Will Marshall | CEO Of Planet - Creating A Queryable Earth

Well, I mean, yes, there's a lot going on in the world. Honestly, when world events happen, we get dragged in whether or not we like it. Because we're imaging the entire planet every day. No matter where the event is, a flood in Congo or obviously the events in Iran, our imagery is there. It is helping people understand the situation. It is providing transparency and accountability. It is shedding light. It is triangulating truth for people all around the planet.

Yeah, I think it's not a bad one. It's funny. I met some people the other day that were photographers and I said, 'Oh, I'm a photographer, too.' And they what sort of photographer are you? Well, you know, space one, you know, take lots of pictures. And they were impressed how many pictures we took per day, which is about 4 million per day. Obviously I was being a little bit joking. But that's right. And, you know, a picture's a thousand words, and we're taking that across the whole planet. And we have been doing that, documenting change across the planet to help people make those smarter decisions. Using these 200 satellites,

not only do we have this daily scan of the Earth, we have 3,000 images on average for every point on the Earth's land mass tracking changes through time. So it's a bit like when you go to Google Maps and see the satellite layer that you can switch to, but that was three or five years old. So our images is from today. Also, we have a time access, which means you can go back through time and do what we call digital forensics. See changes at the time, see what's normal in order to know what's abnormal. You know, so that is an incredible power of course in principle and now we're using AI to make it more and more powerful in practice. Rather than it just being the specialty user like NASA that obviously has a lot of expertise in processing satellite data, how do we get it to the individual farmer to that citizen journalist to that scientist to the insurance company to so many other actors that could get benefit from this.

Well, we're in an era of democratization with AI and AI is of course only about the data sets and as good as the data sets that you feed it and planet has really a gift to bring to the world in that front and bring to AI to extract out that value.

Well, I mean no one else in short has a daily scan of the earth. No one's erected a line. Basically before planet satellites cost about a billion dollars doing any sort of mission. There was a couple of companies doing things a bit cheaper, maybe 10 times cheaper. We've made it another hundred times cheaper at least. It's more like a, you know, our satellites cost a few hundred thousand to a couple of million per satellite rather than a billionish per satellite.

When we were working at NASA, I'm not exaggerating. It was an order of billion. The cheapest ones a couple hundred million. The most expensive ones up to 10 billion. But either way, a billion plus or minus, right? What we did is we took satellites the size of a double-decker bus and miniaturized them leveraging the miniaturization of electronics that you know you have in your pocket now. What has gone in into these phones? Well, miniaturized computers, miniaturized sensors, your camera system, miniaturized radios for communicating, miniaturized GPS for say seeing your location to have those maps work, all that stuff miniaturized into this little case.

So when you look at what a satellite does and you look at what a smartphone does, there's a 90% overlap, batteries, GPS, radios, a camera and, you know, accelerometers, rate drivers, a processor, obviously all these things stuffed into this little thing. And it cost $1,000. And me and my colleagues were at NASA going, 'Wait a second. This cost $1,000. Our satellites cost a billion dollars. What gives? What is those extra six zeros doing for us?' And it wasn't quite clear. And so we threw a few phones into space, tested them, and showed that this electronics that we have in our pocket is perfectly viable in space.

And then we did this plan to say, well, what could we do with that? We said, well, one of the things that we could do that would help the world the most. If you look at all the challenges around the planet that from security to sustainability is have more rapid information to help people make smarter decisions on a day-to-day basis. Truth is power. It enables accountability. And that's a good thing. Again in security and sustainability and so back to your question, I've gone round a long way here, but we were the first to really miniaturize satellites to put up enough to put a line scanner for the planet.

If you needed a 100 satellites to do a line scan of the Earth, if you needed to spend a billion dollars per satellite, that's an expensive game plan. But if you're going to spend a few hundredk per satellite that suddenly becomes something you get VC funding for. So we developed that tech. We launched that. We were the first ones to do a daily line scanner.

And you know right from the get-go we said this is going to be really more powerful as we add algorithms on top because obviously individuals can't look at those four million images per day. And so we were riding the wave, luckily being Silicon Valley, we were very close to it of all the AI developments, computer vision, neural networks, and now of course the large language models that you're seeing with ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude. Which are further enabling this from being just a specialized discipline for being something that anyone can tap.

And hopefully this enables us to get to that vision of enabling what we call queryable earth where just like Google figured out how to index the internet and make it searchable. We are indexing the earth and making it searchable and queryable right so you can have a semantic conversation with the earth like you can with the text of the internet which is what you're doing you know with Gemini or ChatGPT you know now you can imagine how that unleashes huge capabilities if it has information about the real world basically LLMs today don't really know much about the real world and we are bringing real world data to that that unleashes huge huge applications for AI.

Very, very close. I would say it's here. It's not all unleashed, but there's exciting developments. We've been working on specialized applications that enable people to answer those questions where for some time maybe you know eight years we have that where if there's a lot of customers that ask a question like that we will go and figure out a specific solution that will enable it but now it's becoming generic so that you didn't have to do that and that is happening this year queryable earth is happening this year.

Oh, well I like thinking about how we do conservation more smartly because we got this precious biosphere. You know I come from a background as an astronomer and you look out in the cosmos and there's huge numbers of planets around huge numbers of stars and huge numbers of galaxies. The numbers are just breathtaking. But the number that we found life on so far is exactly one. It's just this planet. Now, I hope that we will find life off Earth. But right now, all we know is that it's either we're the only ones or we're very rare. Either way, the biodiversity on this Earth is so incredibly precious. You know, my co-founder Robbie, he helped an exoplanet mission that was looking literally for planets outside of our solar system and found thousands of them, which was cool. And none of them are as cool as this planet. I mean, not even close, right? This planet is really, really special. It's exactly the right conditions for life.

So, we have a cosmic duty. Not just it's not just cool that we have all this biodiversity around us. This incredible diversity of life in our rainforest, in our coral reef systems. Ask anyone that has ever gone snorkeling or scuba diving around coral reefs. I mean, they're just incredible life systems. Not only is it as beautiful as it seems, it is cosmically important. We have, you know, so is our duty to protect that stuff. So what I like thinking about is how everyone could protect their biodiversity in their corner of the planet using this kind of data that helps to make smarter decisions real time that pulls in the whole of human knowledge of what smart interventions are to help us take care of that and has that local data and data through time to know what to do in a tactical sense in their corner.

No, not at all. I mean, so we said out of the gate that planet is serving a wide variety of users. I mean, I mentioned at the beginning commercials, civil government, defense and intelligence, NGOs. We're this is a very horizontal capability. But one of the biggest areas is sustainability because you need big understanding of what's going on the planet and micro understanding. And one of the great things about satellite data is you can zoom in and zoom out. You know, it's like what's the global deforestation problem? What's the local deforestation problem? What can I do in my park to stop deforestation right now in the corner? And everything in between. Transparency drives accountability.

I'll give you an example. We work with the Brazilian Federal Police. There we scan 8 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon every day. It's about the size of Australia every day of forest. Obviously, you can't look at all the images. It AI automatically finds all of the deforestation and illegal narcotics and illegal mines. It alerts the federal police. They get these alerts and then 10 times per day they send a mission out to stop that illegal issue. Okay, real time data. And then at the same time, let me jump to security. We do work with security agencies that are monitoring large areas of threats. Take the US Navy. We're helping them monitor the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands, all of the developments that the Chinese are doing along there. Giving truth and transparency to what's going on. the US Navy share that with the Philippines with other partners in the region so there's a common operating picture so they all can be on the same page about what's going on who's doing what who's doing what vessels where and when is you know from illegal fishing to military activities this provides transparency helps security because it reduces the probability of accidents and misunderstandings.

Totally. The only tweak I'd say from that is that we let our customers do that. We have customers in media trusted media program. We have NGOs. We have those civil governments. We have all of those to bring light. Our job is to bring the best capabilities that are horizontal to all of that those use cases to those users so they can do it. We can't be all things to all of those applications. So I love the idea but I think that's the way to do it is enable our clients to do that.

Well I mean back to my biodiversity piece we have whittled down the biodiversity of the planet. You know that humans are are constantly pushing deforestation and clearing land for agriculture for cattle. We are overfishing. We see violations to marine protected areas all the time. We see the bleaching of coral reef systems due to climate change as well as trawling and other things that cause problems for fish stocks that we humans are driving serious biodiversity loss on this planet. There's no question. And it's separate from the climate change question, but related and they exacerbate one another. Even but even if we stopped climate change for a second, we would still have biodiversity loss because we're wiping out those forests, not because we're burning those trees, but because we're doing it for agriculture. So our food systems are driving the biodiversity loss more than climate change, which is being driven by fossil fuel consumption, right? But they hurt each other, right? And nature's part of the they also can help each other. Nature's part of the way out of the climate change challenge. If we get more forest back or more seagrass, they pull down the CO2 from the atmosphere and they course correct naturally. And so far nature has already been doing that. Most of the excess CO2 we pump out gets pulled down by nature rapidly. But if we whittle away that nature, we can't get away with that game anymore. And we're seeing that in a number of places.

So I look the the biggest thing I see when I look back in data is that the planet is just constantly changing. It's constantly changing on its own things. Rivers move, flood planes change every year in India, Bangladesh area, the flood planes change completely because the last floods changed the nature of the river flow tributaries. So it just changes. But also we change it, right? We have agriculture, we have deforestation, we have fishing, we have all these things and they change it and so we see the planet is changing and humans are used to a static map. That's what you see online. That's what you see in your hand when you go hiking or what have you. We're used to static maps but that's not the nature of the planet. The planet is evolving. So we have this sort of misconception between what we were taught and what is in practice happening.

Yes. We remove an excuse, we give people tools, but it's ultimately a sociological endeavor, right? Behavior change is sociological and we can't force people to change and make smart decisions. But I'm hopeful because look at that Brazil case where suddenly as a result of all those interventions by the Brazilian Federal Police, we reduce deforestation rates 55% year on year, right? AI and this tool in the right hands can do incredible damage on the problems that we are inflicting ourselves on the planet. And also with security, okay? You know, look at Ukraine and Russia and the war and the tragic events there. I often wonder like we could see the buildup of troops on the border with Ukraine before the war, but actually now looking back, we could have seen signs of that many months before. Had we pointed that out, could we have enabled the diplomacy that may have prevented that or done something else, enabled more preparation or whatever? You know, again, human history is littered with examples where war happens because of mistakes and misunderstandings. Look, I think look this technology has the potential to give humans the agency to make smarter decisions with more forethought, more data-driven decisions. Get away the politics. be focused on what's happening in actual practice, not you know conspiracy theories and actually gives them practical actions to do about it right because when you have data like that so look I'm an optimist in the end and I'm excited by the even though it's slow we are seeing the uptake of this sort of data fast and it can help us sustainability, security and even fighting misinformation online, giving truth to a world that needs it more and more.

Well, from the university, but yeah, he was my adviser, supervisor. Yeah. Yeah. I was extraordinarily lucky to have his him as an adviser and you know, he He did all this work in black holes. We were actually working together on theories at the interface between quantum mechanics and general relativity. He had some really interesting theories about that and wave function collapse. Why we get the world that we do which is not a superposition of lots of things in the classical world but yet a micro level we're seeing all those things. Very exciting. I learned so much. I also learned that there's geniuses in this world like Roger Penrose and I'm not one of them. Maybe I'm just about smart enough to get a PhD, but like that stuff is so really fascinating, but you know it's genius territory and the geniuses are a lot smarter than others. So I learned a lot but ultimately also that that was not the game plan for me in my career.

Well, these guys can run rings around. I mean, Roger would have the best physicists from around the UK come on these Saturday meetings at his house and then he'd run rings around them on the whiteboard. And, you know, talk about string theory and hopping to gravitational collapse and his his ideas. And you know very few people can be fluid in all of those things, keep all of that in their head, just be able to and you can just tell that he could come up he was racing at a pace that was incredible. I was so lucky to learn learn so much from him about the how the universe works and it you know it got me very excited. I've always always loved theoretical physics and space and and those are my twin passions intellectually.

Yeah. That's a good question and I I do I am a bit sad, you know. When I first saw a string of Starlinks, I was like, 'What an oh whoa.' You know, that's it was a moment because I'd seen satellites of course, but it was suddenly got so much more at the big scale. You know, our satellites are so small you can't even see them actually with a naked eye. And and so they they don't fit into that. But the bigger ones you can and yes that can interrupt astronomers. I think we've got to do all we can to darken them so that they don't cause those streaks across the astronomers window or for the kid who's out in the woods and trying to get in nature and doesn't want to be you know crowded out to that. I I look I think it's something that we should really try to avoid. And and there are things that can be done to make it less less bad on the satellite and how we and where we fly them. And so it's incumbent on all the space actors to think about those implications as well.

Yeah. Yeah. So roughly it's a bit like the high seas. Anyone can go anywhere. A little bit first come first serve. Geostationary orbit is a bit different because there's a very defined orbit which is geostationary and their slots are organized through the ITU the international telecommunications union in Geneva and that's allocated by country and sort of first come first serve you have to demonstrate that you can put a satellite in there otherwise it just gets wasted sort of thing and that's the regime has worked pretty well in the rest of orbits it's kind of anyone can go there everyone's trying avoid collisions of course. But that's relatively tractable. Now there's a lot more space than you think. We do have a problem of space debris which is that these are mainly not the satellites. They are leftover rocket bodies or satellites that have exploded. we didn't really understand this problem in the space community in the 60s and and so Russia and the US were putting up lots of stuff

and didn't really care where it went and it created a long-term challenge. And then subsequently we've even had countries blowing up satellites to prove that they could take out the eyes of the other country. And in doing this game they have made a big mess, and so we really need to stop that behavior. Because unlike these other domains of land, sea, and air, if you blow something up on the land, it just stays there on the land. If you blow something on the sea, it falls to the bottom of the sea. If you blow something in the air, it falls to the bottom just underneath where the planes were. If you blow something up in space, bizarrely, all the bits—the satellites fragment, fly through each other, and continue going 8 km a second, but just now in thousands of pieces. Well, that is a big problem.

So imagine if every time there's a car crash on the road, the two cars splinter into thousands of pieces and continue on the motorway going 100 km an hour for a few decades. Well, that would be really annoying for all the other travelers, right? So now, even though we've got about 10,000 satellites, we've got about 100 million pieces of space debris. So for every one satellite, there's 10,000 objects, smaller bits. It could be a fleck of paint, it could be a bolt, it could be an exploded bit of a satellite, and all of these pieces could cause a collisional cascade where the pieces bump into each other, and then that creates more debris which then causes a nuclear cascade. This is called the Kessler syndrome. Actually, in certain orbits we're already in that.

So we have to care for that problem, and we do that—we need to do either ground-based lasers which can nudge the debris, if two pieces of debris are coming to each other they nudge them so they miss, and then slowly everything comes down, or you need to go and grab the big bits of debris, and so that reduces the future growth. There's actually a project at Mount Stromlo Observatory that I and some colleagues at NASA helped to instigate years ago now, that is doing—setting up one of these lasers to try and do, if you like, space traffic management of all these debris pieces. But it's a real challenge and the sooner we nip it in the bud, a bit like climate change, the better, because it's on a curve getting worse.

100%. Yeah. Although we got better at figuring out how to deal with those challenges. So it's more to do with the historical stuff than the new stuff.