The mission to create a searchable database of Earth's surface | Will Marshall
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2018
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
What if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new project: using AI to index all the objects on the planet over time -- which could make ships, trees, houses and everything else on Earth searchable, the same way you search Google. He shares a vision for how this database can become a living record of the immense physical changes happening across the globe. "You can't fix what you can't see," Marshall says. "We want to give people the tools to see change and take action."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features space scientist Will Marshall recorded live at TED 2018. |
| 0:08.0 | Four years ago here at TED, I announced planets Mission One, |
| 0:12.0 | to launch a fleet of satellites that would image the entire Earth every day |
| 0:17.0 | and to democratize access to it. |
| 0:22.9 | The problem we were trying to solve was simple. |
| 0:26.1 | Satellite imagery you find online is old, typically years old, |
| 0:30.1 | yet human activity was happening on days and weeks and months, |
| 0:32.1 | and you can't fix what you can't see. |
| 0:35.7 | We wanted to give people the tools to see that change and take action. |
| 0:41.3 | The beautiful blue marble image taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 had helped humanity become aware that we're on a fragile planet, |
| 0:45.3 | and we wanted to take it to the next level, |
| 0:47.3 | to give people the tools to take action, to take care of it. |
| 0:50.3 | Well, after a mini-apollo project of our own, launching the largest fleet of satellites in human history, |
| 0:58.0 | we've reached our target. |
| 1:01.0 | Today, planet images the entire Earth every single day. |
| 1:05.0 | Mission accomplished. |
| 1:07.0 | Thank you. |
| 1:10.0 | It's taken 21 rocket launches Thank you. |
| 1:14.2 | It's taken 21 rocket launches. |
| 1:18.1 | This animation makes it look really simple. |
| 1:19.2 | It was not. |
| 1:23.2 | And we now have over 200 satellites in orbit, |
... |
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