Big Tech Billionaires Are Moving Into Space: Satellites For Humanity
Humanity & Social Innovation
Big Tech billionaire social entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar (eBay founder) are joining forces to release Radiant Earth with its new Earth imagery platform aimed to help policymakers, researchers, and journalists to use satellite images to serve humanity.
The Radiant Earth platform offers instant and secure, free access to Earth observation data to help the global development community apply the data to real-world problems.
Not love, but intelligence is in the air.
Will The Big Tech Billions Support UN Global Sustainable Development Goals?
Sure, we can complain about Big Tech, and we should lock up repeat offenders, but Jeff Bezos this week also announced to pledge $10 billion to fight climate change. Often times invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.
Bezos has thick skin. He is used to be bashed since day one. By incompetent financial analysts and journalists who repeatedly wrote: Amazon with Bezos, will never be profitable. Yup, great output!
Where politicians talk and lobby a lot, social tech entrepreneurs walk the talk. And that can help our planet, our oceans, and climate change. We need manpower, money, and misfits to reverse engineer climate change!
And while we are at it, let’s also fix the other United Nations Global Sustainable Development Goals.
Meet Radiant Earth — An Out Of This World Satellites Data Project
Multi-millions are being invested in the project Radiant Earth. The goal is to offer the free non-tech world, visualized data in formats that don’t require specific expertise to understand the data.
You can bet your butt that Donald Trump isn’t going to be happy with it. Climate change is fake news or a hoax, he stated frequently.
Radiant CEO Anne Hale Miglarese said:
Radiant will help build the ‘who, what, where when or why’ for the planning and management of issues such as land tenure, global health, sustainable development, food security, and disaster response.
Open data can indeed bring transparency and access to important data that should be available to every humanist and activist. The Radiant Earth Foundation platform is now available to the public at app.radiant.earth
Eventually, the Internet and Blockchain will make everything transparent. But trolling, fake news, data privacy, cyber fraud, cyber hacks, and attacks will rise accordingly. Propaganda and greed are, unfortunately, part of our history.
That’s why I’m not stressed about Robots, automation, and AI at all. Social and emotional intelligence? That is Ancient Intelligence and robots and AI won’t have a soul till at least 2050.
My biggest worry about robots? That they will start behaving like us, human beings.
The Space Economy: A Modern-Day Gold Rush for Tech Billionaires?
Industry experts said over the past five years that the number of operational satellites has jumped 40%, and nearly 1,400 now orbit the Earth.
This number could more than double over the next five years as satellites become smaller, lighter and more affordable.
I already wrote why Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos could be interested in the Space Economy: A Modern-Day Gold Rush 100x Bigger Than Bitcoin.
Space offers trillions of dollars in raw materials. So the gold rush has moved away from Bitcoin towards mining to space mining.
Tech entrepreneurs like Musk, Gates, Bezos, Ma, Omidyar all know a few things with their foresight and Math Men thinking: Sky is the limit when it comes to tech, the cloud, 5G, IoT, satellite TV, and intelligence that fuels informed strategic decision-making.
Math Men have non-linear minds. They get exponential technologies and they can see the future of society. All scale entrepreneurs seem to have that superpower.
My Conclusion?
Satellites and the sky, it will be busy out there. Did we once think our oceans were so huge? Today we face the so-called Blue Acceleration: overfishing, oil drillings, tourism, plastic.
History seems to repeat itself again. When we had mined planet Earth from all its resources, we immediately took over the seas. And now also our skies.
Robots and AI? I hope they will upgrade our morals and ethics. That we come up with smart laws very fast.
I certainly believe that Radiant Earth will provide way more informed decision-making about the Earth’s resources. Available to the public, I like that. Collaborative ecosystems, not egosystems.
I also believe in the Math Men backing the project. These few good men have shown radical invention vision and an amazing gift called Sixt Sense.
Why do you think about the project? Or about the space economy? I’d love to read your opinion.
About the Author
In the spotlights, Igor Beuker is a professional public speaker and activist known for his foresight on trends and technologies that impact business, economy, and society. Behind the scenes, a social entrepreneur with 5 exits and angel investments in 24 social startups, an award-winning marketing strategist for brands like Amazon, L’Oréal, Nike and Unilever, and a new breed trendwatcher for Fortune 500s, WEF and the EU.
Originally published at https://igorbeuker.com on February 20, 2020.
