At any given moment, there can be 30,000 manmade objects in the sky above us—planes, helicopters, satellites, weather balloons, space debris, and other diverse technologies. They watch, they guide, they protect, they communicate, they transport, they predict, they look out into the stars. In less than 100 years, the deep blue has become a complex web of machinery.

Our lives are closely tied to these networks in the sky, but a disjunction has occurred between us and the aerial technologies we use every day. We rarely consider the hulking, physical machines that have now become core to our lifestyle. By not being aware of the hardware we use every day, we may also not be aware of the social, economic, cultural, and political importance of these technologies. By visualizing them, it may lead to a better understanding of the forces that are shaping our future.

However, our understanding of this mechanical chaos is so closely tied to the scale of it all—beyond global—that visualization proves limiting. Computers can now collect massive amounts of data, but our display systems are struggling to keep up. Scale is part of information, yet we continue to reduce and enlarge everything in our increasingly well-documented world to 720x540 pixels. Our glowing screens cannot present any of the phenomenology of the data…that awe that scale inspires. Planetariums give us a way to visualize a complex system without losing the emotion of the data. Scale creates wonder, and we should not separate our feelings from the statistics…they help us understand them.

Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne