A world brought ever closer
Since the early experiments of Tsiolkovsky over a century ago, humans have yearned for the stars. During the space race the US and Russia firehosed enormous sums (up to 4% of Federal budgets) into reaching for the moon. Space was so expensive, difficult, and dangerous, that it seemed to be reserved for only the most prestigious of states.
In the 21st century, this began to change. A new era of private space initiatives has emerged. Rockets have become massively more cheap and simple, and indeed a new generation of reusable rockets has been developed. This is slashing the cost of sending payload to orbit, enabling a democratization of access to space
Satellites have similarly become a great deal cheaper. This is partially due to reduced payload costs, but also due to miniaturization. 10cm³ cubesats are very popular. A lot of components can be crammed into this tiny volume, which can hitch a ride next to a larger satellite (the nose cone fairings usually have quite a wide tolerance from the satellite itself. This makes the final frontier massively more accessible to smaller organizations – Now even some high schools have their own satellites.
New machine learning techniques such as super-resolution means that even very modest imaging hardware can have massively improved fidelity, and can resolve tiny details that once even the most sophisticated government spy satellites had difficulty perceiving.
This enables new ways of understanding our Earth. Many companies are now providing high-resolution imagery of our planet in real-time. Satellite crop monitoring, as well as prediction capabilities, based upon weather patterns and climactic conditions, enable high-tech precision agriculture. This increases yields, and requires less pesticides and fertilizers than can harm fragile ecosystems.
We can also use similar techniques to monitor pollution in new ways. For example, companies and NGOs now offer pollution tracking services, monitoring the size and duration of smoke plumes, as well as monitoring color in a range of wavelengths to find out what chemicals are being released.
Similarly, Greece had only 324 swimming pools declared to its tax authorities in the wealthy suburbs of Athens. However, by analyzing satellite imagery, they were able to uncover the true number – 16,974.
This kind of technology enables us to track and understand environmental impacts in precise ways that weren't feasible before. Governments can present an itemised bill for environmental costs shifted onto others. Moreover, the democratization of these technologies enables citizen scientists to hold people accountable even if states can't or won't.
Satellite technologies have also been used to safeguard against the major social problems such as slavery. Slaves are often used in illegal clay manufacturing operations in the Indian subcontinent. By sharing satellite imagery with a crowd of volunteers, 30,000 clay firing sites were quickly pinpointed from space.
Now that these examples have been created by humans, this data can be applied to machine learning to do it again instantly, any time, any place. A great many police raids have occurred, and slaves freed as a result.
New low-altitude, dense satellite networks are enabling worldwide high-speed, low latency broadband. Now even the most remote parts of the world are able to participate in global networks of commerce, and to stream high-fidelity data to and from anywhere. This makes connecting our planet so much more accessible and democratized, and sidesteps many of the limitations and systemic fragility of land-and-sea based national infrastructures.
The real magic will come once we apply these to networks to integrate visuals from the sky with sensor readings from drones or Internet of Things sensors, with data publicly accessible via secure and immutable yet anonymized blockchains.
This will enable us to fully automate the tracking of environmental and even social externalities in new ways. The pollution that a product cost to produce, along with any social misery, as well as its eventual decommissioning, can all be tracked to ensure that fair dues are paid, and that no-one gets away with 'fly tipping' problems for others to deal with, even those far away in time and space.
It's clear that satellite technology is here to stay. It will serve as a democratized panopticon, to increase the accountability of all potential bad actors, whilst bringing informational awareness and opportunity to anyone who desires it. Satellites networks are a cocoon that can protect all people, and connect all nations, irrespective of borders, and that will empower rich and poor alike in the decades to come.
Commercial yet best-efforts beta tests have now begun on Starlink. $100 a month for all you can eat satellite internet is a huge deal for remote communities, especially as DSL heavily attenuates just a few kms from an endpoint. 40ms latency is nothing compared with satellites in geosynchronous orbit (540ms round trip). That price point is also less that some folks might pay for a decent VPN, and Starlink and its competitors arguably offer greater security, as VPNs can more easily be hacked and subpoenaed.
It remains to be seen what effect such technologies will have on the internet as a whole. It could be a bulwark against the trend of further fragmentation into national internets by making such efforts moot. Alternatively (perhaps more likely), the uncensorable disruption that drives authoritarian regimes crazy trying to stamp it out, especially if paired to a mesh network that can piggyback signals a long distance out towards a hidden illicit transceiver.
Hyundai's buy-in to Boston Dynamics for 880 million will probably pay off for them. BD is the world leader in robots that combine agility, strength, and independent movement, as demonstrated in their recent choreographed holiday dance video. The purchase will enable Hyundai to embed these powerful technologies into their broader portfolio, enabling more sophisticated versions of their existing products and services, such as more sophisticated appliances, such as autonomous versions of lawnmowers, cleaning robots and autonomous dump trucks.
We are starting to see the public deployment of delivery robots such as Starship and Nuro. I think it will take a few years yet before BD's robots are safe to operate in public areas, but the gap will be filled by using them as avatars for human pilots. In a world with low latency satellite coverage we can access a global labor pool of virtual delivery people who can telecommute into a robotic system in order to perform tasks. The recorded performance of such duties then provide a perfect dataset to enable AI systems to operate increasingly autonomously.
As a Judge for the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, I know that these technologies are maturing incredibly quickly. The company that nails practically avatar robotics will be the next addition to the Big Tech pantheon.