The 21st-century Sunstone: Compass for humanity
The 21st-century Sunstone: Compass for humanity
- Published
In a world spilling over with data, how can these flows of information help navigate humanity’s greatest threats?
- Sunstone Institute was founded to collect, organise and visualise data on humanity’s greatest threats.
- The Norse legend of the sunstone serves as a metaphor for how data and artificial intelligence can help us navigate today’s complex global challenges.
- Journalist
- Naushad Ali Husein
Norse legends mention a mineral called the sólarsteinn, or sunstone. It was said to polarise light and reveal the position of the sun, even when hidden behind clouds or just below the horizon. The sunstone, if it indeed existed, would have been the tool that enabled Viking seafarers to cross the Atlantic a hundred years before the magnetic compass became popular in maritime navigation.
In a sense, the sunstone was cutting-edge technology for the Vikings at the time, and they used it to solve their biggest problem: crossing the ocean. What are the biggest problems of our times? Well, we have many of them, and they pose significant threats to humankind. Like the Vikings, we could use some help getting our bearings.
Penetrating the mist
The fastest-growing and arguably most powerful tool in modern times is data. The sheer volume of data available gives us access to an incredible mass of knowledge – a resource that could help us chart a path to sustainability. But in its raw form, data is impenetrable and obscure, much like the sun in the hazy North Atlantic sky.
Like sólarsteinn, the use of AI and machine learning has given us the power to process and organise data, decipher patterns, and create projections and forecasts within minutes – technology that one could only have dreamt of, even a decade ago. How we use these powers, though, is the question.
The power of data
In past decades, wealth was driven by controlling the means of production – minerals, land, technology. But at the end of the 20th century came the internet boom, and with it, what has been called the industrial revolution of data. Today, four of the world’s five richest people owe a considerable part of their wealth to companies deeply involved in datafication, cloud computing and AI.
Data has revolutionised our understanding of our world, and contributed to large-scale improvements in technology, health, environment and the everyday lives of billions of people. Yet this powerful new force of science has also been used against common people, in favour of those who control it. It has become a tool of surveillance, suppression, control and profit.
People have pushed back, attempting to reclaim or democratise data by organising to strengthen privacy and transparency, facilitating data journalism, or going rogue, through cryptography and hacking. They argue for the protection of the public’s privacy, but also for using data as a tool for positive change – taking advantage of the opportunities datafication offers.
21st-century Sunstone
In 2024, long-time private banker Lawrence D. Howell founded an institute to make the power of data available to address what he considers the 30 biggest threats to humanity over the next 30 years – broadly in the areas of environment, education, conflicts, democracy and health. He called it the Sunstone Institute.
The idea was to collect, organise, and visualise data relating to these existential threats. Like the sólarsteinn, the Institute would give its users tools and information to empower them to act. The institute would remain independent and neutral. Alongside data scientists, journalists would tell the stories, so that the knowledge becomes accessible. The project has grown to include data scientists and journalists from 11 countries in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and continues to grow.
Bigger picture
It is not the first time that data scientists and journalists have worked together to reveal and document important threats against humanity and the planet.
In 2024, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) analysed over 40,000 satellite images with the help of AI to identify the ongoing destruction of ecologically sensitive regions in Norway, revealing 44,000 projects ranging from industrial parks, motorways, cabins and salmon farms to primary schools and hospitals. They later partnered with Arena for Journalism in Europe to replicate the project for all of Europe. Despite being unable to identify certain types of destruction like roads and logging, they found 9,000 sq. km of valuable ecosystems destroyed between 2018 and 2023 – “the equivalent of 600 football pitches every single day” (Green to Grey, 2025). The report says this continues unnoticed because “the dismantling happens bit by bit, without anyone seeing the whole picture.”
In 2020, Global Fishing Watch used satellite data paired with AI tools to identify a Chinese fleet of 800 fishing boats operating illegally in North Korean waters. The fleet had evaded detection until that point by turning off their transponders. The Global Fishing Watch and its partners used satellite technology to detect the powerful lights these fleets use to attract squids closer to the surface. The fleet catches an estimated 160,000 tons of squid in the breeding grounds of a squid population feared to collapse. Another series of projects led by the environmental news outlet Mongabay from 2021 identified illegal deforestation in the Amazon, including a series of clandestine airstrips used for drug trafficking and related to the intimidation of indigenous leaders.
There are scores of other inspiring projects of this sort. Alongside strong, visual storytelling, data can reveal and raise awareness of destructive patterns that pose a threat to us all. This partnering of data science and journalism to reveal the impact of human interventions is what Sunstone Institute aims to do on a global scale.
Visualizing change
Sunstone is investing heavily in documentary photographs, interactive datasets and maps to visualise the data and tell stories like these, making the knowledge easier to understand and widely accessible. “We will hold lectures, publish journals, emphasise visual storytelling on all platforms – even Snapchat and TikTok if necessary, in order to get the data out,” says Jan Grønbech, CEO and publisher of Sunstone Institute. The raw data will also be published for media, academics, policymakers and the public to use freely.
