SpaceDew's one number for how far humanity has climbed toward living on Mars, on a 100-point scale: the Doomsday Clock, pointed the other way. It is the weight of the rungs already climbed on a published ladder of 28 milestones. The weights are editorial and open to argument, the statuses are dated, sourced facts, and the number moves only when a rung flips, a few times a year. Currently 34. Never 100 until Mars. The ladder and every move it has made are on the scorecard.

The Dew Pulse is the number of launches that have reached orbit, anywhere in the world, so far this calendar year, with the change against the same dates of the year before. It is a measurement from Launch Library, refreshed every six hours, and it climbs whenever something reaches orbit, starting again at zero every January 1, where the Dew Point moves when a milestone falls. The two sit side by side so a reader sees both the climb and the pace. Suborbital flights are not counted. The counting rules, one by one, are on the Methodology page.

The thesis SpaceDew is built on. The word Filter has dual meaning. First, we filter the stock market down to only the companies contributing to humanity's expansion beyond Earth. Second, it references The Great Filter, a concept from the Fermi Paradox suggesting that civilizations face existential bottlenecks on the path to becoming spacefaring. Becoming multiplanetary may be how we pass through ours.

A civilization that can harness all the energy available on its home planet. The companies tracked by SpaceDew are building the infrastructure (energy, transport, intelligence, habitation) that moves us toward it. The full scale, and where humanity sits on it, is the next card down.

Commands all the energy available on its home planet. Weather, oceans, geology and the full sunlight falling on the world are engineering inputs rather than limits.

Commands the entire energy output of its star, not just the fraction that happens to strike one planet. This is the scale at which a species stops being fragile.

Commands the energy of an entire galaxy. Purely theoretical, and far enough away that it mostly serves to show how early we are.