What would happen if a company found a way to combine satellite imagery with big data crunching computer ability?
Actionable intelligence on competitors, nations and people for those firms willing to purchase the service from firms like Orbital Insight.
The Palo Alto, California, company uses advanced image processing and algorithms to track national and global trends. One product estimates sales at 60 U.S. retail and restaurant chains. Others generate a global poverty map and predict illegal deforestation by watching for road construction and other signs of logging.
As the price falls and the details and real time capabilities improve, property owners will find themselves under the scrutiny of the most authoritarian of busybodies wanting control over how that property is used.
Imagine anything new that you park outside (car, RV, boat, etc.), then imagine the companies who will be able to target their advertising at you because they have gathered information on everyone’s yard across the nation, matched with names and addresses? It will be an annoying new world.
Data mining is big business. Take a large shipping or logistics company for instance. They can make a lot of money selling information to people on what products or comodities ship. These people will then have advance intelligence on various market trends……great stuff to have if you trade futures or other things.
Holy crap. Soon to become Skynet owned by Cyberdyne Systems. We will be knee deep in Terminators before you know it.
Read the article, they are tracking oil stocks by measuring the shadows cast by oil storage units (the roofs float with the oil so a long shadow means a tank is low).
There will be insurance companies double checking your home owner policy to see if you’ve claimed that trampoline in the back or the condition of your swimming pool.
The IRS will be able to monitor any improvements you’ve made to your home and just imagine what mischief the EPA will be able to get up to if you so much as fill in a pot hole in your drive way.
They’re based in Mountain View California. The have 5 Venture Capitalist backing them up. The scary part of this is they wouldn’t be throwing this much money into this if they we not confident that they can beat the Privacy Rights law suits they will eventually be hit with.
and we know how poorly that worked out. . .
Who holds the orbitals, holds the planet – on many different levels.
Cast the Druids aside; preferably into the pit.
Knowledge is not evil.
Attacking knowledge IS evil.
The efficiencies that can be gained from something like this are worth $trillions.
Every new system is exploited by evil people.
Go after them rather than progress.
On the other hand, this is the USA. If you want to be a Druid or a Pastafarian, by all means, carry on.
According to Julius Caesar it took 20 yrs of diligent study & disciplined memory training to become a Druid. They were walking, talking, living, breathing repositories of science (such as it was), history, philosophy & cultural knowledge.
“Knowledge isn’t evil.”
The Romans knew that to defeat the Celtic tribes of Albion they had to absolutely destroy the Druids.
“Attacking knowledge IS evil.”
I suppose it depends on who defines “knowledge.”
Then it just comes down to who’s ox is getting gored.
As an imagery interpretation specialist in the Air Force, I daily viewed photographic and digital imagery from the KH-8, KH-9 and the KH-11 satellites during 1976 and 1977 for Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska. My unit was the 544th Intelligence Exploitation Squadron. You can’t imagine what our capabilities were using those platforms, even back then. I was constantly amazed at the things we were able to ascertain from those satellites. You’d be flabbergasted at what we could learn about the enemy. Still today, it amazes me.
What image resolution were you working with?
I’ve done GIS work using 1-meter resolution and larger. I have some half meter images on my work computer but the file sizes are huge.
“Planet Labs provides the industry’s most frequently updated imagery of any place in the world at 3-5m resolution”
3 to 5 meter resolution is not going to be very detailed when zoomed in. Anything smaller than 3 to 5 meters is going to show up as a single pixel.
So people and things like fire hydrants, anything smaller than 3 or 5 meters square would not even show up.
I’ve worked with a lot of 1-meter quality images. You can make out things like cars, but you can’t tell make or model or even if it’s a car or a truck in most cases.
They can still look pretty damn impressive when zoomed out a ways, though.
What this company seems to have to offer that’s different is a higher frequency of newer images being made available. We used to have to wait a year or more for new images from space to be available.
I know the government does have satellite cameras that can read a license plate from space. You would have to pay very dearly for imagery of that high of quality.
They track everything with GIS software now – reindeer migration to crime statistic patterns. It reeks of the desire for total control by those in powerful positions.
I can only say that anything on Google maps doesn’t even come close to what the KH-8 provided. To this day, the KH-8 holds the world record for photographic resolution from space.
To answer your previous question, I will say it was under five inches.
That’s pretty frickin detailed!