How Satellites and AI Can Protect the Planet | Robbie Schingler | TED

00:04On 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 cofounder of an Earth imaging company, and with our satellites, we can see the entire world every day.

00:27And 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 ten 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.

01:04And 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.

01:22But 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.

01:44The satellites, they worked exactly as they were designed. They 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.

02:06And 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.

02:28When 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. We're entering into an era that we call planetary intelligence, where new capabilities in action can happen at the speed of change.

02:50Now, my cofounder, 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?

03:09And 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.

03:30NASA is inspiring us once again with this picture 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.

03:48It'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.

04:12We 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.

04:39So let me show you what this looks like. 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.

04:59It's helping to close that gap between awareness and action. A 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.

05:25So 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.

05:44And we're already seeing glimmers of planetary intelligence happening all over the world. It 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.

05:58The 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.

06:17But deep in the dense forests 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. Riverbeds are illegally mined and poisoning downstream communities.

06:34And 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.

06:54And 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 four billion dollars’ worth of illegal equipment in the Amazon.

07:15And most importantly, I think, over wherever this was deployed, deforestation rates decreased by over 50 percent. (Applause) Now 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.

07:40And 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.

07:57So 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. If 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.

08:21So 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 a line, money appears on his phone, he moves his herd, he buys supplemental food, and the crisis that would have unfolded doesn't.

08:40Over a million and a half herders across the Horn of Africa are now protected with this drought insurance program. (Applause) So this is what it looks like when you use a signal from space to guide human action in real time to changing events.

08:59The 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.

09:22And 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. And this is extremely painful because the problems that these institutions were built to address are only intensifying.

09:48But 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.

10:06And 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 amass at a border, there will be no pontoon bridge.

10:29I 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.

10:56Thank you. (Applause) DS: Thank you so much for watching Robbie’s incredible TED Talk. I'm Divya Siddharth, one of the guest curators for Robbie’s session this year at TED2026, along with the incredible Audrey Tang. And I think the reason we were so excited to share Robbie's work with the world is because we think it's a huge part of what the world needs to collectively govern and understand our future with AI.

11:24One of the reasons this is an important talk to have on stage now is information is power. And the incredible thing that Planet has done is build a very powerful information source and make it, in as much as they can, available to everyone.

11:38And so they not only create the information, which lots of people do, but they actually let people benefit from it. And that's, in the age of AI, not always true. Audrey Tang: When you see the Earth from the outer space, we become better people because we can then imagine that we're on this fragile spaceship.

11:55And that really changed me to want to wage peace much more forcefully than we wage war.