From stars to systems of infrastructure

Satellite States

For thousands of years, we looked to the sky to understand our place in the world. The stars once inspired us through myth and wonder, providing orientation, meaning, a sense of order, and a canvas on which to paint our beliefs. Today, though, the sky tells a different story.

Now host to a vast network of satellites capturing where we are, how we move and how the world around us changes. What was once uncertain and immeasurable can be understood with extraordinary insight, showing us how to move forward.

Created in support of the Warburg Institute’s Night Maps exhibition, this digital experience offers TomTom’s perspective on that story. We trace humanity’s evolving relationship with location, from early attempts to understand our place on Earth to the living maps and location technologies that shape our world today. Across three chapters, we map out this journey: from looking up to the stars, to looking down at earth, to looking ahead, using location technologies to navigate what comes next.

Begin the journey

Star chart with constellations arranged in a circular grid, marked with Roman numerals and handwritten notes around the edges.

Looking up

For most of human history, understanding where we were meant looking beyond the horizon. The stars provided orientation, helping us navigate oceans, chart landscapes and envision our role within something far larger than ourselves.

Maps emerged from observation, memory and imagination, placing people within landscapes they only partially understood.

Today, location is measured with extraordinary precision. Modern mapping and location technologies may be powered by constellation of satellites rather than stars, but it is the latest chapter in a story that began when humanity first looked up and asked, "Where are we?”.

Abstract network of glowing blue lines resembling a city map or neural connections on a black background.

Looking down

Understanding “where” was only the beginning. As we learned to measure movement, location evolved from a point of reference to a source of insight.

By observing movement at scale, a new picture emerged: not shaped by borders, roads or landmarks, but by every journey that connects them. Maps became dynamic, continuously enriched by the real-world collective experience.

Our relationship with location began to change. The map wasn’t just a guide to help people move through the world. It became a way to understand how the whole world moved.

Digitally rendered Earth with pixelated continents and oceans, glowing blue and orange against a black space background.

Looking forward

Today, maps and location technologies help us understand what’s possible.

By learning from billions of observations every day, modern maps reveal patterns, relationships and changes as they unfold. Transforming location into a layer of intelligence through which to plan our next steps.

As our ability to observe the world grows, so does our ability to act within it. From its passive observers, we have conquered the sky to create tools to guide us, help us move more efficiently, build more intelligently and make better decisions about the future we are creating together.

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The next chapter

We are entering a new era, one where location intelligence has the potential to give us more agency than ever before.

For more than 30 years, TomTom has pushed the boundaries of what a map is — building the data layers, tools and technologies so that location intelligence can power smarter cities, safer roads and better decisions in the face of an increasingly complex future.

To keep up with how we’re doing this, explore more stories on our newsroom, or discover how our location technology solutions are helping shape what comes next.