Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”.
Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Is it a black swan though? I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit. Note, I'm not disputing you. This got me thinking about the nature of invention and discovery.
GPS is a pretty cool case. It's not the first navigation system out there, not even close. But the designers did something pretty forward-thinking and a bit risky: they made a big chart of all the different ways to implement GPS. A system where the ground based receivers has to talk back to the satellite. A system where every user needs their own atomic clock. A system where every user needs to communicate with a satellite. A system where every user needs to communicate with a separate ground station. Systems whose accuracy decreased at higher velocities. etc. The final solution was one that required more satellites, but allowed users to determine their own 4D position without needing any outside resources. The only downside was that it required portable atomic clocks, which didn't exist yet.
Not sure if that's black swan territory or not, but IMO it was a great piece of forward-thinking that made GPS useful beyond just the original military applications.
The most amazing thing to me about GPS is that it required compensation for relativistic effects to work. It is as far as I know the most direct impact relativity has on our every day life in a way that just sticking to Newton would have led to the project being abandoned or to the discovery of relativity if Einstein had not given it to us on a platter.
The most interesting thing to me about relativistic corrections for GPS is that we didn't even have to know about or understand relativity in advance in order for GPS to work.
That sounds strange .. but .. there are many small corrections that need to be applied to "straight forward" triangulated fixing off of moving monuments (term from surveying), relativitic time shift being just one.
There are several recent HN threads about Kalman filters [e].
It's possible (and more or less roughly what already happens) to record GPS fixes against a fixed master station and compute the time series error twixt the naive computation and known location (or, indeed, mesh of locations across (say) Australia) and generate a Kalman filter to correct and return more precise positions for moving recievers in the mesh area.
Had we not been aware of relativity we very likely would have discovered it via the time slip 'error' terms in the correction filter.
In a similar manner we have improved our understanding for atmospheric wobble, continental drip [1], and other fine effects.
No. You're correct. GPS is the culmination of 50 years of work in radionavigation, and it wasn't the first satellite navigation system either.
As so often, the refinement of the technique makes it so widely available and effective that, without being revolutionary in principle, it becomes revolutionary in effect.
Telecommunications is like that. A century ago a telex from Australia to England could make it from desk to desk in under an hour. The Internet is not revolutionary in that sense. And yet it is revolutionary anyway.
> I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit.
I don’t know about that. Maybe it was. What I do know is that we have documented speculation about satelite based navigation the days right after the launch of Sputnik.
American scientist figured out the orbit of Sputnik independently from the Russians by measuring the dopler shift of the radio transmission with their radios. Then knowing where their radio is located they used an iterative optimisation process to identify the orbital parameters of the satelite. Immediately there they were talking about how if the orbit of the satelite were known they could use the same process backwards to fix their location. That was 21 years before the launch of the first GPS satelite.
Now, that is not exactly how GPS signals work, and with good reasons. But it is the first documented seed of the idea of satelite based navigation that I am aware of.
> Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”.
How informative of you.
GPS does things better but we can do generally the same things without it.
Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all GPS functionality overnight, think about what would happen if we had a decade to implement replacements.
The loss of accuracy wouldn't be that important.
> the Haeber-Bosch proces
That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including.
> or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a broad evolution. I'm not sure.
But my point was that the list was too long, not that it didn't have any valid examples.
It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.