Bill Gates, Airbus, Softbank back EarthNow plan to cover Earth with real-time video surveillance satellites

[Guest]

4 hours ago, DildorTheDecent said:

>Backed by Bill Gates

 

Of course.

He is head of the New World Order! 

[Delicieuxz]

2 minutes ago, Mihle said:

If its high enough resolution to track people, then I hate it.

If its only enough resolution to track ships and forest fires, but not people, then go ahead, I want it.

When I think about it, I wonder if smaller whales or small-to-medium sized fishing boats can be tracked, then shouldn't a person at least appear as a dot? That would afford the capability to track the movement of that dot.

[Salv8 (sam)]

well, I'm staying inside for the rest of my life if this gets approved, like hell i want people to know were i am at all times.

[wanderingfool2]

5 hours ago, jaslion said:

Well:

Spying

Stalking

Home invasion

Transporting illegal goods

Better organized crime

Actual 0 privacy

...

Spying - With how cheap drones are now this is already would be within reach of someone who really wanted to spy like that

Stalking - Again drone usage, and the fact that the resolution of this won't be that good

Home invasion - Again, if you are targeting someone it would already be easy enough through other means

Better organized crime - I assume that while live, it will likely be streamed as a delay

 

I've always been curious if the modern civilization accepted having cameras on every corner taking pictures, how many crimes could be prevented (or rather how many crimes could be solved without the high expenditures of detective work).  Not saying it's a good thing, but just a point.

 

Anyways, to those talking about tracking and stuff, I doubt the resolution would be any good on this.  Assuming 500 satellites, 8 bits per pixel, 1 second frame rate, and 18,618,000,000,000 square meters (inhabitable land), that is 35GiB/s/satellite transfer speed (that is Gigabytes)...that is a lot of data to process/transfer.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, theninja35 said:

"As close as we can get to Minority Report" does not mean we're predetermining crimes. This is real life, dude, come on. We're not fortune tellers lol..."As close as we can get" means we can see it in real-time, and police can respond almost immediately. An immediate response time is the fastest time possible without using an inaccurate prediction system.

And I explained to you that no, we cannot see anything in real time just by having these satellites unless already expecting it, but I guess you skipped it. Unless by "as close as we can get to Minority Report" you meant "not an inch closer than yesterday", which, sure. The satellites may transmit image in (almost) real time, but "almos immediate response" requires "almost immediate detection", and having a camera pointed to Earth doesn't equate detecting anything. Right now, our only detection technology for something as complex as a crime (like, infinitely more complex than a face) is a person watching the images (with a bunch of context in his head), definitely not much closer to Minority Report levels of immediateness than, basically, patrol cars.

 

3 hours ago, theninja35 said:

 

If a criminal can track a specific kid (out of how many hundreds?) that gets on a bus from school and heads home, what makes you think that police wouldn't be able to track a criminal?

Obviously, that the criminal knows who he is targeting before the fact, while the police could only do it once they know who's the criminal and a location to start the tracking.

For already wanted people, sure, but that's not random crime prevention, that's, well, tracking, as previously discussed in these thread. Good to track specific people (as @Sauron pointed out, if detailed enough and with enough coverage), terrible at preventing/solving generic crimes by previously unknown criminals.

 

 

It's no different from intercepting phone calls: having a wiretap on a top suspect can help you bring the case home; having a wiretap on everyone does not get you any closer to preventing crimes than no wiretap at all.

[mr moose]

OP article is behind a pay wall.  So I don't know much information people have to make the claims they do, but 500 cameras hoping to catch volcanoes, fishing and fires seems like they won't be above cities or be very sparse over cities to begin with.

 

 

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

as @Sauron pointed out, if detailed enough and with enough coverage

Unlike CSI 'zoom and enhance' is not a thing, if the detail isn't in the original/source image then you cannot get what isn't there. Image correction is still so much more basic and doing it on a live, extreme wide angle very high bit rate image honestly isn't feasible beyond extreme amounts of resources that wouldn't actually amount to much.

 

It's also not like there aren't re-positional telescopic satellites in use already anyway, why use a wide angle when you can use something that can optically zoom right in on you in a narrow angle also with a very high bit rate? The same also exists on drones in high orbit.

 

I'd like to see a sample image first before anything else, lets actually see what can be seen.

[PocketNerd]

3 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

What's a good one?

Bill Gates, seeking HoH, partners with other evil corps to spy on the world like a reality TV show.

[CarlBar]

3 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

When I think about it, I wonder if smaller whales or small-to-medium sized fishing boats can be tracked, then shouldn't a person at least appear as a dot? That would afford the capability to track the movement of that dot.

 

Depends on the revolution, looked from above an adult human is generally going to have a cross section of around 0.05m^2, (about half a square foot if you prefer). But even then they're not going to fully fill the pixel, nor in reality are they going to stay neatly in the center, so if the person dosen;t have a good gap aroudn them, (as often happens on crowded streets), your not going to be able to differentiate two people from each other reliably. To get around that you need a minimum of 4 times the resolution, but in particular packed conditions, or when dealing with small children, or groups of people with extraneous external items, (i.e. things like briefcases, backpacks, e.t.c. they'll all mudy the picture in ways that can't be compensated for and you thus have to get the resolution down to at least 4 times the visible area of the smallest visible object that could act as interference.

 

The earth has a surface are of 510 billion square meters. To get even the totally inadequate 0.05 m^2 resolution you'd need 10 trillion pixels. To get something even vaguely close to reliably rendering someone as a dot you need somwhere close to a quarter of a petapixel. And thats ignoring some other major issues.

 

In general the sensors we can build don't cope well with sharp differences in illumination levels, to avoid things like shadows resulting in things being obscured you either need a lot more resolution still or you need multiple sensors tune to different detection factors that overlap, (so you can composite the outputs together). Also your going to be dealing with atmospheric distortion even on a perfectly clear, (from the ground), day. Guess what the only answer to that is more resolution. By the time your done your going to be needing sensor pixel count sin the multiple peta range. And all of this has to be done in a high enough refresh rate to not create unacceptable smearing of fast moving small objects

 

By the time your done your going to be pushing or exceeding 0.1 exapixels worth of data every second. Assuming the output works out at a 32 bit colour scale, (no idea if it would), that means you'd fill LTT's Petabyte project 400 times every single second. You'd fill an exabyte vault in 2.5 seconds. You'd fill a Zettabyte in less than an hour and a Yottabyte in something like 7 or 8 months, (who here has ever heard of those prefixes before ). Note that current worldwide storage capacity is estimated at 300 Exabytes. Or 0.3 Zettabytes.

 

Obviously compression could improve on that but still.

 

And then thing about the sheer amount of surface area of sensors needed to get that resolution, (never mind the lens area, or the lower capabilities imposed by space use due to the radiation hardening needed).

[molszanski]

Didn't read the whole thread.

Did anyone mention how ARGUS-IS class drones / systems have been used?

[Fasterthannothing]

I'm sick of watching my privacy be flushed down the drain.

[theninja35]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

--

So what you're saying is that it's unlikely a kidnapper will be able to track individual kids and it's unlikely that individual criminals can be tracked by police?

[CarlBar]

Just now, theninja35 said:

So what you're saying is that it's unlikely a kidnapper will be able to track individual kids and it's unlikely that individual criminals can be tracked by police?

 

Assuming they don';t have individual high res camera's that just anyone can use, nope on the first part. The second part would again require high resolution cameras and the police to get access and to know who to track and they'd probably need warrants.

 

Likely resolution will be in the few square meters per pixel range for general scanning at best, (thats somwhere just below what can reliably track a car, though they may be able to do it on a perfect day by using the extra resolution they use to deal with distortion and contrast to up the general resolution scale, but that would require hardware thats capable of this and the software support for it), with higher resolution zoom camera's that can go to higher resolutions. How much higher would depend on what they spec, and that might well depend on whether they want police to be able to use it for tracking. if they don't then they'd presumably spec it somwhere just outside the range for that, (probably in the few tenths of a square meter per pixel range). Also if they're not after detailed tracking but instead general overview they can probably accept a lot lower refresh rates on the general scan, (on the order of a frame every few seconds).

 

If i had to make a guess i'd say a low res setup that is around 1 hz and can at best track somthing around 10 times the size of a car, and a zoom system that can resolve a car sufficiently well to track it, (that would also let them read most ship and aircraft identification codes), but not people at a refresh rate of a few tens of hz. Weather the zoom camera's will be capable of higher res for law enforcement is going to depend on how they view it's use by law enforcement.

[CarlBar]

As a sort of p.s to my last two posts, the first of them was addressing the idea of weather you could scan the entire globe continuously at a resolution needed to track a person as a blob. Obviously in reality it's going to be a two piece system, a much lower resolution global scan. And then smaller zoom camera's for looking at very small area's in higher detail. Those smaller zoom camera's could hypothetically resolve an area several tens of metere's across at a resolution sufficient to read the date off a newspaper and at a refresh rate sufficient to broadcast a quick paced sports match. But how good the zoom camera's will be is dependent on whats specified, however the more capable it is the more expensive to build, and launch it will be and the larger it will e,. (meaning there will be fewer of them up there), and the more weighty the data stream will be and the storage requirements to routinely record everything it sees.SO the worst case i outlines a second ago is very unlikely as it's a big expensive and storage hungry setup.

 

 

Incidentally the same basic theory applies to things like stealth in space. You'll hear a lot about how we can detect a  rocket burn out at jupiter with our current sensor tech and therefore we could detect any rocket out to jupiter orbit trivially, And it's technically true. But building a system that can resolve the entire sky out to jupiter orbit at a sufficient resolution to make it work is a whole other ball game.It's why we still keep finding bits of junk inside our own solar system, we don;t have the means to scan for a lot of it in a full sky search.

[PhantomJaguarr]

I’m surprised they’re so public about it.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, PhantomJaguar77 said:

I’m surprised they’re so public about it.

Bill gates invests in things like this to help push development and ideas.  He does it knowing 6 of every 7 things he backs won't eventuate into anything.  So he only worries about things like PR when they actually have a chance to be anything other than a idea on paper.   You can be rest assured he hasn't sat down and conceived this idea himself or been in talks with people brainstorming,  it was likely the end result of him putting the call out for startups and investment ideas to tackle climate change, deforestation or fishing issues.  Therefore he probably doesn't even care what the public thinks.

[leadeater]

43 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Therefore he probably doesn't even care what the public thinks.

A lot of the public have some weird ideas about vaccines, I know he doesn't care what they think, or he'd rather change their mind not leave them in ignorance. Instead he invests hundreds of millions in to wiping our Malaria etc. Someone with the means to do something and is actually doing something is always nice to see.

 

On the scale of 1 to evil where does someone sit compared to those sitting on giant piles of wealth and resources that do nothing. What's worse, someone doing something you don't agree with or someone with the means to do so not contributing at all, hording an impossible amount of wealth that they can't use.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

A lot of the public have some weird ideas about vaccines, I know he doesn't care what they think, or he'd rather change their mind not leave them in ignorance. Instead he invests hundreds of millions in to wiping our Malaria etc. Someone with the means to do something and is actually doing something is always nice to see.

 

On the scale of 1 to evil where does someone sit compared to those sitting on giant piles of wealth and resources that do nothing. What's worse, someone doing something you don't agree with or someone with the means to do so not contributing at all, hording an impossible amount of wealth that they can't use.

He uses his money to better the planet rather than buy new laws and government support for his business. He does this in the face of all the crazy accusations of wanting to cull the population etc.  That makes him significantly better than the armchair experts who continually pontificate about his motives.

 

[Tech_Dreamer]

i know this kinda shocks some people thinking we'll be under surveillance for 24/7 , But what makes you think we aren't already under this kinda large scale surveillance at the moment? no one believed large scale global internet surveillance or phone company mass scale surveillance of all consumers on an entire nation until the leaks came out. just walk outside & see how many cameras are pointing at you casually from all ordinary citizens have it connected to the open internet.

[mr moose]

27 minutes ago, Tech_Dreamer said:

i know this kinda shocks some people thinking we'll be under surveillance for 24/7 , But what makes you think we aren't already under this kinda large scale surveillance at the moment? no one believed large scale global internet surveillance or phone company mass scale surveillance of all consumers on an entire nation until the leaks came out. just walk outside & see how many cameras are pointing at you casually from all ordinary citizens have it connected to the open internet.

Many cities have been under this type of surveillance since the 80's.   The London rail network has had camera surveillance and boasted of being able to track anyone from the second they are spotted on the network until they leave the system.  That has been a thing since the 80's,  this is of course almost city wide now with surveillance camera's on most city corners and thoroughfares.

 

 

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Many cities have been under this type of surveillance since the 80's.   The London rail network has had camera surveillance and boasted of being able to track anyone from the second they are spotted on the network until they leave the system.  That has been a thing since the 80's,  this is of course almost city wide now with surveillance camera's on most city corners and thoroughfares.

 

 

 

That might apply in the heart of the busiest cities. but outside of those it's really not a thing, at least in terms of whats publicly known. Now get into what military intelligance satellites can do and your getting into a somewhat different world. But then you start to run into the question of where to point that capability, generally looking at things going on at home isn't going to be a big focus for most, there's too many external things they want to keep an eye on.

 

Now like i said whats being proposed isn't remotely in danger of turning into  a mass track everyone movements kind of deal. It's simply horrifically impractical to get the resolution needed for that. But if it was it would absolutely be a massive change to the status quo because the majority of places the majority of people go during their day don;t have constant surveillance.

 

This is of course ignoring the difficulties that can and do occur with even the systems that currently exist unless you've got a lot of angles to work with people can disappear into crowds as people in front block those behind and you have to start looking at surrounding footage to re-acquire them and if they can change clothes unnoticed during that time it can become all but impossible.

[Doobeedoo]

I want access to this, I wonder how much sub it will be. 

[elfensky]

On 5/4/2020 at 4:35 PM, jaslion said:

This just sounds horrible. For all the good it can do it will do so far more worse things. Once anyone with bad intentions gets access to this be it a single person, a group, a government or whatnot things can easily spiral out of hand.

It seems to be just a step ahead of Google Maps Sattelite View, given that I doubt the resolution will be enough to resolve unique people, how is that any different from that?

[Curious Pineapple]

There is potential in this for awesome VR gaming, or just gaming in general. Real live weather, adding ships and aircraft into games, getting traffic conditions close to what's actually happening.

 

Not to mention keeping an eye on your Amazon delivery and knowing if it's safe to go and drop king kongs finger or not.

[spartaman64]

On 5/4/2020 at 9:44 AM, MS-DOS Guy said:

There's no way the government is going to consider this viable and judicious at least within there proprietorship. It's borderline invasion of privacy, and now that I think about it, the general public is probably not going to handle it well if it does come into effect.   

theres already lots of companies that do this except they dont have that many sats

https://www.slingshotaerospace.com/products/

https://www.maxar.com/products/satellite-imagery

https://www.imagesatintl.com/