E.T. Image: Wikimedia Commons, Juancho20002000

The Internet, where you are seeing this, was made possible on August 31, 1962; COMSAT, child born of the Communications Satellite Act (United States) and Sputnik (Russia), celebrated global communications. But it was Arthur C. Clarke who first saw the spark, when in 1945, he penned an article entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays.” ET would phone home – soon. What waits beyond the Internet? Will Alphasat, project of Inmarsat and Esa, open a new era of L-band radio-frequency (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23455823)? How might space exploration expand communications?

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.