I knew it was a branch that was going to come about sooner or later, but I so wish it had a less dumb and boomer-sounding name. Like… come on. We are the country that made Star Trek. We built a CVN named Enterprise as a not-so-subtle nod to the series. We could have had the United States Star Fleet.
Ha. Who would have thought that an industry promotion magazine would promote more industry?
They been moving fast for decades. That's how this problem was created. Space capitalism. They've trashed both earth and space. They've got billions for spacemen while the planet burns.
It's not just youth, it's people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.
I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.
In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I'd say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn't any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is "who was in boy scouts"
And it's not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it's been used as a joke in movies for decades. It's probably gotten somewhat worse since people don't use paper maps as much anymore, but there's also a "use it or lose it" aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there's probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven't had to in over a decade.
Probably about as many who can't do digital maps. They aren't different, except you don't get a "you are here" dot or the ability to zoom. Everything else is the same.
There's no need to go back to paper maps if it's just GPS and mobile Internet that are unavailable. Osmand works just fine without them. It's the map application I always wanted, none of that always-online nonsense.
To be more specific, I wonder how many people rely on GPS turn-by-turn navigation, vs being able to read and navigate by a map be it a paper map or electronic map (without 'my location' or other GPS functionality.)
I'm in my 50s and I can't do paper maps. I can navigate just fine without Google maps but I navigate by landmarks while paper maps seem to rely on knowing road names, which I don't.