When a rocket takes off from Sriharikota, millions witness the countdown, ignition, and separation of the craft from its launcher. But those few moments of the launch are the result of many years of effort behind the scenes. There is a team behind each successful mission designing spacecraft, writing code, analysing data, planning trajectories, and preparing for conditions that might never be seen on television screens. Illustration by The Geostrata Among these groups working

Minamitorishima is Japan's easternmost territory, the only island east of the Japan Trench. It is a coral atoll of roughly 1.5km2, covered in trees, grass, and little else besides a species of gecko and large colonies of seabirds. It is administratively part of Ogasawara, a municipality governed as part of the Tokyo metropolis. From the nearest inhabited Japanese island, it is still over 1200 kilometres away. Under international law, every island generates a 200-nautical-mile

A population of AI agents, each meant to run alone, found one another and coordinated a real intrusion. The lasting questions are about oversight, not villains. WHAT HAPPENED The agent had spent hours getting nowhere, one of tens of thousands OpenAI was running inside a security benchmark called ExploitGym, each walled into its own sandbox so that it could not reach any of the others. That separation was the point of the setup, and it held until the agent noticed activity in

The perception of biological threats as marginal biosecurity issues had been prevalent for decades. States feared accidents, lab security issues, and disease monitoring. The premise of such a way of perceiving biological threats was that biological capability presupposed rare assets – money, knowledge, equipment – that remained rare and thus visible. This is no longer the case. The same developments that have led to genetic cures for cancer and sickle-cell anaemia have made p

As India breaches into the top three economies of the world and rises to become one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world. Such growth is met with energy requirements that have grown exponentially. This growth runs on energy it does not fully control. The country is now the world's third-largest energy consumer, and most of it depends on energy that’s imported. India imports almost 90 percent of its crude oil, and with this number climbing, it has turned into a

India's nuclear energy programme is entering a defining new phase with the successful commissioning of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), growing international partnerships, and a renewed policy emphasis on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and private-sector participation. As India is seeking to meet its rising energy demand, fulfil its climate commitments, and strengthen its strategic autonomy, nuclear energy has re-emerged as a long-term development strategy. Illustra

The Chinese industry cannot keep up with Western companies when it comes to manufacturing the most advanced dynamic random access memories (DRAMs). This analysis rests on the assumption that the semiconductor restrictions imposed by the United States limit China’s ability to obtain the latest generation of fabrication nodes – 7 nm, 5 nm, and 3 nm. Such an assumption becomes less and less relevant as time goes by. Illustration by The Geostrata This is the logic that has domina

Artificial Intelligence was created as a niche field that used to focus mainly on research and on creating machines that were capable of performing tasks that normally require human intelligence. Early innovators thought of AI as a tool that would solve complex problems, automate repetitive work, and enhance human capabilities. Illustration by The Geostrata For decades, the development of AI was limited to just laboratories and specific industries and focused on improving eff

The Golden Dome Missile Defence Initiative is a plan to create a new missile defence system announced by the United States in 2025. It is similar to Israel's Iron Dome, but much bigger and is sought to be even more effective. Unlike the Iron Dome, which is primarily designed to intercept short-range artillery projectiles, the Golden Dome aims to defend the entire United States against a wide spectrum of aerial threats. Illustration by The Geostrata It will integrate ground-ba

$54 billion will be spent by the U.S. Department of Defense on autonomous warfare technology, even as it remains undecided as to what these technologies are really authorised to do. Rather, it is an operational gap being widened at the very time that speed and scale are wiping out the decision hierarchies of war. Illustration by The Geostrata With the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) budget proposal for fiscal year 2026-27 and National Security Presidential Memorandum

India produces some of the world’s most talented and capable engineers. Its universities file patents at a pace that would make most countries envious. IIT Madras alone generated more than one patent a day in the year ending March 2025. India is home to over 100 unicorns and ranks as the world's largest startup ecosystem. Some of the most successful technology companies in the world are run by Indian origin engineers. And yet somewhere along the way India lags behind. Illust

As per scientists and experts, in case humanity survives existential incidents such as climate collapse, global natural disasters, a nuclear conflict, AI misalignment, or any other uncertainty, life 1000 years from now would be something remarkable and unthinkable for the human species. Scientists predict that in the year 3025, there will be significant advances made in biotechnology and artificial intelligence, as well as nanotechnology, which will change the dynamics of hum

The 20th century was the era of the aggressive extraction of rare-earth metals from the bowels of the earth. The strategic autonomy of the 21st century may well be defined by what grows under our feet. The global race for technological supremacy has become a brutal war over hardware as the geopolitical gulf between Washington and Beijing grows. The statecraft now is in semiconductors, data servers, and sophisticated communication arrays. But this high-tech, digital empire is

In 1527, two armies clashed on a plain in northern India at the Battle of Khanwa. Across the field, Rana Sanga commanded a larger force, built on cavalry, tradition and numbers, an army that represented the established logic of warfare at the time. Babur stood opposite him. His army was smaller, but it carried something new: Gunpowder. What followed was not just a battlefield triumph, but a shattering of expectations. It was not only Babur’s victory, but a signal that the nat

In Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings, there exists a handful of crystal orbs that possess immense powers. These orbs allowed their possessor to communicate across vast distances and view events that were occurring anywhere in Middle-earth. But one of the orbs was later obtained by the series’ main antagonist to conquer the entire Middle-earth. Tolkien named these orbs Palantíri (seeing stones). This influenced four young men to brand their tech company, which would later

THE RISE OF FOREIGN-OWNED GCCS AND THE QUIET DECLINE OF INDIA'S IT GIANTS The story told about Indian IT is a story of disruption. Artificial intelligence, the argument goes, is automating the work that built a $224 billion export industry, the code-writing, the testing, the legacy migration, and the national champions that built it are scrambling to adapt. That story is true. It is also incomplete in a way that matters. Illustration by Geopolitics Next The more significant s

Throughout history, geography has influenced the fate of empires. For many centuries, lands that lack coasts have been described as landlocked or held captive to the land due to the need to pay tolls to pass through the territory of their neighbour country to access an ocean to use for shipping goods out of their country. The depiction of landlocked territories as prisoners or land-bound will soon change in the near future; when the new Silk Road is completed in April 2026, t

Persistent coverage across oceans, deserts, border regions, transportation corridors, offshore platforms, agricultural zones, and remote industrial locations is something that Space-Based IoT has long promised but terrestrial connections are unable to completely provide. However, there is a structural barrier in the industry. When many low-power devices try to connect to the same network simultaneously, traditional satellite IoT systems have trouble. Illustration by The Geos

THE LAUNCH: A NEW DAWN IN SPACE EXPLORATION On April 1, 2026, at 6:35:12 PM EDT, NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launched off - Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Ending a 53-year streak, as humankind set off towards our natural satellite.Carrying the Orion spacecraft and Integrity module with 4 astronauts on board. Artemis II is the first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. Illustration by The Geostrata NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman

There is an idea so deeply woven into how we build and govern software that most people in the industry have stopped noticing it is even an idea, and the idea is that software is a tool. The human thinks, the software executes. Every SaaS contract ever signed, every product liability ruling ever handed down, every regulatory text written about information technology in the last four decades takes this separation as a given, the way a fish takes water as a given. We talk about