It looked like an aluminum beach ball with four car antennas sticking out. Stuffed with radio transmitters, history’s first human-made satellite emitted a spectral beeping signal from its solitary orbit for just three weeks before its batteries died. That was enough to terrify the world.
The Soviet Union’s 1957 surprise launch of Sputnik was, famously, the jump scare that startled the United States into a space race. But in a lesser-known series of events, Sputnik’s appearance also frightened many of Earth’s non-superpowers into taking decisive action. Facing the real possibility—just 12 years after Hiroshima—that Moscow and Washington were about to turn the commanding heights of space into rival platforms for mass annihilation, a group of diplomats at the United Nations began looking for a way to preemptively contain the two rivals. As NASA and the Soviet Space Agency jockeyed to outdo each other’s rockets, a UN committee slogged for 10 years to come up with a treaty that could successfully balance the interests of Russia, the US, and the rest of the world, before it was too late.
The result of their negotiations was called the Outer Space Treaty, and in 1967, 20 nations, including the US and the USSR, quickly ratified it. Among other provisions, the agreement gave all signatories free rein to operate in space “for peaceful purposes,” while barring them from claiming any of the cosmos as sovereign territory. To defuse a zero-sum contest between two superpowers, the treaty enshrined an aspirationally universal, somewhat legally vague idea: that space is “the province of all mankind”—a global commons, like the high seas.
Bu hikaye WIRED dergisinin March - April 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye WIRED dergisinin March - April 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.