Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Earth Observation at the World Resources Simulation Center Design Event

Episode Date: June 15, 2009

Earth Observation at the World Resources Simulation Center Design EventLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, podcast listeners. It's Matt, once again, coming to you unscripted, unplugged, mostly to thank those of you who responded to my request last week. Your donations have been extremely heartening, and we are very, very grateful. We have a good long ways to go, I'm afraid. Good long ways to go, I'm afraid. That's why on this week's show, you're going to hear Lou Friedman making an appeal in the break in the middle of the show, a public service announcement. We'll be doing the same thing on the broadcast side with slightly different wording, but it's you folks who've responded so far. I'm especially happy that I've already been able to respond individually, personally,

to several of you who've donated, and I think I'm going to be getting information on everyone who donates so that I can send you a personal note. I'm really looking forward to that. off and on over the last week or so. We know it has been up and down, and for those of you who went to the website to help out, to make your donation, I think things are better now, but the main thing I can say is keep trying. What can I say? It's a serious problem with our web server,

and they're having a little trouble figuring it out, getting it diagnosed. But the link is there at planetary.org slash radio and we still very much need your support. So thanks again and hope you enjoy this week's show, which is a special edition, as you're about to hear. Simulating a shrinking Earth. this week on Planetary Radio. Music

Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. A special program and topic today, we'll visit with a unique gathering of activists and experts who began the creation of the World Resources Simulation Center, a concept created by Buckminster Fuller 30 years ago that has only recently entered the realm of possibility. Monitoring of our planet from space will be an absolutely vital component of this center, but there's much more to the effort. Later I'll drop in on Bruce Betts for our weekly helping of the night sky will be an absolutely vital component of this center, but there's much more to the effort.

Later, I'll drop in on Bruce Betts for our weekly helping of the night sky and a larger-than-usual portion of silliness. Here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. This week, Charles Bolden will be confirmed as the new administrator of NASA. Now, the outgoing administrator, Mike Griffin, said, if you're not going to do it right, then don't bother spending the money. Well, the challenge is, with the economy being the way it is,

we have to do more with less in space. We have to find ways to get more done in space without spending the enormous resources that were spent in what people think of as the glory days of the Cold War and going to the moon. So what that means is we have to use international partners. The new challenge for the new administrator is to find ways to get South Korea, which is launching its first rocket, China, which is launching a pure science X-ray telescope mission to do jobs not unlike that done by the Hubble, to get these new take people to the International Space Station, to get the Russians to be making money, to get the private contractors to be making money,

so that we can all get access to space without the burden being on NASA, on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. So that is the challenge. And it's not whether robots should be favored over humans, whether humans should be favored over robots. No, the challenge is to get everybody on the whole planet involved. It's an exciting time. Good luck, Mr. Administrator. Let's change the world.

I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. It's Friday morning, June 12, 2009. About 100 people have gathered in a huge room at the Quantum Learning Network headquarters in Oceanside, California. A dozen giant video images cover the walls. On the floor is the biggest map of the Earth I've ever seen. Like everyone else, I'm padding around in my stocking feet so that we don't damage that simulation of our planet. And that's partly why this very distinguished group is here, to learn how to tread more lightly on our small blue dot and teach others the importance of doing the same. First of all,

thank you for coming. This is the World Resources Simulation Center version 1.0. A design prototype of a facility that we would actually like you to someday be able to work in that will integrate dozens of issues in a world that often times is built in silos. We all kind of work in our specialty. I've been in energy for the last 20 years. Some of you are experts in water. Some of you are communication wizards. These issues are all interconnected. Nothing is independent anymore, that they're all interrelated. This is a place that we can actually see that interrelationship

and hopefully down the road make more sustainable decisions and act on them quicker. I don't think we have the luxury of time anymore. That opening was delivered by Peter Meissen of the Global Energy Network Institute, or GENIE. It's Peter who has gathered these scientists, activists, artists and others, asking them to help create a new center for the visual interpretation and dissemination of data about our world. What's the goal of bringing all these people together in this big room, all of us in our socks? We're doing a prototype design event for the World Resources Simulation Center. This was a concept that Buckminster Fuller had proposed actually 30 years ago

and said there needs to be a, literally a place, a venue where policy makers and business leaders can come and literally see visually the trends of the big issues of our time, water issues, energy issues, population, demographics, and then obviously the projections going forward in some cases are positive, negative, or in between. So if you can see those projections going forward, hopefully those policymakers and business people can make more sustainable choices and act on them quicker so we can accelerate the action because it doesn't look like we have the luxury of time on some of these issues. Now, brilliant idea, but when Bucky came up with this,

the Internet was in its infancy, and certainly the Web didn't exist at all. What is important, what is vital perhaps about having a physical center for people to gather rather than just putting all these tools and resources up on the Web? Some of them are already there, of course, like Google Earth. Well, in truth, everything that we're finding right now today is online. So we're not accessing that isn't available immediately on your desktop. But I'm going to assert that if I find this information and understand and layer this information and all of these issues on my

desktop sitting in my office, I'm not able to make the accelerated decisions and investments that the world needs to make, that nations need to make on these issues that sometimes you have to gather policy makers in one place so they can collectively see the synergies that are interrelated between issues. Because if you address these one person at a time, we all have our biases, we all have our prejudices, and if I think you visualize these issues in a way that transcends those prejudices and biases, then you can get people to a more common decision in a much quicker way. And that's ultimately what we need today when you look at water crises in the world. My gosh, I've been hearing about the wars over water are

going to be in the Middle East in 20 years, aren't we smart enough to figure out and design water and energy systems where we don't have to deal with that water war that everybody's talking about? Peter Meissen of GENIE, organizer of the World Resources Simulation Center design event. So what happened there for two and a half days? Well, lots of discussion and lots of games, games that were themselves simulations of how visualization of data about our Earth might be presented to groups ranging from United Nations ambassadors to residents of a single community. An incredible collection of maps, charts, websites, and other digital resources provided the visual complement to the many small groups considering such

challenges as population growth, climate change, communication, and water resources. And sometimes even the most colorful data visualization left participants puzzled. So when we see all these images, they look like some sort of IR thermal imaging, but it's for all kinds of different, like there's by race or by industry or by area or by geologic time span, like Mesozoic, Paleozoic, but we don't know what the data itself actually is. Any guesses? I'm standing next to you and you're asking me to guess? Orgasms per population.

Yeah, right. You're going to be like, who knows what it is, right? Yeah. I don't know what kind of radio we're on. The conversations were fascinating, as passionate participants from a score of fields learned from each other. But this being a show about space, it was especially exciting to discover Alan Falconer.

Alan is a professor and associate dean in the George Mason University School of Science. Alan, we were talking at breakfast, and it came up that you were around in, I think you said 1970, brought together to begin to think about, gee, what might we be able to learn about our planet that would be useful, looking at it from 100 or 200 or a few more miles up? Well, yes, it was very interesting because what had happened, the first experimental weather satellite was in orbit. And, of course, it was intended to look at clouds. And sometimes there weren't any, and this was a shame because that's one of those, you know, noise.

And the background noise from the Earth was quite good. You could see things. You could see major geological structures. And, of course, you could see lakes and water and things like that. major geological structures, and of course you could see lakes and water and things like that. And so people in the geological survey in particular were saying, this is fantastic, it will help us map and monitor natural resources, geological, water, geographical resources, the whole range, in fact, of their mandate. And it came to pass. I mean, we've had many Earth-observing satellites now, and a new generation

of them, at least announced as being the intent of the Obama administration as part of the new NASA budget. So many of the images that are around us here today on all these big screens, a lot of the data didn't come from space, but so much of it in the way it's being viewed, seems to have been partly inspired by that. Well, I think that's true. It's been very interesting. Science is always a little bit ahead of itself in that the people who understand

can start to speculate about what will happen. And by God, we speculated 30 years ago. And some of it could not be done at the time but the intent was clear. We could actually look at the Earth. We could look at the whole Earth. We could actually see every piece of it and it's only just recently that we've had the computer power

and capacity to make that visualization available and Google Earth is perhaps the best single simple example of what I'm talking about. It's best known. Did you have any idea back then in 1970, as you began to consider this with some other smart people, the kinds of sensing, the detailed and breadth of information, of data we'd be able to see from space? Well, this was part of the oversell, if you like. We looked at it and we said, well, what are we going to do?

And when you look at the Earth, invariably what happens is you focus on it and then like almost everybody that goes to Google, you look for your house. Now, just a minute. We're talking about space. And we were thinking in those days what we would see from about 600 miles up. And it wasn't fine enough to see your house. In fact, the best we could do was some high altitude photographs from aircraft that were used as a simulation to start with. And although that was a very good quality of data,

it showed us more than the satellite could because the satellite signal in those days had to be transmitted and we had bandwidth problems and so on. Plus we had travel time. We only had 25 seconds to capture the picture, approximately. And so this was a lot of data to dump in a short time. And when the data finally started to flow A. the data were good B. they showed large areas

about 100 nautical miles but what people weren't used to was being able to look at the Earth at that resolution and so they complained about not being able to see the detail. Now we finally solved that problem because what the early complainers didn't realize was that for every order of magnitude in detail, you had the square of that in data.

So if you went from a 100-meter resolution to 10, you had 100 times the data flow, and you still only had 25 seconds to get it down. So until that technology barrier was breached, the early days were days of frustration when the satellite data was all right, but it wasn't very detailed, was it? Good thing things have changed. Well, it is. Alan Falconer of George Mason University, a pioneer in the development of Earth-observing satellites and what we could learn from them. We'll have more from the design event

for the World Resources Simulation Center when Planetary Radio continues. Hi, I'm Lou Friedman, Executive Director of the Planetary Society. You've made Planetary Radio one of our most successful programs. Our valued listeners depend on it for weekly space-related news, entertainment, and inspiration. However, today's economy is forcing the society to make tough choices. As a result, the future of Planetary Radio is now on the line.

Planetary Radio urgently needs your financial support to continue. We know this program is important to you, so we're asking you to make a donation dedicated to keeping Planetary Radio alive. Please visit our webpage at planetary.org slash radio. Tax-deductible donations of $50 or more will be rewarded with a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our listeners are a thoughtful and committed team. I trust you will help sustain Planetary Radio so we can continue to explore new worlds. Please extend your lifeline of support at planetary.org slash radio and thank you.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week we're getting just a taste of the two-and-a-half-day design event for the World Resources Simulation Center. There were so many brilliant and passionate individuals in attendance. I wish I could let you in on all the great conversations that took place in that big Oceanside, California room. Visit wrsc.org to learn more. We'll list that and other relevant sites at planetary.org slash radio. I'm glad I got to talk with Ben Disko.

Ben is a 3D geospatial programmer who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii. That's where he tends his farm and feeds a voracious appetite for technology and data about our small planet. He is deeply devoted to creating a sustainable civilization and world. How important is the data about our planet that we can gather from space now? Space is absolutely vital. As many of your listeners probably know, remote sensing and not only the continuous Landsat mission, which gives us comparative data, but also the very particularly the MODIS satellite and the other more recent sensors that have gone up are just incredible.

And the fact that they are publicly available or for a modest fee has really, and terabytes of them have ended up in publicly accessible data sets like Microsoft's and Google's imagery offerings. It's huge. It's important. And if anybody is a skeptic on the importance of launching a few satellites, this is an undeniable value. Just one more. There's something really fun about all this stuff.

Taking gobs of data, columns and columns of numbers. Yeah, terabytes. And turning them in to beautiful and sometimes terrifying pictures. Yeah, I've been in the field of visualization since the mid-90s. My background then was in virtual reality. VR, as we called it back then, didn't really have a future because you could make 3D worlds, but there wasn't anything in them that people cared about.

So my chief realization, and I kind of launched the digital earth field in 97, 98, was that if you put the real world into the virtual world, then you have content that people care about. People actually do care about the real world. I'm delighted to see the mainstream adopt this and things like Google Earth come into being. That's something that was done initially

by independent company Keyhole. It wasn't until somebody with deep pockets like Google came along that really made it fly by doing the deep-pocketed licensing. And that's just one of the most delightful developments I think that humanity can take some pride in. Ben Disko at the design event for the World Resources Simulation Center. We'll wrap up our coverage with Mike Leibold. Mike is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. He travels the world gathering information about its resources and the tools that may enable us to keep it livable.

You gave examples during your presentation of what seems like a fast-expanding family of websites. It seems like a fast-expanding family of websites. I mean, maybe Google Earth is the best known. But so many of these that are attempting to turn this data into formats that people can understand. Well, there's a couple of very, very important trends that are converging. First off, when Al Gore was vice president, he, of course, had a vision of a digital earth. And he realized that the U.S. federal government consumes and creates more geospatial data, more map data than everyone else in the world. So he gathered all the people from all the agencies together and said, you guys

all make maps. I want you to form a council to work together to make the data work together. And it's taken many, many years. And so there's something called the Federal Geospatial Data Coordinating Committee that has been working to make data work together. In the meantime, on a separate parallel track, a large community of grassroots hackers, hackers in the good sense, creative computer programmers, have been working to make map data accessible on the web. And data have come up with many, many standards for doing this. And so now we have web mapping standards and scientific and technical mapping standards coming together so that enormous amounts of data can be merged and blended for analytic purposes.

And as I say, we're still in the early stages, but we're learning very, very fast. And during the last five years, it's been an astounding time of innovation in web mapping. And as I mentioned, there are hundreds of websites enabling people to draw global data and pull it together and do local analysis and to create their own geodata as well. And we'll put links up to just a handful of those sites, some of which you talked about. This one may sound like it's coming from a bit out in left field because we're really more about digesting, interpreting data here than gathering the data. But do you have any comments about the data that we're now able to pick up

because we can look down on our planet from above? After all, this is a space radio show. Well, remote sense data is extremely important, and you can gather enormous amounts of data from spacecraft, and we're getting better at it all the time, and we're getting better analytic tools to decode the remote sense data from photographs and other kinds of sensors in orbit. But you really need ground truth.

You need to correlate on-the-ground observation with the data that you see in the air. And the thing is that satellite sensors sometimes can sense single phenomena and are not good at visualizing the complexity of the interdependency of something within view. That takes a human observer on the ground. So it's got to work together. Grassroots mapping tools for everyone to work with the remote sense, the aerial, and the satellite imagery to get the complete picture of our environment. Thanks, Mike.

My pleasure. Thank you. Mike Leibold of the Institute for the Future. Our Earth Observation-focused sampling of the World Resources Simulation Center design event has hardly done it justice. Check out the links at planetary.org slash radio for more. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts. Bruce Betts is sitting across the round table.

Did you know we had a round table at the Planetary Society? Yes, it's where all the knights of the solar system gather. We wanted to make sure we didn't offend any of them, so we made it round. And here he is, Bruce Betts, one of the same, with this week's edition of What's Up? Hello, I am Sir Space-a-Lot. Are you going to climb on the table and dance around now and smack coconuts together? I wasn't planning on it. We'll get to it later. That'll be in the premium version of Planetary Radio

this week. Coconuts, yeah. He doesn't get the reference? Sorry. Holy grail. Ah, no wonder. Please. If you're going to bad mouth Monty Python, just tell me about the night sky. I didn't bring it up. That's true. But anyway, let's talk about the

night sky. That's probably safer. Now that we're a minute in, and all we've talked about is silliness, boy, that's unique. There's a surprise. All right, night sky. We've got in the evening sky, you can check out Saturn over in the west, looking yellowish over there in Leo. And check it out. It's going to be getting lower and lower over the coming weeks.

In the pre-dawn sky, Mars and Venus, they're friendly. They're snuggling. But Venus is so much brighter. Venus brightest star-like object up there. Mars will be growing brighter over the coming months. You just, you have a gender joke, don't you? No, I don't have any gender jokes. I really don't. It was just how you rolled your eyes when you said so much brighter. Maybe that was a gender joke, talking about Venus. Venus is just constantly so much brighter, but Mars is feeling dim at the moment.

But we'll be getting brighter. But it's that reddish thing next to the really bright Venus, low in the east in the pre-dawn. Got Jupiter in the south-southeast in the pre-dawn, much higher up, and also extremely bright. That's our night sky.

Let's go on to this week in space history. It is Women's Week, first Women Week in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space. 20 years later, Sally Ride, first American woman in space. I forget from year to year that those both took place in the same week of the year, different years, of course. 20 years apart. Yeah. Fascinating. Gotta get Sally back on here sometime. She's a friend of the show. Indeed. Also, 2004, I can't believe it's been five years ago, Spaceship

One launched first privately funded human spaceflight. Five years ago? No. Alright. Okay. I was there. In spirit. There you go. Alright, let's go. It was there. In spirit. There you go. All right, let's go. That was an opportunity.

On to... Random Space Fact. You know, that may have been my favorite of all time. Whoa. Really? I'm serious. That was so dramatic my favorite of all time. Whoa. Really? I'm serious. That was so dramatic. That was operatic, truly. I've said that in the past.

Wow. I want to listen to a reaction to this. I want a few bravos. I'll study it and try to recreate it in the future. Mercury. If you were on Mercury, as you have want to do, you're just hanging out in the same place, an entire year will be in daytime and then an entire year in nighttime.

That's how it works out. You get a whole – for solar days, the ones we're used to calling days, you get two years for one day. Now, if I wanted to stay on the Terminator, could I just walk the whole time and stay in the terminator and just complete that in one? I wonder if I could cover Mercury in one year walking the surface. This may be the big thing to do in 50 or 60 years. Gosh, I should know immediately. I will check that for you. Thank you. But I do know exactly what you would say when you got back to the same point. What would I say? I'm sorry. When you started this journey, you would say, I'll be back on my Terminator journey. It gets better and better.

On to the trivia contest. And we asked you, how many people, how many unique visitor humans have visited the International Space Station? It's a big number. How did we do, Matt? Some disagreement about that number, but all pretty close. And so we let Random.org take care of this. Random.org and the world's foremost authority, the Wikipedia. Indeed.

Here's how it comes out. And it was, by the way, Ivan or Ivan Ulrich or Ulrich from Campania, Argentina. Argentina came up with the answer that most people had. And that was 173 unique visitors, 173 individuals. Although there have been a total of 243 visits. Of course, many people visited many times. But like I said, we had a few numbers that were either side of that, but it seemed to come down to 173 unique individuals, eight of whom have been named Michael, seven of whom were named Yuri. That's what I love about our listeners.

And longest name, this from John Gallant, longest named person, really, because really, I mean, it must have added to the weight, you know, on the shuttle. Heidi Marie M. Stefanischen-Piper. No, it's worse. It gets worse. Heidi Marie M. Stefanischen-Piper. And I don't know what the M stands for. Wow, that's a lot of good bonus information. Yeah, isn't it? I just probably killed your next trivia contest, didn't I? But anyway, we're going to send Ivan, or Yvonne, a nice Planetary Radio t-shirt. And if you'd like an Oceanside Photo and Telescope rewards card.

All right. I'm just still stunned by all of that fabulous information. We're going to the moon, as is LRO attempting to do this week with a launch. Kaguya crashing into the moon, still got Shondraya. There's a lot of lunar action. So what I want people to think about is lunar surface area. One of my favorite random space facts people have heard probably many a time is that the surface area of Mars is very similar to the surface area of the land portions of Earth. And it gives a nice concept of how hard it is to actually explore Mars. It's like exploring all the land on Earth.

What is the surface area of the moon? And give us some analogy, whether it be to your number of backyards or to a country or a state, you know, in a country or to whatever. But something that's, you know, a ballpark. We'll judge you on the area and then also give bonus points for analogies. 28,700 Luxemborgs. All right, great. Yeah, that kind of thing. How can they enter?

They can go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter. And you've got until the 22nd of June at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. Great, thank you. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about the longest-named person you've ever known. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts. He's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious every week here on What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week.