00:25:32 · Molly O'Shea, Will Marshall
[00:25:32] S0: So there's increased demand globally. There's also increased sensitivity globally, this brings in new national security concerns, especially with satellites. Why are satellites so sensitive and such sensitive assets? And what can you compare that to if someone took down a satellite? Well, in many ways, satellites are like the sensors of countries. They are acting as their eyes and their ears. [00:26:00] S1: And obviously, it's very threatening if you say, hey, I'm gonna take out your eyes and your ears. You're suddenly blind. The US, for example, gets its early warning of missile attacks from space. That's how it knows if North Korea is sending a missile this way. It's missiles with GPS, and then there's all this civilian infrastructure that is now dependent on it. You use your maps, you use your iPhone, you're going be using GPS. You pay for a credit card, you're going be using GPS. Look at the Google Maps, you have a satellite layer, you're using satellites. You use the weather report, you're using satellites. People don't realize how much is baked into our lives today. So it also underpins a lot of our economy. The space economy, you know, is a few 100,000,000,000 a year, but the dependencies amount to much more than that. And so countries' security depends on it and their economies depend on it, in short. [00:26:55] S0: As you mentioned earlier, you're scaling across globally and there has been more interest per country. So why has sovereignty increased and what are you seeing?
00:27:04 · Will Marshall
[00:27:04] S1: Well, that's the backdrop of the geopolitical fragmentation. US administration has asked other countries to do more in defense and for The US to shift more of the burden to others. And in doing that, a lot of those other countries, the first thing is, well, I first need to understand the threats in my neighborhood. And how do you do that? Well, satellites, we already just mentioned, are how you get your sensing. It's your eyes and your ears. One of the first things countries want is that. Now, they look around the world and they go, well, who's produced all the eyes and ears? Well, we produce more earth imaging satellites than any other company. And so, of course, we're one of the first people they call. So that is driving a lot of demand right now. It's very exciting. We can really help countries with their sovereignty needs. We can help them have their own satellites to which point where they want them to point, controlling those satellites, and they get to do that really quickly. In the case of Sweden, we managed to launch the first satellite for them in four months after we signed the contract. Wow. Which, you know, normally in the aerospace industry would have taken five or ten years. We did the same, for the, one sponsored by Germany in just two months. So we can do really fast, and that is a complete game changer. So there's two big things that Planet does that no one else does is the daily scan and the fact that we can launch satellites real fast for people. And those two things we're really leading the world in.
00:28:37 · Molly O'Shea, Will Marshall
[00:28:37] S0: Who's on the no go list? [00:28:38] S1: Well, there's definitely no go list. I mean, firstly, there's a list of US embargoed countries. The EU has equivalent lists. The UN, obviously, we don't tell the terrorists to North Korea. But we, in addition, have a group of employees that look at deals and really think, how is this aligned with our values and ensuring that we're going to see positive outcomes from that? So, we really care about this. It's something that we think very carefully about. We know that our technology is very powerful and we want to be good stewards of that. [00:29:18] S0: Will, this is a difficult question. You have probably seen more images of the earth than anyone else. One, have you seen any aliens? I [00:29:31] S1: knew it. No, in the short answer, we've seen lots of funny things. In fact, the US Air Force alien office, whatever it's called, did ask us for imagery and we did provide. No, I mean, short answer, there isn't really anything. [00:29:47] S0: They move too fast? What's the deal?
00:29:49 · Will Marshall
[00:29:49] S1: Yeah. I mean, funny objects, trying to look at flying objects, flying devices, what have you, anomalous stuff. Now, most of it, there isn't really. I'm sad because actually the interesting backdrop is that the universe is remarkably silent. We haven't seen any aliens yet, and that's shocking. My co founder worked on a mission called TESS at NASA, which was looking at other planets around nearby star systems. So we've now discovered over 6,300 planets all around in the local galactic neighborhood, and none of them have any obvious signs of life yet. And now we're still looking, but in many ways the universe is eerily silent. And this is what Enrico Fermi called the... We now call the Fermi Paradox after his question, which is basically, what gives? How come there's so many planets, the universe is so big, and we still haven't heard from the aliens? This is a big question. I predict that we'll actually find life off Earth within the next ten years. Actually, I predicted that a few years ago, so now it's probably more like And six or the reason is we're going to look at all those planets and look at their atmospheres with the modern best telescopes we have on the earth and the James Webb telescope. We can actually tell chemical signatures doing what we do with our Tanager satellite, but looking out. And with that, we should be able to see certain signs of the atmosphere that might be indications of life. Like if you looked at the earth, you'd you see 20% oxygen in the atmosphere. That's a dead giveaway because oxygen grabs onto anything. It oxidizes iron. It oxidizes everything. The only reason we have all this abundance is because life keeps on... All the plants keep on pushing all that up. If we saw anything like that, we would go, that planet probably has life. We won't be certain. We haven't seen the picture of the alien yet, but we would go, that is anomalous. We haven't done that yet, but with all that survey, I think we'll probably find it. But still, that could be life that's not intelligent. We would expect to see radio waves from these things, and we've looked at most of those kind of things, and there isn't. We haven't seen any obvious signs of technology or technological life. And so that's rather worrying because one possibility is that we get to technology stages and then we blow ourselves up.
00:32:20 · Will Marshall, Molly O'Shea
You know, people seriously worry about this. Like, we've got nukes. We're sort of getting through that. Now we've got AI. Scary. Obviously, amazing upside potential like we were talking about, but also brings real risks as we saw with recent hacking events and other things. AI could help terrorists build bad things, and we've got real risks of AI. And then there's the whole control thing. Can we even control it? We don't know that the reason it's eerily silent is actually because they blow themselves up when they get to this stage. Hopefully not, but this is why what we do right now with taking care of planet Earth or as I call it, spaceship Earth. Because we're all on a spaceship, 8,000,000,000 of us, like Buckminster Fuller, observed. And it's the only place that there is life that we know yet. Maybe there's other places, but so far, it's the only one. Therefore, our responsibility to take care of it and not blow it up is like not just locally important, it's cosmically important. It's our cosmic duty to take care of the earth. And so in short answer, no, we haven't seen any aliens, but that makes our role here even more important. [00:33:34] S0: Question. Are there any conspiracy theories we should be paying attention to? [00:33:40] S1: I'm not a big, I mean, you're talking to a scientist here. [00:33:43] S0: Okay. [00:33:43] S1: Most of that, my friend at NASA used to run the hotline for aliens and 90 something percent. The [00:33:52] S0: hotline for aliens? Basically. Like if the aliens would call? No,
00:33:52 · Molly O'Shea, Will Marshall
[00:33:52] S0: hotline for aliens? Basically. Like if the aliens would call? No, [00:33:55] S1: no, not the aliens. No, the people calling thinking they've seen aliens. [00:33:59] S0: Oh gosh. Is what [00:34:01] S1: I meant. Or the fruitcake line, as he would call it. Because most of it, unfortunately, isn't real. It's like most of it's people observing Venus and not realizing that it's Venus. Over 90% is that one use case, by the way. So unfortunately, most of these things have very similar explanations and even the ones that we can't explain, and there are definitely some that we can't explain, the chances of it being aliens are really low. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we haven't got that, but it's fun to think about aliens in our galactic neighborhood, and I think, again, in the next few years, we might see some. [00:34:38] S0: Do you have any particular sci fi movies or books that you like? [00:34:41] S1: Well, I like Star Trek. Like, probably my favorite is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was made into a film, but the best is the radio series original, which is, I mean, those guys sometimes were drunk doing this radio, but they were amazingly funny. And that's why, yeah, my favorite numbers, 42, The Answer to the Life of the Universe and everything and all the rest of it.