AI for Good

AI and Satellites: Critical Tools to Help Us with Planetary Emergencies

—Will Marshall and Andrew Zolli

The early 21^st century is a strangely incongruous moment for life on Earth. On the one hand, ours is a time of extreme, self-induced planetary-scale risks. On the other hand, we're living through a second Renaissance—an unprecedented flowering of human knowledge, capability, and tool-making.

In our unquenchable lust for resources, for movement, and for convenience, and in our sheer fecundity, we have transformed almost every corner of the land, the air, the oceans, and the web of life that spans them.

For example, we have terraformed the lands and forests, converting a third of them for agriculture and animal pasture. Once human beings roamed a hostile world, full of predators red in tooth and claw. Now, by weight, a mind-boggling 96 percent of all mammalian life on Earth is made up of human beings and our livestock—with just the remaining 4 percent composed of wildlife.

We have warmed the atmosphere and acidified the oceans, making life harder, and stranger, for the life that remains, including our own. A climate-changed world, filled with extremes of water (droughts and floods) and heat (heatwaves, wildfires, and ever-more powerful typhoons), promises to make life more unpredictable in most places and potentially unbearable in others. While all human beings are at risk from climate change, not all of us are equally at risk. Some of those least responsible for our changing ...