Page 36 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

1. SATELLITES AS WORLDWIDE CHANGE AGENTS 13

poorest and least educated societies behind? Today we talk of the issue of the
"Digital Divide," but the potential scale of the problem is not well understood.
The prospects of staggering gaps of information on one small planet are funda-
mental and sobering to contemplate.
This issue of the Digital Divide could easily escalate rapidly in only 20 years.
The United Nations, national aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations
that provide international aid and relief services have now identified the Digital
Divide as one of the world's most important issues and problems. Satellite net-
works can serve to extend this problem by providing advanced electronic systems
to promote the growth and expansion of multinational business enterprises or
minimize this problem by the provision of teleeducation and telehealth services. It
is likely that advanced satellite networks will serve both causes.
Yet another way to consider the issue of satellites and their role in the future
life of our evolving "E-Sphere" or "Worldwide Mind" is that global information
is being collected and stored at an astonishing rate. In mathematical terms, the
growth of information globally is not just accelerating, but growing in accord with
a third-order exponential. This is to say that global information systems are not
merely accelerating—the rate of acceleration is increasing. This is what physicists
call jerk for obvious reasons.
More simply we can say that the generation of global information is growing at
least some 200,000 times faster than our global population. (This, in mathematical
terms, is a swift turtle trying to catch the Space Shuttle.) The problems of surviv-
ing and adapting to such a "Super Speed" world are not small. In fact we are now
looking to future satellites and computers that can operate hundreds of times (if
not thousands of times) faster than today's impressive machines. These machines
of tomorrow, most likely powered by concepts known as quantum communica-
tions and quantum computing, may possibly allow us to keep up with the flow of
new information that will flow across our increasingly small "intellectual
telecity," which I call the "E-Sphere" or the "Worldwide Mind."
Intel has already indicated that by 2005 or so it will have desktop computers that
process at speeds of 10 GHz from a single chip. This means that easily accessible
computers for the mass consumer market can process the equivalent of a human
lifetime of reading and speaking in a single second. Satellite links in another decade
could be operating at the hundreds of Gigabit level and fiber optic connections pro-
viding connections at the terabit/second level. (This means moving the equivalent
of several Libraries of Congress per minute.)
The continued expansion of digital services in the areas of video, multimedia,
broadband Internet, and IP services—barring some catastrophic disaster—will
thus only continue to mushroom in the coming years. This increased speed of
processing and broadband communications will give rise to a staggering array
of new services.
The speed with which this is projected to occur over the decade ahead is shown
in Fig. 1.3, with the different shadings identifying existing, new, and projected