About Technology – Paradise lost

About Technology –

Sat-nav feels like state-of-the-art technology, but it’s a century since the first auto-navigation device was invented and, says Joe Moran, there are fears such systems are starting to erode local knowledge.

A report presented recently to the US Congress warned that sat-nav – satellite navigation – systems could start to fail from next year as the US Air Force’s satellites deteriorate. It is yet another episode in our long and fraught relationship with in-car navigation – a phenomenon that is more ancient than you might think.

Today’s sat-navs are really a number of older inventions cobbled together. In fact, mechanical in-car navigation stretches back further than most people would think – 100 years to be precise.

‘If only you’d bought the Jones Live-Map’

The earliest in-car navigation system was the Jones Live-Map, patented as early as 1909. It was a turntable with a pointer on which the driver placed paper disks for individual routes and it measured distance and direction through a cable connected to the front wheels. On early boneshaker cars and bumpy roads, with no opportunity for mid-course corrections, it must have been next to useless.

If the Jones Live-Map had raised expectations among those seeking a reliable resolution to the in-car tensions between harassed driver and hapless navigator, they were to be disappointed. Over the next few decades, car manufacturers experimented with various Heath Robinson-like contraptions to guide drivers, some of which even promised to warn them about road conditions, like rough surfaces and police speed traps. But all of them were basically variations on the Jones-Live Map and about as accurate in giving directions.

It was 1981 before the next significant advance in mechanical navigation – Honda’s Electro Gyrocator, fitted as an optional extra on its Accord model.

The Gyrocator was the first computerised in-car navigation system. Developed in Japan, it was like the Jones Live-Map – a solid-state system that could not respond to the changing narrative of the drive. So if you went wrong the errors soon stacked up and, unlike a broken watch, it would not even be right some of the time.

A British first

However, unbeknown to most motorists, the technology for a real-time system already existed. The US Defense Department had developed GPS (global positioning by satellite) in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that President Reagan made it available for civilian use.

Among new developments, 3-D buildings

The other technological piece of the sat-nav jigsaw was digital mapping, which was pioneered by a tiny British firm, NextBase, which grew out of a circle of friends who met as teenagers, programming some of the earliest home PCs at a school holiday computer camp in Northampton.

In 1988, working from a friend’s spare bedroom in the Surrey stockbroker suburb of Esher, they created the AutoRoute journey planner, a complete digital road map of Britain.

The technology for sat-nav, in other words, was around for several years before it was developed. All these different inventions simply needed to be brought together.

This suggests that the growth of sat-nav is not just about the advance of technology. It speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road. More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater.

Britain’s roads are also an increasingly bewildering place to navigate – a maze of spaghetti junctions, elevated roundabouts and coned-off contraflows.

Take the left vortex

The British road system is no longer known by its epic cross-country routes – the M1, when it opened 50 years ago, was known as "the London-Yorkshire motorway". It is known by its pinch-points like Staples Corner (at the very southern end) and the Lofthouse interchange (where the M1 meets the M62), mentioned daily on radio traffic reports as vortices from which none can escape.

No sooner is it helping us than it’s haunting us

The motorways that once carried hopes of uniting the nation now evoke images of eternal circularity, encapsulated in those urban myths about foreign tourists (or confused pensioners, or naive northerners) who drive round the M25 for days in the mistaken belief that it is the M1.

Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.

Perhaps that is why sat-nav devices are branded things like Road Angel and Time Traveller, presenting themselves not as scientific cartographers, but as magicians and soothsayers, guiding you through the maze of our road system by psychic intuition. Sat-nav is a seductive mixture of science and mystery, perfectly attuned to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in the maddening twists and turns of the British road system.

However, sat-nav still seems to make us uneasy. Many drivers, for example, dislike the voice prompts that say "take the first left" or "take the second exit". Most speech synthesisers use female voices because they are easier to distinguish from engine noise and road rumble – and British sat-navs have rather clipped, head-girlish accents.

Destroying local knowledge

Two of the early sat-nav voices were Susan Skipper, who appeared as Nigel Havers’ posh girlfriend in the 1980s sitcom Don’t Wait Up; and Eve Karpf, who voice-dubbed the famous line in the Ferrero Rocher commercial ("Monsieur, with these Rocher, you’re really spoiling us").

Early voice of satnav – Susan Skipper

Men in particular seem to recoil from being given digital instructions, and read the satnav woman’s pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like "make a legal U-turn" and "recalculating the route", as stubborn or bossy. Of course, they are reading too much into it. Sat-nav is just a dumb computer, obeying its algorithms.

We still don’t quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections. Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.

You can sense it in all those fearful newspaper headlines about motorists guided by their sat-navs to the edges of cliffs or deposited in village ponds. We may have grown to rely on in-car navigation, but it will be a long while before we learn to love it.

Joe Moran’s book On Roads: A Hidden History has just been published by Profile. He also keeps a blog (see Internet Links, above, right).

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About Science-Nature – Paradise lost?

About Science-Nature –

Tourism commands one-third of the economy directly – but is under threat

The Maldives’ idyllic, pristine beaches and tropical reefs attract more than half a million tourists to the small Indian Ocean nation every year.

But an unavoidable catastrophe awaits the Muslim nation and its natural beauty: the threat of global climate change and rising sea levels.

An increase in sea levels of 58cm (22.8in), as projected by the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), could see most of the country’s 1,192 islands submerged by next century and leaving many of its 369,000 citizens without a homeland.

But locals say the effects of global warming have begun to show already, with the phenomenon likely to damage significantly the nation’s key industries – fisheries and tourism – not far into the future.

Tidal surges

The atolls of the Maldives are protected by networks of coral reefs which act as a defence against natural phenomena including flooding, tidal surges and erosion.

Many fishing catches have also been reduced

But scientists say that many such reefs are facing extinction from fluctuating water levels and rising temperatures as the Earth warms up because of climate change.

According to Abdul Azeez Abdul Hakeem, head of conservation at the Banyan Tree Resort, a rise of sea temperatures of only 2C will wipe out many coral reefs if it is sustained for a period of two weeks.

“With climate change there will be more tidal surges, more swells, and more storms,” he says. “Weather patterns are changing rapidly. From fishermen we know these are not normal. Before we knew what to expect; today those things are very unpredictable.”

Tidal surges will not only increase the risk of houses and communities being flooded, but will also result in a higher level of salt water on local vegetation – which will impact on food production too, says Mr Azeez.

Erosion is already affecting many of the Maldives’ 200 inhabited islands, with domestic activities such as pollution, reclamation and illegal coral and sand mining contributing to the damage.

Islanders are beginning to feel the impact. On one island in Raa atoll this month, residents held protests demanding government action after four houses collapsed into the sea due to the erosion of sand banks.

‘Adverse impact’

A rise in sea temperature is also likely to have a significant, but still under-researched impact upon fishing in the Maldives, the second biggest of the nation’s industries.

The lifeline of the industry, tuna fishing, which depends on bait fish which live in the reef, is likely to be at threat.

Mohamed Hassan, 37, a fisherman from Gaaf Daal atoll, says he believes climate change is already having an adverse impact.

“When the temperature of the water rises, the plankton lives deeper so the fish also live deeper and it is much more difficult for the catch,” he says.

Hassan, who has been fishing for 25 years, now says he has to travel three times as far for his catch, but still brings in much less than he used to.

Three years ago his fishing vessel caught 70 tonnes of tuna a week, he says, but nowadays it brings in only around 35-40 tonnes a week.

Tourism commands one-third of the economy directly, making the Maldives the region’s highest earner in tourism in relation to Gross Domestic Product.

But the slow destruction of reefs could have an impact on the quality of diving – the Maldives currently boasts more than 250 types of coral – as well as its vast, flawless beaches.

Ali Rilwan, executive director of local environmental NGO Bluepeace, says that if the IPCC projection is accurate, the luxurious white sand beaches of the Maldives could disappear in a similar way to the ice sheets in the Arctic.

“Our natural asset is the beauty of the islands. If the proper measures are not taken to protect these islands, I don’t think the Maldives as a tourist destination can be sold as it is today,” he says.

But Mustag Hussein, owner of Maldivers’ diving company, argues that it is “a very slow and gradual process” and corals and ecosystems may well adapt to the changing conditions.

“This will not be a sudden thing like pouring a pot of boiling water on the reef,” he says, “Some types of coral are very resilient. Certain species die but certain species will grow back”.

Homeland

Former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was credited for bringing international awareness to the perils posed to small island states by global warming.

But the former leader has faced criticism domestically for failing to implement a proper waste disposal management system, as well as for widespread reclamation projects and a lack of monitoring of environmental impact assessments.

The Maldives felt the full force of nature during the 2004 tsunami

“We are not naïve to think climate change is not happening. It will have a severe impact,” says Minister for Housing, Transport and Environment Mohamed Aslam.

He says that while there is global awareness of the issue, there is a surprising lack of research in the country on how climate change may affect local ecosystems.

“It is only through understanding and protecting our environment that we can even have any hope of surviving here given the climatic scenario.”

After being sworn in last month, President Mohamed Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected leader, said he would put money aside to save for a new homeland to relocate his people in the face of the threat.

But Mr Rilwan, from Bluepeace, argues in favour of an alternative contingency plan: reclaiming land for seven safe islands, one in each region, as a last-resort option.

“Finding a new homeland is not a solution. It is not easy for people to abandon 2,000 years of heritage and migrate,” he says.

“We don’t believe in reclamation, but in a doomsday scenario we don’t have much choice but to develop a few places for our survival.”