Page 42 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

18 PELTON

AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX
AND INTERDISCIPLINARY WORLD

This book is focused on satellites. The information here is thus largely based on
how satellite technology came to be, what is or is not available from satellite sys-
tems, and what impact they have made on our world—past, present, or future.
That is not to say that satellites are the source of all modern telecommunications
or networking systems. Clearly they are part of a "telecommunications gestalt"
that now enables planetary communications to work with great efficiency at an in-
creasingly low cost.
Satellites have made an enormous impact, as the following chapters clearly ex-
plain. Nevertheless, companion systems and technologies are also a key part of
the digital revolution that is bringing us such change at a constantly increasing
pace. If we look around, there are other candidates that might be labeled the
"prime movers" of modern change. Thus, we now find an array of "kissing
cousin" technologies that create electronic intimacy and information formation
and exchange. The list of prime change agents for Western technological society
could certainly include computers, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, space
exploration, telecommunications devices, the Internet, missiles, atomic weapons,
lasers, fiber optics, or TV.
We do not dispute that these other technologies have also had a profound effect
on the world and have also reshaped our lives. In fact we try to show in this inter-
disciplinary investigation of the field of satellite communications just how com-
munications and information technologies fit together. It takes a good deal of en-
gineering and standards making to create seamless networks that enable global
media, global business, global science, global education, global health care, and
global news to all work together. That having been said, the impact on satellite
technology and modern planetary systems simply cannot be denied.
The following chapters describe how satellites can and will fundamentally al-
ter the state and nature of human existence. Satellite news and entertainment have
made us more globally aware and interconnected. Today, telephone connections
and satellite-based Internet penetrate to the core of urban ghettoes, the
battlegrounds of the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the remote reaches of
schools and clinics in the midst of jungles and deserts. Satellites reach from uni-
versity laboratories and mountain top telescopes to the living rooms of houses—
all the way from the United States to Borneo.
By a combination of history, political analysis, business, and trade informa-
tion, a diverse mix of people who have lived through the satellite revolution will
attempt to explain, probe, and analyze how satellite communications have swept
forward the wild fire of change, innovation, and globalism.
Today the six sextillion-ton mass of dirt, stone, water, and air that orbits the
sun as the third planet in the solar system is much the same in its chemical and
physical composition as it was thousands or even millions of years ago. Yet in