Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Welcome to the very first edition of Present/Future.

I’m Brady Ng, one of The Ken’s deputy editors in Southeast Asia. Every other Tuesday morning, I’ll bring you the long view on tech, breaking down the most interesting deep tech ventures in the region. I’ll speak to the scientists and engineers who want to change the world on a fundamental level. The ones who are chipping away at the big problems—in labs, in virtual environments, and even in space.

Present/Future is a little different from our usual newsletter lineup. For one thing, it’s our very first limited-run newsletter. But perhaps more importantly, it is our only newsletter that isn’t behind a paywall right now. That means anyone can read it in full just by signing up with an email address, so please be sure to share it widely.

For this first edition, we’ll explore one big idea: what’s the best way to communicate over long distances? Because, on the road to developing a system for interplanetary communication, there’s a solution that could give billions of people a stable, fast internet connection, no matter where they are.

The Past: Analogue Songs

My first experience with going online was auditory: the ear-splitting screech of a dial-up modem, loud enough that the whole house would hear when somebody logged on. The concept of streaming was still years away, and loading a page of text could take minutes. But it was exciting. For 11-year-old me, being able to read about nearly anything was my first reason to stay up well after bedtime.

That scream let out by the modem sounded like pain. And in a way it was, like forcing a square peg into a round hole. At the time, telephone networks were built to carry human voices, not 0s and 1s. To fit computer-readable data through a phone line, digital signals had to be modulated into an audio signal and demodulated on the other end, hence the name “modem.”

That noise we triggered by clicking the “connect” button was the computer sending digital data through an analogue channel.

Computers were given a voice. Quite literally.

The Present: Seeing Stars

Today, more than five billion people around the world use the internet, and most of us are constantly online through our phones. Telecommunications is a digital business—or is well on the way to becoming one. But another leap forward could already be coming, and it’s being developed in Singapore.

Rohit Jha hails from Jamshedpur, the first planned industrial city in India. A place that, in his words, revolved around the Tata group’s massive crude steel production plant.