With GPS systems and other geographical technology being as sophisticated as it now is, do lighthouses still serve an integral purpose? Are they more now just in case the captain/crew lapses on the monitoring of navigation systems? Obviously lighthouses are more immediate and I guess tangible, but do they still fulfil a purpose beyond mitigating basic human error?
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It’s an excellent safety measure – a second data point, a way to calibrate and verify whatever you’re using to navigate.
If you see a lighthouse you weren’t expecting, or Don’t see one you were expecting, that’s your warning that something is wrong and you might not be where you think you are. …and it tells you this from line of sight, without crashing into anything, or getting lost at sea.
If you see the lighthouse where it’s supposed to be, that tells you your other systems have worked well enough to get you to the lighthouse, and you can use your location and direction compared to it to navigate from there.
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