How satellites and AI can protect the planet | Robbie Schingler

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. 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. 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. That's space technologist Robbie Shingler.

0:46He 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 Dunn-Rite pairing all this satellite data with AI could change how we respond to the world's hardest problems. We're entering into an era that we call planetary intelligence, where new capabilities and action can happen at the speed of change.

1:29Planetary intelligence doesn't just change what we do, but it changes how we know the world and our place within it. 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.

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4:28And now, our TED Talk of the day. 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.

5:30And 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.

6:14They 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.

7:08We'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.

7:57NASA is inspiring us once again to gain perspective that we live on this beautiful, precious spaceship Earth that we call home. And with 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. And here on the ground, we're all in amazement as AI just continues to accelerate at rapid speed. And like many of you here, I'm holding on to that polarity between the sheer awesomeness of this technology and also a bit of anxiety about how this comes into the world in the right way.

8:38We have to get governance right. And we have to get alignment right. For AI to work for everyone and the larger living world, we need it to speak the language of the planetary systems to which we're all embedded. It must understand our infrastructure and human activity, but also the impacts on the water, the trees, and the soil. So when you combine all of this Earth data with AI and large language models, we are allowing for global change to happen in near real time. You can see change in just about everywhere, over vast distances and time. It's helping to close that gap between awareness and action.

9:25A farmer can understand how healthy their soil is. An insurer can create a dynamic and custom policy based on the real-time environmental risk of the asset. And a finance minister, they can account for the true cost of their financial economy, along with their rich, living, natural ecosystems. So planetary intelligence guides our actions, much in the same way that the eye connected to a nervous system guides the body, so that humanity is no longer a witness to what's happening. We can become stewards for the planet and our society. And we're already seeing glimmers of planetary intelligence happening all over the world.

10:09It is already measuring global change in near real time, guiding human intervention where it's needed the most. So let me show you a few examples. First, let's go to Brazil. The Brazilian Amazon is huge. It's five million square kilometers, roughly two-thirds the size of the United States. And it's brimming with rich biodiversity, countless indigenous communities. and it's the home of about 20 percent of the planet's freshwater supply. But deep in the dense forest of the Amazon, there are illegal activities that are happening all the time. Fields are cleared for illicit crops. Runways are cut for narco-traffickers.

10:52Riverbeds are illegally mined in poisoning downstream communities. And deforestation still happens every day. So how do you stop that? You can't manually patrol that with boots on the ground and planes and paperwork. So our team worked with local partners and the Brazilian federal police to create a system that monitors the entire Brazilian Amazon every day. And it looks for a signal of illegal activity. For instance, an unpermitted road. And today, over 100 ,000 people across the Brazilian government, from a ranger to federal courts. They use this system, and over the last three years, they've seized$4 billion worth of illegal equipment in the Amazon.

11:37Robbie Schingler: And most importantly, I think, wherever this was deployed, deforestation rates decreased by over 50 percent.

11:51Now let's see what this looks like at the speed of change. Let's go to Kenya. A herder has kept his cattle on the same semi-arid land for generations. And livestock to pastoral families is not just their income, it's their savings, their insurance, the accumulated wealth of a lifetime. But every few years, the rains fail. And when they do, the grass dries up, the cattle weaken, and they start to die. So one bad drought can wipe out the economic foundation of a family in a matter of weeks. But now, a new drought insurance program is coming together. The satellite is able to read the health of the grass.

12:31If that health falls below a critical threshold, an automatic payment is sent via mobile money to every pastoralist in the region affected so that they can go and buy supplemental food for their animals. So the herder doesn't need to understand satellite imagery. He doesn't even need to file a claim. Satellite reads the grass, a number crosses the line, money appears on his phone, he moves his herd, he buys supplemental food, and the crisis that would have unfolded doesn't. Over a million and a half herders across the Horn of Africa are now protected with this drought insurance program.

13:13So this is what it looks like when you use a signal from space to guide human action, in real time to changing events. The eye detects change, and the body moves to prevent harm. And I think there's something deeper going on here. Planetary intelligence doesn't just change what we do, but it changes how we know the world and our place within it. It allows for us to see with the whole in mind and dissolves the false separation between our culture and our society and that of the larger living planet. And we're living through a time right now where many of our institutions and our alliances are fracturing and falling apart.

13:59And this is extremely painful because the problems that these institutions were built to address are only intensifying. But I believe that planetary intelligence can help us transform our institutions, purpose-built for the speed and the complexity of the 21st century. We can all build new products and institutions that allow for us to see change in real time. And it can transform just about every sector of our society, from finance to infrastructure, decision-making and accountability mechanisms, all at the speed of change in order for us to build a more resilient future, so that the next time tanks amassed at a border, there will be no pontoon bridge.

14:50I started my career believing that information would save us. I now know that only coordination actually will. We gave the earth eyes. We're connecting it to the brain. But now, now the only thing left to do is to build the body, the trust, the alliances, the institutions that is brave enough to move when the mind signals. Thank you.

15:25That was Robbie Shingler at TED 2026. And now here's TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers on why the satellite images we're used to seeing aren't as static as they seem and the question Robbie's talk left her wondering about. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to Robbie Shingler's talk. So Robbie came to us through our guest curators, Audrey Tang and Divya Siddharth, who curated a session about collective intelligence. And they were really excited about the opportunity Robbie's work brought to help the world really appreciate the benefits of collective intelligence and how this might better shape our world.

16:04And so Robbie co-founded an organization called Planet Labs, and he and his co-founder have spoken about their work with satellite imagery and geospatial monitoring of the planet on the TED stage in the past. And in this moment, Robbie came to talk to us about this idea around planetary intelligence, as you heard in the talk, and how this creates an entirely new way we can engage with satellite imagery to improve some of our intractable problems, to improve some of the biggest challenges we see vulnerable communities on the planet facing. and the idea feels like something in this moment that we all sort of need.

16:46We've reached a point with some issues, whether that's climate change or hunger or things where you begin to feel like, where do we go from here? And he's presented this idea that feels like, well, here's a way we can push this even further and actually see real change come about in ways that we've never seen that happen before. So for me, I was really interested to learn about the ways we can actually engage with the satellite images that we're seeing. I think that a lot of times, a lot of us see these images and they feel static. They feel like they're just there for us to interpret and use them to inform our work.

17:22But what Robbie's shown us is that there's opportunity for us to actually interact with what we're seeing, to use what's happening from the sky to actually inform what's going on here on the ground in real time. And that feels like a big shift from the way that we've often thought about these things. It feels we're removed from what's going on up there. And I think that listening to his talk, the thing that surprised me was just how excited I felt about the opportunity it presents for us to really improve our world. And it left me kind of thinking, what can't planetary intelligence solve? What problems are beyond the reach of the tech that he's building?

18:01And I think that's really exciting to feel like there's something that feels like it could reach so far and change so much. I hope this talk is as transformative to you as it's been for me.

18:17If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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20:35Robbie Schingler: Hi there, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast, and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish. Cases closed. Requests handled. No extra work for you.

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