Thus, the "building of global information" could
mushroom to 160,000 stories (320 miles into space) before we reach 2020, and of
this information only 2,500 stories would predate the age of satellites. This build-
ing, which represents our global database, would represent the ultimate Tower of
Babel and truly reach into outer space.
This is to say that in about 15 years the totality of global information systems
could increase some 16 times in size. Just the information represented by environ-
mental data captured by NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, called the Earth Obser-
vation System, will have increased to nearly 3,000 terabytes of information or the
equivalent of 1,000 Libraries of Congress. If we sought to organize, store, and re-
trieve this remote sensing information on a fully interactive basis on a national
and international scale, this would create problems of communications almost un-
imaginable a few years ago. (Some people even fear that without some new stan-
dards of information management, the Internet as presently organized could reel
out of control due to simple "information overload.")

BEYOND THE GLOBAL VILLAGE INTO THE AGE
OF THE WORLDWIDE MIND

The satellite, other wireless systems, and fiber communications networks will not
only assist in creating the oft-quoted "Global Village," but will soon start to fash-
ion what might be called a "Worldwide Mind." By the end of the 21st century,