New Earth Surveillance Tech Is About to Change Everything, Including Us

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the astronauts aboard NASA's Apollo 8 spacecraft became the first humans to behold the entirety of Earth with their own eyes. That day, crew member Bill Anders took an iconic photograph called "Earthrise'' that captured our home world emerging from behind the Moon's horizon. "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth," Anders famously said of his mission. More than 50 years later, Earth is being rediscovered from space once again, but this time it is through the "eyes" of satellites, supercomputers, and artificial intelligence (AI) networks. Geospatial science, a sprawling and multifaceted field dedicated to resolving ever-finer details about Earth and its systems, is poised to undergo an unprecedented growth spurt powered by this confluence of technologies across both the public and private sectors. "With the proliferation of satellite platforms, essentially this is something that's almost become impossible to keep a handle on because there are so many new systems being launched and developed by so many different actors globally," said Jonathan Chipman, director of Dartmouth College's Citrin Family GIS/Applied Spatial Analysis Laboratory, in a call. "It's just mind-boggling the amount of data that's now being collected from low-Earth orbit." The feeling of epiphanic connection with the planet experienced by astronauts gazing at Earth is known popularly as "the overview effect," a term coined by author Frank White in his book of the same name. The new geospatial view of Earth, however, may offer something closer to an "overwhelm effect," as our home world is imaged, valued, and monitored by millions of sensors on thousands of spacecraft orbiting Earth. How will we deal with the petabytes of Earth-observation data that may document the collapse of whole ecosystems or the wreckage of natural disasters? What will we do with geospatial information that predicts such dire outcomes but also demands nimble and dramatic changes to our lifestyles? It will take foresight to ensure that the deluge of information is managed in a way that equitably benefits communities and ecosystems around the world, and remains as accessible to the public as possible. "The biggest challenge will be in making sense of all these data," said Dawn Wright, chief scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), a major geospatial software and data science company, in an email. "It is one thing to store, to distribute, even to analyze, but how do truly understand it?