Remix.run Logo
▲ pingou a day ago

Wasn't it extremely expensive to analyse so many images?

Edit: I asked gemini and it's only 834 1200x1200 images for 1,200 km2 at standard lidar resolution.

Can that be used to detect illegal mining operations in South America?

▲piltdownman a day ago | parent | next [-]

It can, but then it runs into the Google Maps issue - everything altruistic at the expense of some bad actor becomes a Security, Military or Legal concern - and the apathy issue.

This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.

▲mschuster91 a day ago | parent [-]

> This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.

At the very least you can try to hold the bad actors accountable even if it's years if not decades afterwards, if you have documentation. Germany for example had deathcamp criminal cases being prosecuted as late as 2022 [1].

It will get really interesting what happens in the US once the Trump administration is gone - even if the expected Trump pardon against everyone involved gets reversed somehow, I suspect that a lot of material regarding ICE or the military strikes against "drug smugglers" will simply have been shredded or never been created in the first place...

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/die-letzten-ns-prozesse-in-de...

▲toephu2 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not clear whether the author used personal tokens or Google's token allowance (given to each worker) to perform this analysis.