Well, that's what this guy did.
- No, you can't just throw the phone in space,
even though we did throw a phone in space.
It's a little bit more complicated than that.
- Why do this?
Because making satellites more affordable,
like consumer electronics,
means you can make a lot of them.
And if you can make a lot of them,
you can put them into space,
and capture the entire Earth every day.
- We have a database of how the Earth
is evolving at every X, Y-coordinate of the planet
at every time going back five years.
Being able to see the entire Earth
every single day and how it's evolving;
it is a new capability for humanity.
It's never been possible before.
- Google figured out how to index
what's on the internet and make it searchable.
We are essentially figuring out how to index
what's on the Earth and make it searchable.
- If we allow 8 billion smart people
to understand how the Earth is evolving,
- This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
I've spent so much time imagining what it would be
like to work at NASA that I've never thought about
why someone would quit,
but that's exactly what these guys did.
- When we were at NASA, we were actually thinking,
"Well, a smartphone has radios, processors,
rate gyros even for games, GPS to know where it is,
significant processing power, all in this little box.
Many of those capabilities, in fact,
just about 90% overlap, is exactly what you need
in a satellite."
- The initial idea was to make small, affordable satellites
that had a short lifespan by design.
Instead of one super big satellite
that stays in orbit forever,
they could constantly be upgrading
and replacing those small satellites
as the technology improved.
Moore's Law means that our ability to process,
to store, doubles every 18 months.
Historically, satellites have not kept up with Moore's Law
because you build one of them,
and it has to be amazing and perfect
'cause it costs you
Planet was the first one that said,
"Well, what if we instead build lots of small satellites?"
- The miniaturization of electronics
is enabling us to do what we call 'agile aerospace'—
rapidly iterate the satellite capability in orbit
on a much more frequent basis.
And every time, that uses a slightly better sensor,
you know, we go from a 29-megapixel sensor to
a 47-megapixel sensor.
We went from four spectral bands,
four color bands on the spectral, to eight color bands.
Our next-generation satellite produces
data per day,
per satellite, for the same cost as the previous one.
That trend has led to about a thousand-fold increase
in data produced per dollar spent on the satellites.
- Traditional maps mark a moment in time,
but by taking photos of the world every day,
Planet's maps show us more than what the world looks like,
they show us how it's changing.
- What we see from our bird's eye view,
daily scanning of the planet is immense change:
rivers move, forests get deforested,
agricultural fields get harvested,
houses get built, roads get built, vehicles move—
everything is changing.
And so, this perception of the world as static
is completely wrong.
It's a fundamental engineering principle
that you have to measure something
faster than the timescale of change
to do something about it.
Otherwise, we can't do anything about it.
We can't fix that.
We can't stop the deforestation
if we measure it every year,
if deforestation happens on days and weeks.
We can actually see deforestation
before even one tree goes down.
We can see the illegal logging roads that come in
just before deforestation happens,
and help stop that just before that happens.
Last year, we did the first map of
all the world's coral reefs,
but every day we visit those
and see if there's any signs of ocean bleaching
or illegal fishing vessels in marine protected areas,
and then alert the Coast Guard.
Governments use the data to ensure
that they can rapidly respond to disasters
like floods, fires, earthquakes.
We also help governments with monitoring security.
So just last week, we exposed
over 100 new nuclear missile silos
being built in Western China.
- And this cuts both ways.
Just as governments use this data,
so can citizens.
Individuals can access the same data
about what their governments are doing,
which means it's hard to hide those, uh,
inconvenient, uh, concentration camps.
- Buzzfeed won the Pulitzer Prize
from using Planet data to uncover areas
where China, for example,
was building forced-labor camps.
So I actually think that transparency creates security,
creates trust, and that's true between businesses
and people in governments;
it's also true between nations.
- The early days of the internet were,
well, they were awful.
- 'The truth is, I wasn't entirely happy.'
- You were connected
to a massive amount of information,
but unless you knew where to look
or what IP address or URL to connect to,
how could you use it?
Search engines like Google and Yahoo
are what made it possible for normal humans
to use all that data.
They cataloged the internet and made it searchable.
So what happens when you catalog the Earth like this?
That's the big idea with Planet.
With image recognition,
they can identify what's a house or a container ship,
or a moo-cow.
They're building a searchable index of the entire world.
- We have a dataset that images
the whole planet every day,
and in principle, with computer vision,
we can abstract out objects.
Then we basically build up a database
of all the objects on the Earth over time.
And that database should be queryable.
You should be able to just say,
"Well, how many roads are there in Pakistan?"
"How many trees are there in the Amazon?"
“Just tell me where the illegal deforestation is
in the Amazon over the last month.”
- Take agriculture as an example:
you can create an index that tells you
an immense amount about what's happening
in your fields,
and not just at the scale of a single field,
at the scale of every single field
across the entire Earth,
at the same time, every single day.
The more that we can build machine-learning tools
on top of it that allow people to extract
just the parts that they care about,
the more they're going to be able to solve problems
we're not even thinking about today.
- So what problems could we solve
with everyone able to see what's happening
everywhere in the world, every single day?
In the same way
it was impossible to predict all the ramifications
of the internet,
it's hard to imagine the ideas and companies
that will be created because of this technology.
But could the most important thing that comes out of this
be a reset of our perception of the world?
To give everyone the same feeling
that was captured on December 7th, 1972.
- I've always remembered that iconic shot,
the “Blue Marble.”
Every single person who ever lived,
lived on that little blue dot
captured from millions of miles away.
We have a single Spaceship Earth,
and we have to keep it safe.
- It was astronauts going to the moon,
looking back at the Earth and going,
"Ooh, that is one fragile planet in the vastness of space."
- That single image changed
how we thought about our planet,
but we won't have just one image anymore.
We'll have billions.
- You can't understand your own country
without visiting other countries
to get some sort of perspective.
So, it's not surprising that we have to go out to look back
and take an understanding of our planet,
and see how it's changing from a distance
that we can get perspective.
The most meaningful things for me, personally,
are how this helps us to take care of our ecosystems.
In the last 40 years, we've lost 70% of life on the Earth.
The wiping out of biodiversity is a tragedy.
I think that our grandchildren will look back at this time
and be flabbergasted that we were trying
to take care of the planet
without regular information about the planet.
I mean, how were we gonna, you know, transition
to a sustainable economy?
How were we gonna stop emissions
if we don't measure it?
We might see in the future, predictive analytics
that start going, 'Okay, well,
where's the urban sprawl gonna continue?'
'Where's the deforestation most likely to happen next?'
Or, you know, 'Which coral reefs
are most likely to get hurt next?'
In agriculture, 'How do I predict the crop yield
at the beginning of the crop-growing season?'
- This gives everyone the opportunity
to become cartographers
and explorers of our world in entirely new ways.
- People can see the rivers move.
They can see the new nuclear missile silos.
They can see the Uyghur detention camp.
That means that you can't have a sort of
bystander effect as much, right?
You can't just sit and ignore that.
You can see it.
- Come back next time
for another episode of Hard Reset.
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