Satellites can now spot plastic trash on Earth's beaches from space (photo)

[Admin]

"This is incredibly exciting, as up to now we have not had a tool for detecting plastics in coastal environments from space."

Satellites can now spot plastic trash on Earth's beaches from space (photo) : Read more

 

[Steel167Mightly]

What would happen if we sent trash to the sun to burn up? Would it hurt any thing!

 

[skynr13]

What would happen if we sent trash to the sun to burn up? Would it hurt any thing!

For one, your last sentence should end with a ? mark and two, yes it would as not only would the plastic trash be wasted, but the rocket fuel used to get it there would cause more pollution.

 

[skynr13]

The remark in this article about how more than 10 million tons of plastic trash enter Earth's oceans every year and is estimated to increase to 60 million tons by 2030. So, in about 5 years the amount of plastic trash will increase 600%? Man, we need to think about how wasteful we are!

 

[Vrs420]

Could anyone combine the technology used to scan the Earth within for all sorts of things from dinosaurs skeletons to forgotten temples, with such a satellite so that we could Scan the Earth for All the Hidden things?
Could the "photo satellite" be used to find all sorts of things? Like people in need of help? Lost people and so on? Also, what we could do about the plastic trash? I so want to enter the recycling "world" and try to help us breathe a little bit easier, but it is a huge WAR and I need All the Help that can come my way. Let`s combine our resources both physical and mental so that we actually make the world a better place.

 

[Vrs420]

Could anyone combine the technology used to scan the Earth within for all sorts of things from dinosaurs skeletons to forgotten temples, with such a satellite so that we could Scan the Earth for All the Hidden things?
Could the "photo satellite" be used to find all sorts of things? Like people in need of help? Lost people and so on? Also, what we could do about the plastic trash? I so want to enter the recycling "world" and try to help us breathe a little bit easier, but it is a huge WAR and I need All the Help that can come my way. Let`s combine our resources both physical and mental so that we actually make the world a better place.

For whoever wants to help me out fighting the impossible almost literally, feel free to contact me, via Private Message.

Mod Edit - Personal Contact Info removed

 

[Unclear Engineer]

We are using scans of all sorts to identify all sorts of things. For example, see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/valeriana-maya-city-discovered-mexico-campeche-jungle/ .

But, those discoveries are based on huge amounts of data that are taken without necessarily intending to find the things that are later discovered by careful analysis, usually by humans who are looking for something in particular.

With the development of "artificial intelligence" that can scan more rapidly and sometimes more effectively than humans, the effort by humans shifts from looking at the data themselves to developing the AI algorithms to sift through the data to look of patterns of interest.

We are also using things like thermal imaging to find people lost in forests, when we know what to look for and roughly where to look.

So, yes, a lot can be done, and doing some of those things is already in-progress.

If you really want to get involved looking for something that interests you, you would make more progress by narrowing down the parameters you are interested in and looking for people who are already involved in doing that.

We are never going to be able to know everything about what is on and under Earth's surface, even with satellite data for the entire surface. The question about dinosaur fossils is an example of something that we might be able to narrow down the best places to look, but we would not be able to find individual skeletons deep in rocks, because they are not really different materials from those rocks. Of course, if they were visible on the surface in a recognizable form, they could be seen with photography that had enough detail. But think about how hard it would be to design an algorithm to look at high resolution pictures of the entire surface of the continents and be able to recognize whatever the actual fossils happened to look like without getting confused by anything else that might look similar, such as the bones of a road-killed deer lying in the woods. The problem is that humans would have to look through far too many "false positive" findings by the algorithm to maybe find an actual fossil actually exposed on the surface.