TECHNOLOGY

The First Artificial Star

1957 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

On 4 October 1957, a polished aluminium sphere the size of a beach ball became the first object humanity placed in orbit, and radio amateurs across a startled world picked up its beep. Sputnik opened the Space Age in a single night: the strategic shock accelerated missile programmes and the race to the Moon. Its quieter descendants, thousands of satellites, now carry the world's communications and navigation, forecast its weather and watch over the health of the planet itself.

Why it matters

For the first time, something made by the species stood outside it and looked back. Within years, satellites were watching the ozone thin, the ice retreat and the cities glow at night, and they are the instruments behind several of the entries here. The Space Age also changed scale in the imagination: the whole Earth became one visible, finite thing. On this timeline's own skyline, the satellite is the last figure drawn.

Dating & uncertainty

Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957 and beeped from orbit for three weeks. Historians date the Space Age from that autumn: the launch upended the postwar strategic order, triggered the missile race and the creation of state research complexes, and opened the era in which machines observe, relay and measure the Earth from above.

Sources

1. McDougall (1982), American Historical Review · Technocracy and statecraft in the Space Age: toward the history of a saltationdoi:10.1086/ahr/87.4.1010
2. Aglietti (2020), Frontiers in Space Technologies · Current challenges and opportunities for space technologiesdoi:10.3389/frspt.2020.00001
3. Dicati (2017), Springer · Prologue: from Sputnik to the International Space Stationdoi:10.1007/978-3-319-20756-8_1

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:4118.9 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day