How satellites and AI can protect the planet | Robbie Schingler

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
On Valentine's Day in 2022, a bridge appeared on the border between Belarus and Ukraine. It was just a river one day, then had a pontoon bridge crossing it the next. A satellite caught it. Ten days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

**Robbie Schingler** (0:27)
We built this extraordinary eye, an independent source of truth about what's happening on the planet. But an eye that's not connected to a functional nervous system, and a body capable of response, that eye is just a witness.

**Elise Hu** (0:44)
That's space technologist Robbie Schingler. He co-founded Planet Labs, the company whose satellites spotted that bridge, and whose cameras now image the entire Earth every day.
In his talk, Robbie shares why catching that bridge was a triumph, but also a haunting kind of failure. We saw the war coming and still couldn't stop it. It's an idea that comes with real questions, ones Robbie himself acknowledges about privacy, and how a technology this all seeing should be governed. Still, he believes that done right, pairing all this satellite data with AI could change how we respond to the world's hardest problems.

**Robbie Schingler** (1:21)
We're entering into an era that we call planetary intelligence, where new capabilities and action can happen at the speed of change. Planetary intelligence doesn't just change what we do, but it changes how we know the world and our place within it.

**Elise Hu** (1:38)
Stick around after Robbie's talk, TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers jumps in to share how this talk found its way to the TED stage, and why it sparked a perspective shift and a curiosity about what this technology could fix. It's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the Day.

**Robbie Schingler** (2:07)
On Valentine's Day, 2022, a pontoon bridge appeared near the border of Belarus and Ukraine. One day, an empty river. And the next day, a bridge. I'm the co-founder of an earth imaging company. And with our satellites, we can see the entire world every day. And from space, we were able to detect that bridge, zoom in, and that picture was broadcast around the world the next morning. Everyone could see that something was changing.
And then 10 days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Thanks to satellite imagery, many governments and NGOs, researchers and journalists, they all had access to the same daily facts, the same baseline of reality, and the same possibility, at least in theory, of seeing clearly enough to respond together. And with that shared view of reality, we're no longer arguing if something is there, but deciding what to do because it is there. In the days that followed that Valentine's Day bridge, Western nations coordinated for severe sanctions against Russia and unified in their support for Ukraine. But for months beforehand, we saw an increase of military activity and tanks amassing at the border. The signals were there.
Perhaps the allies stopped the worst from happening, but they didn't stop the war.
And I sat with that for a really long time.
The satellites, they worked exactly as they were designed. They showed the emerging threat. They saw the threat. But the institutions that were supposed to respond, they weren't built for this. The alliances, the frameworks, the coordination mechanisms, they weren't built to handle signal at this speed or to incorporate this amount of information. And we built this extraordinary eye, an independent source of truth about what's happening on the planet. But an eye that's not connected to a functional nervous system and a body capable of response? That eye is just a witness. But fortunately, new technologies are helping to close that gap. When you take all of this earth data and pair it with the analytical power of AI, we can build extremely different things, action, in an entirely new way. We're entering into an era that we call planetary intelligence, where new capabilities and action can happen at the speed of change. Now, my co-founder, Will, was on this spot in 2014, and he shared with you all our dream. What if we could image the whole world every day?
And he came back in 2018 with a new dream. What if we can use AI to understand how the world is changing? And today, that vision is becoming a reality. And before I share that with you today, I want to provide a little bit of context.
The space sector is going through a renaissance right now. We have reusable rockets, thousands of satellites, and for the first time in over 50 years, we just sent humans to the moon and back. NASA is inspiring us once again to gain perspective that we live on this beautiful, precious spaceship Earth that we call home. And with the hundreds of satellites that are all monitoring the planet, they're getting connected to each other, and we're putting a lot more compute next to it. It's beginning to build a planetary nervous system.