GPS: How the Military Built Your Fitness Tracker
Welcome to the orbital navigation terminal, where knowing precisely where you are doesn’t guarantee you know where you’re going—though it does ensure the universe can track your detours through residential neighbourhoods with atomic precision. In this examination of GPS, we discover that the infrastructure built for targeting enemies became infrastructure for targeting restaurants, and both require identical levels of temporal accuracy from caesium clocks orbiting at 20,000 kilometres.
Our quantum-coherent correspondent guides us through the MapQuest era—when humanity discovered it could print the future and then immediately get lost around step eleven—a young project manager’s 1993 presentation predicting smartphones, ride-sharing, and precision agriculture (dismissed as fantasy), and the discovery that sometimes the bridge between vision and reality is six pages of badly formatted directions that prove you were heading in the right direction all along. Meanwhile, the real science reveals why GPS requires Einstein’s theories of relativity to function, how President Clinton’s 2000 decision to end Selective Availability enabled every location-based service we use today, and why even Russia—builder of their own GLONASS system—still uses American GPS because sometimes your competitor’s infrastructure is just too convenient to ignore.
Navigation Warning: This episode contains concepts such as “atomic clocks in orbit,” “relativistic time dilation,” and “the brief era when people printed directions from MapQuest and called it revolutionary.” Listeners may experience side effects including nostalgia for obsolete navigation methods, appreciation for invisible orbital infrastructure, and the uncomfortable realization that nuclear submarines and teenage pizza delivery drivers now rely on identical satellite timing precision. Side effects are considered normal and may persist until you question why your phone knows where you are better than you do.
The Military Problem That Civilians Solved Differently
GPS emerged from a fundamentally military challenge: how do nuclear submarines know their exact position for missile launches without surfacing? Pre-GPS navigation was a collection of imperfect compromises—celestial navigation with sextants, ground-based radio beacons that revealed your position to enemies, and dead reckoning that accumulated errors with every nautical mile. The Cold War demanded navigational independence: something in space, broadcasting continuously, immune to terrestrial interference.
The solution required atomic clocks in orbit maintaining nanosecond precision, because the brutal arithmetic is simple: light travels 300 metres per microsecond. A one-microsecond timing error translates directly to 300-metre position error. If you want ten-metre accuracy for targeting, you need nanosecond precision for timing. And because those satellites orbit at 20,000 kilometres travelling at 14,000 kilometres per hour, Einstein’s relativity isn’t optional—it’s in the navigation equations. Without corrections for time dilation, GPS would drift by 11 kilometres per day.
The military spent $12 billion deploying 24 satellites and deliberately degraded civilian signals through Selective Availability until 2000, limiting accuracy to 100 metres. Then President Clinton ended the degradation, civilian accuracy improved tenfold overnight, and every location-based service we use today became possible. The infrastructure built for targeting missiles became infrastructure for finding coffee shops. Both require atomic clock precision. Only one required imagination to recognize the other was possible.
The Corporate Parallel: It’s like spending billions building a system for one specific purpose, then watching civilians repurpose it for applications you never imagined and dismissed as impractical when someone suggested them. The military wanted targeting infrastructure. They built the internet of location. The return on investment is immeasurable—an entire civilian economy built on free access to signals that cost billions to maintain. Sometimes the most strategic infrastructure is the kind you let everyone use, even if they’re primarily using it to prove they weren’t actually late—the map simply changed its mind.
The MapQuest Era (Or: How We Learned to Print the Future)
Between 1996 and 2008, humanity experienced a peculiar transitional period: people discovered they could get computer-calculated directions from the internet, print them on paper, and then get lost anyway because they were reading page four whilst driving past the turn on page three. MapQuest served 82 million directions per day at its peak—82 million daily opportunities for humans to miss step eleven whilst attempting to execute complex navigation and vehicle operation simultaneously.
The directions were aggressively specific: “Head east on Maple Street toward Oak Avenue (0.3 miles). Turn right onto Oak Avenue (1.7 miles).” Six pages, carefully stapled, optimistically suggesting a 47-minute journey that would inevitably take twice as long because the pages got shuffled somewhere around direction fourteen. People kept emergency pens in their cars for writing simplified versions on the backs of the printouts: “Right out of station. Three miles. Large sign.”
This was revolutionary at the time. It proved people wanted computer-calculated routes—they just couldn’t execute them because the computer was at home whilst they were in a car. The solution seemed obvious in retrospect: put the computer in the car. When the iPhone 3G launched in 2008 with GPS and turn-by-turn navigation, the era of printed directions ended almost immediately. Car GPS devices went from £500 premium products to obsolete in under a decade.
The Vision Nobody Believed: In 1993, a junior project manager suggested exactly this future: phones that knew where they were, turn-by-turn navigation calculated automatically, routes printed before leaving home. His presentation was dismissed in seven minutes. Senior management explained that we have maps and they work fine. His report was filed under “Impractical Civilian Applications” and later lost when the archives were converted to parking spaces. He left for Quantum Improbability Solutions and built every industry he’d described. Sometimes the bridge between vision and reality is a stack of badly formatted directions that get you lost but prove you were heading in the right direction all along.
From Missiles to Pokémon GO
The industries that emerged from civilian GPS access read like a checklist from that dismissed 1993 presentation: ride-sharing services that know where both car and passenger are (Uber and Lyft), delivery tracking in real-time (following your pizza with obsessive precision), precision agriculture with centimetre-accurate fertilizer application (farmers paying to know which exact square metre needs attention), fleet logistics optimizing global supply chains, location-based advertising (Google’s entire business model), fitness tracking creating billion-pound industries from step counting, and financial markets using GPS timing for microsecond transaction synchronization across global exchanges.
But perhaps nothing demonstrated GPS’s complete cultural penetration quite like Pokémon GO. In 2016, millions of people wandered cities hunting imaginary creatures whose locations were tied to GPS coordinates. The game made nearly a billion dollars in its first year by answering a question nobody thought to ask: what if we used satellite navigation designed for nuclear missiles to make people walk to specific locations to collect fictional animals?
The military spent $12 billion building infrastructure so teenagers could catch Pikachu in the park. Both applications require atomic clock precision. Only one makes any logical sense. And yet both work perfectly, because the infrastructure doesn’t care what you use it for—it just keeps shouting the time at Earth like the universe’s most punctual town criers, completely indifferent to whether you’re coordinating nuclear launches or arguing about restaurant locations.
Multiple positioning systems now operate simultaneously: GPS from America, GLONASS from Russia, Galileo from Europe, BeiDou from China. Modern smartphones use signals from all systems, achieving sub-metre accuracy. They’re part of orbital infrastructure that’s become remarkably crowded—over 9,000 active satellites, including SpaceX’s 5,000-satellite Starlink constellation. But amongst all this, GPS remains arguably the most strategically important. It’s the invisible utility everything else depends on. Your Starlink connection might tell you where the nearest coffee shop is, but GPS tells your phone where you are.
Join us for this exploration of orbital infrastructure and missed opportunities, where MapQuest proved humans wanted computer-calculated routes but couldn’t execute them whilst driving, a young project manager’s 1993 predictions were dismissed as fantasy before becoming billion-dollar industries, and the real science reveals why relativistic corrections are mandatory for navigation and how atomic clocks shouting the time from space enable everything from missile guidance to Pokémon hunting. Because in the multiverse of strategic foresight, we’re all just trying to recognize when military infrastructure accidentally enables civilian revolutions—one satellite broadcast at a time.