Tomorrow’s Tech TreeInvention Globe

How places were chosen

Every star from the Tech Tree sits where it came from.

• Invented is the historical filter: it includes recorded demonstrations, trial reports and launches as well as inventions. A star's stage and definition say what was achieved; a demonstration does not establish approval or widespread use. Today's country is used, with the country of the time (Soviet Union, West Germany) shown on the card.
• Forecasts with a named company or programme sit at the lead programme's home. Other countries working on it are listed as "also".
• Claude's own projections name no company or programme, so they are not given a made-up spot. They circle the globe in the "Not placed yet" ring and the Not placed tab.
• Places were set by Claude from the star's description and source, with web checks for doubtful ones. Cards flag the ones that are uncertain.
• The Centre line is the average position of every star from the previous 15 years, so you can watch invention's centre of gravity move.
• Trails, while history plays: when a star is born, a streak runs to it from each placed star it built on (the tree's prerequisite links), and stars born in the last 15 years glow hotter, cooling as they age. A streak means "built on", not that anything was carried from one place to another. Stars with no place, including Claude's own projections, start no streak.
• Reach (in the Flows tab) sorts every link between two placed stars by great-circle distance: same city (under 50 km), same country, neighbours (across a border, under 3,000 km) and intercontinental (3,000 km or more), and charts the median hop by the decade of the later star. Click a category or a decade to draw those hops.
• Compare (the pill on the time ruler, or V) splits the globe with a curtain: left of it the stars, ring and labels follow the gold window A, right of it the violet window B, on the same turning globe. Heat then shows each country's change in share, B minus A. The lists follow window A; the centre line and idea flows hide while comparing.

Lifelines (Cities tab) draw each top city as a strip from 1900 to 2100 with one tick per star. The trend word counts only invented stars up to now: rising when more than 45% of them date from the last 30 years, fading when under 15%, finished when none do, otherwise steady. Forecasts never count.

Select a star and its lineage lights up one generation at a time: roots ripple outward in gold, descendants in blue with pulses running along the arcs. Arcs rise with the years between the two inventions, so a 60-year leap arcs high and a two-year step hugs the ground. Click the star again to replay.

Forecast percentages refer to the stated event and deadline from the tree. They are editorial judgments, not calibrated measurements. Conditional planning windows assume the event occurs; they are not confidence intervals.

Map: Natural Earth data via world-atlas 2.0.2. Geometry: TopoJSON client 3.1.0. Full license notices are included in this page.

Keys: / search, Space play, globe or flat, layers, + − zoom, Esc clear. Drag to turn, scroll to zoom, right-click to clear.