Astrum Space - The Power of These Satellites Is Deeply Troubling

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

A compilation of Astrum Space episodes exploring everything the most powerful Satellites can see and do.Discover our full back catalogue of hundreds of videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@astrumspaceFor early access videos, bonus content, and to support the channel, join us on Patreon: https://astrumspace.info/4ayJJuZ

Space has become a hotly contested battlefield. And I don't mean that just metaphorically. Space stations with cannons mounted on them, satellites with lasers, missiles for destroying targets and missiles for intercepting them have literally been not only envisioned but also constructed and launched into orbit by the great powers of the world. Some have even been fired. And although all-out war has not begun to take place between nations in space, countries have prepared for the eventuality of violent conflict above our atmosphere for decades.

They have designed guns and contingencies and even the occasional doomsday weapon. Would you like to take a look at what's being created? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join with me today as we discuss the past, present and possible future of military weapons in space, in the hopes that it will give us some insight into how a space-based war between nations might go and what needs to happen to avoid it. From as early as the 5th century BCE, writers imagined vehicles or structures capable of entering space with weapons capable of reining down destruction.

Hindu texts spoke of Vamana, flying chariots or palaces with flying saucer-like qualities that transported their occupants into the heavens and could destroy entire cities with their weapons. In the second century, Syrian author Lucien of Somosita wrote a short novel containing such elements as travelling into space, and an interplanetary war between denizens of the sun and the moon. But it has only been in the last century or so that these imaginings could actually be shaped into a reality. As the first liquid propellant rocket began to be launched in 1926, some of the Suddenly, it became possible to reach higher as a species than we had ever done before, to not just enter the skies, but to pass beyond them.

And of course, the technology was almost immediately turned to militaristic purposes. Nazi Germany quickly saw the advantages of rocketry and began developing their V-2 rockets, which skimmed the edge of space, reaching 80 kilometers before raining down destruction from the sky. Fortunately, this breakthrough came too late in the war to change how it ended, but V2 rockets became at least the progenitor of the first human space weapons. They may have only skimmed space themselves, but their descendant, the intercontinental ballistic missile of 1959, was able to enter space truly.

It's fortunate that the war ended when it did, as Nazi scientists were considering other, more imaginative weapons that could be used from space. Some of what they were contemplating seemed the sort of thing you might watch in a James Bond. As earlier as 1929, Herman Obert, a Transylvanian Saxon-born physicist and engineer, who later became one of the founding fathers of German rocketry, was chalking up designs for a 100-meter-wide concave mirror that could be placed in space to concentrate sunlight into a single destructive point. This sun gun, Sonnengevere idea, was picked up by German scientists.

who dreamed of making the super weapon a reality. They hoped that its power would allow them to burn entire cities with its heat. Again, fortunately, the war ended before that particular vision could be made a reality. The birth of rockets had a two-fold effect on modern space conflict. The first was the increased development of further and further ranging rockets, which gained increasingly powerful payloads, accumulating in the nuclear weapons the super powers of the world hold on standby today. But the second was the development of the more commercial use of space. When Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite was launched in 1957, humanity began to realize that space could be used for more than just a place to fire weapons from. Since then,

we have launched over 8,000 satellites into orbit around Earth. They contribute hugely to modern society. Through satellite guidance, our phones can know where we are currently and can guide us to any destination by the shortest route. We can communicate in an instant with people on the other side of the world. With this, economies flourished and nations began to realize how devastating it would be if we ever lost them unexpectedly. And so a new front opened up in space conflict, the satellite war. Nations began trying to figure figure out how to protect their own satellites while inhibiting the satellites of others should the need ever arise.

Different nations took different approaches to this. The Soviet Union in the early 1960s sought to protect their own space interests while threatening others by launching the secretive Almaz Space Station. This manned space station was unlike any other in history that we know of, as it came with a built-in cannon attached to its front forward belly. capable of firing thousands of rounds a minute. It wasn't perfect. Recoil on such a powerful weapon was a big issue for the whole space station,

and it had to be aimed manually by turning the entire space station to point at its target. But this weapon was actually tested in space in 1975, firing about 20 shells at a gas canister target. The result of the test are classified, so we don't exactly know how it went. But a few years later, Project Almaz was scrapped on the grounds of being too expensive and inefficient, so you can draw your conclusions yourself. However, one of the greatest weapons of satellites is not in their destructive power, but in their ability to gain information.

Satellites can capture footage of events on the ground in incredible detail, as well as having the ability to listen in to stray signals for espionage purposes. While in 1966, the United Nations General Assembly signed into international law of the Outer Space Treaty, making it illegal to place weapons of mass destruction into orbit and encouraging the peaceful use of space, using satellites to spy on your enemies appears to have been deemed fair game. Each superpower makes use of satellites to conduct reconnaissance on sites of importance. About one-fifth of all satellites are military-owned and are used for this purpose. Many, such as the large American-owned Orion satellites, can hoover up all the telephone

calls and signals that telephone towers radiate into space using their massive 100-meter diameter antennae. Since phone calls stopped running through wires and started being broadcast wirelessly, it has become much easier for military organizations to intercept every single communication. Tapping into wires is a thing of the past. privacy, likewise. Naturally, countermeasures to this have started to arise as nations and groups object to their privacy being invaded like this.

One interesting modern-day facet of this can be seen at play in the Russian-Ukraine war right now. Satellites play a powerful role in modern conflict, allowing military forces to track enemy combatants and relay that information back to units on the ground. However, this is much less effective in Ukraine ever since large swaths of the battlefield became subject to GPS jammers. GPS jammers work by flooding the bandwidths used by GPS satellites with noisy radio signals of their own, drowning out the vital positioning information or spoofing it.

Attacked drones have played a prominent part in the Ukraine conflict. If you convince GPS that your city is miles away from its actual location, drones will attack the wrong site, getting confused about where they are supposed to go. This is an actual technology that is being employed in a war setting today. It represents space technology being used as an asset in conventional ground warfare. That said, at the time of writing, no space war where a space target attacked another space target has ever taken place. But that's not to say that nations are not preparing for the eventuality. America and Russia have been developing anti-satellite missiles, or ASATs, since the 1950s. Some have even been fired.

The US has launched only one test ASAT, which took down a failing commercial satellite in 1985, using infrared heat-seeking as guidance, and then crashing into it at 24,000 kilometers an hour to destroy it, the kinetic energy alone being enough to knock the satellite out of the sky. Russia destroyed one of its own satellites in 2021, with a an ASAT of his own. Unfortunately, that particular test ended with a satellite splitting into 1,500 pieces of debris that started orbiting the planet. Debris got threateningly close to the International Space Station, and Russian astronauts had to shelter in place to avoid a life-threatening situation.

This is the great difficulty of modern space conflict, and is perhaps a reason why it is not more common. Destroying an enemy satellite might simply turn it into a ball of debris that then crashes into other satellites, perhaps even your own, which then disintegrate and hit other satellites in a growing cascade of destruction that closes off space for everyone. This is known as Kessler syndrome, and it could take centuries before space is safe enough to travel through once it happens. For this reason, there are growing calls for ASATs to be banned from use.

No one wants space shut down for everyone. That's about the current state of space warfare. However, there is one future technology that might not actually be so futuristic, that might change just about everything. Lasers. Yes, you heard me right, lasers. Pugh-pue, indeed. While this might sound like something out of Star Wars, real-life companies like Lockheed Martin

have developed working prototypes that have real implications. for future conflict. Unlike sci-fi lasers, real-life ones focus on a target with incredible precision, superheating whatever enters its gaze for too long. They come with a multitude of advantages. Shooting in wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, they are both silent and invisible. You'd only know you were being shot by the fact that the engine of your vehicle was suddenly a melted puddle.

are precise. Only your engine might be melted. They come with unlimited ammo as long as they are on a suitable power grid, and they can take out missiles from kilometres away on a clear day. Of course, they come with one major disadvantage. They don't necessarily work if it's not a clear day. Scattering of the laser in atmosphere significantly reduces its effectiveness, as the particles lose their coherence the further they travel, and if it's a foggy, it's a foggy. day, or if the enemy target throws up a smokescreen, the laser can be neutralized completely. It would be unfortunate if you fail to take down an enemy missile because it was cloudy. But this might not be an issue for space conflict, as there is no atmosphere in space.

A satellite equipped with such a laser and a suitable solar panel array could potentially bore through the heart of other satellites with ease, leaving their internal components as molten slag without creating a dangerous debris field. It would be extremely difficult to see what had done the damage, meaning the secrecy of your satellite would be maintained. Your satellite would never need to be reloaded, provided it didn't need to vent gas, as it gained its power from the sun, and its range would be vastly increased due to the lack of atmosphere.

The only downside would be the need for a powerful enough battery pack, which, given its size and bulk, might be a little bit. limiting factor. A few attempts have even been made at creating a laser weapons platform in space that could attack ground-based targets. Again, the appeal of such a threat is great. Imagine that the nation had the capability to instantly assassinate a target, invisibly and without warning the moment they stepped outside.

There would be no room for interception. The US was working on space-based lasers in 1987. with its Project Zenith Star, and although that never made it past ground testing, their military has continued to toy with the idea in the decade since. The USSR nearly actually launched such a laser, the Polyas spacecraft, in 1987, only for the USSR President Kovychov to forbid firing it in case the Western government saw this as an aggressive act. As it happens, the launched Polyas space laser never reached orbit.

An error caused it to burn up in the atmosphere during launch, so the question of whether to test fire it or not was thankfully moot. These are the attempts we know about. Still, I would not be surprised to learn that one nation or another had secretly put a satellite with a laser into space. We'd likely not know for another 30 years or so, or until it was used. Fortunately, space conflict to date has mostly been about hypothetical. practical preparation, more than actual battle.

Even during the Cold War, no nation actually has gone so far as to attack another nation's space assets, although many have sought the capability to do so, and more than a few sabres are rattling. This may be because, if we actually started warring in space in earnest, we would be unleashing some of the most devastating forces known to man. from space are perhaps the most destructive humanity will ever bring to bear. It wouldn't take a Nazi sun gun. All it would need is the force of gravity, and the realization that with a little maths, you can redirect one passing space rock to have it become a multi-kilaton

nuke as it releases its kinetic energy in one frantic moment. But, like the gun on the space station Almaz, such weapons have a habit of recoiling. Taking down enemy satellites might sound like an advantage, but Kessler syndrome bringing down the global economy would be bad for everyone. Tactically targeting any enemy with a space-launched asteroid might sound nice and useful until you remember the dinosaurs and realize we only have one single fragile rock to live on. Ultimately, the risks that come with space conflict are perhaps the strongest reason it may never happen. I certainly hope so. After all, it would perhaps be a terrible irony and a failure of evolution if humanity's

struggle for survival against each other ended in nobody winning and the ruin of us all. What a cosmic own goal that would turn out to be. They are watching you. Ever feel that prickled across your neck, that ominous sensation of eyes on you, but you can't detect anyone around? Well, although they can't spot the culprit directly, your senses might be onto something. The Earth is surrounded by eyes, studying you, tracking you, trying to understand every aspect of your day-to-day life.

They are our own satellites, and there are hundreds of them. And I don't think we have quite realized how good they've gotten. There are satellites with mirrors, the size of Hubble, not pointed at distant galaxies to unravel their mysteries, but staring down at you. There are satellites that can see through clouds, and don't care if it's day or night, they see just as clearly either way. In this age of information, where companies are pushing for more and more data, and governments strive to keep track of criminals and threats, the thing that might be harder and harder

to find is privacy. Are the benefits worth the cost? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum, and it is time to look out the nearest window and smile for the camera. There. Now do you want to see how your picture turned out? In 1957, the number of artificial satellites in space first ticked up from zero to one.

Sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviet Union, officially to practice their satellite deployment methods and to send test radio signals through the atmosphere, but also to show the world that they were winning the space race. The world, however, did not take long to catch up. In 2007, 50 years later, there were 912 active satellites orbiting the Earth. a testament to how quickly the industry is growing, it took only 10 years for that number to reach 1,778. In 2022, the number hit 6,905.

And this number is set to grow. The company SpaceX alone wants to eventually raise the number of active starling satellites to a whopping 42,000. In the next 10 years, there could be hundreds. of thousands of satellites from various different countries and private organizations orbiting our planet. Of course, not all of these satellites are there for observation. Around half of the ones active right now are communication satellites. But still, according to data collected by the U.S. the aptly named Union of Concerned Scientists, at the start of 2022, there were

1,052 eyes looking down on us. That's a lot of eyes. And they're getting sharper. Let's discuss spatial resolution. This is a measurement of how many meters on the ground are represented by a single pixel in a satellite taken image. The early cameras on satellites like Lansat 1 had a resolution of 80 meters, which is to say a single pixel represented an 80 by 80 meter square.

meaning you could almost fit an entire football field in it. This made them good for taking sweeping images of our planet at large, and perhaps for keeping track of massive objects like clouds and weather fronts, but there was hardly the sense that our privacy was at risk. Now? Well, see for yourself. These full colour videos were taken by Carbonite 2, a commercially available satellite that captures an entire 5km swath as it passes by at 500 kilometers in low Earth orbit.

The resolution for this video is 1 meter, which is good enough that you can pick out details like the motion of waves on the sea or cars driving along the road in real time. Although you might not be able to distinguish their car make and most likely not their drivers. The advantages of such a video are obvious. Transport officials can keep an eye on traffic congestion, and it becomes easy to track the speed of urbanization. There are also numerous scientific benefits, which we'll get into later, but there's one undeniable feature of such improved resolution that made it very interesting for governments

around the world, and the main reason you might be worried, it becomes easier for spy satellites to keep track of you. Spy satellites have also come a long way. Originally, when the CIA began their secretive Corona project, disguised as an innocent space exploration program called Discoverer, satellite cameras were recording their images onto actual film, which then had to be jettisoned and parachuted back down to Earth, where the capsules carrying the sensitive data could later be recovered. One of these capsules was actually the first ever man-made object to be recovered from space.

It wasn't the most efficient system, and spy satellites tended not to last longer than a year before they ran out of film and capsules. Now, everything is digital, significantly improving the lifespan of such satellites. As for what they can see, well, for obvious reasons, governments tend not to reveal how good the resolution is on their spy satellites. However, it's interesting to note that the video I showed you earlier of the 1-meter resolution satellite camera is not the best the market has to offer. Other satellites boast 50 cm and even 25 cm resolutions, and some such as Umbra-Sar

satellite, claim to have reached 16 centimeters. And this is only about as good as they are legally allowed to get. The United States has laws in place that make it illegal to have satellites with better resolutions than that, although companies are pushing for this restriction to be lowered, so that they can keep up with a competitive global market that doesn't always have such restrictions. Take a note of that, though. This is not about capability. True, the laws of physics put some constraints on us that make better resolutions difficult to impossible without having a satellite flight close enough to the planet that atmospheric drag will start to cause it to fall,

or without making a light-gathering mirror so large that it becomes difficult to launch them on a rocket. However, it's not accurate to say that spy satellites can't get better resolution. There are rumours of resolutions hitting at least 10 centimetre resolution, perhaps even one centimetre. Rumours that were at least partially confirmed by the previous US President Donald Trump by accident in a tweet he posted. In 2019, Iran attempted a rocket launch that ended in failure.

Trump felt it was necessary to tell the world that the US government had not been involved in sabotaging the rocket launch. To prove his point, he included a photo of the damaged launch site, hoping to show that there were no signs of foul play. This may well have been true, but intelligence experts around the world were stunned at the crisp detail included in the image. After analysis, it was revealed that the image had to have been at least 10 cm resolution, perhaps even better.

Let's get a feel for what an image better than 10 centimetre resolution might look like on a regular high street. This is the bit where you might need to wave to the camera. This image is not a satellite image, but was taken by a plane flying over the town of Zurich. However, it does reveal what a better than 10 cm resolution image can show. We are no longer on the resolution of making out cars. Here you can see the branches on trees, even the colour of clothes on people. You can see a lot of detail.

Can you imagine what a one centimeter image might look like? This represents technology that exists today. In fact, better technology is now out there. The satellite that took this is a keyhole 11 spy satellite. A keyhole 12 already exists, which amateur astronomers have managed to image in spite of official pictures naturally not being released to the public. We don't know the resolution on this one, but it has dimensions similar to the Hubble telescope, and one of the reasons Hubble used the mirror size that they did was because they realized they

could use the same supplier as the US Department of Defense. So there are potentially 11 additional Hubble out there. Imagine how much further we would be if they were used for science instead of spying. We are also no longer in an era where cloud cover or night time can ensure privacy. Synthetic aperture radar imaging is capable of piercing through clouds, as the technology doesn't collect visible light, but instead sends down a radar pulse and then times how long it takes to bounce back. Done enough times over a wide area, with some sensitive equipment to discern the different times taken of different parts of the wave to return,

SAR satellites can form detailed physical models of the ground and can even simulate having a much larger mirror than they can actually carry. Because they are not reliant on natural light, but ascending their own pulses, these types of satellites can work during the the night as well as the day. So, with all of this, you likely are starting to feel a little worried for your privacy. It's unsettling to think that at any time you step out the house, eyes could be on you, watching you walk or drive to your destination, seeing who you meet, where you go. They are probably not able to read your phone screen, but that's not far off.

The cost of privacy feels huge. If you live in a city like London, you may have been thinking this anyway. way with the number of cameras around, but even where there are no cameras, you aren't safe. However, it should be pointed out that satellites with decent resolution, although probably not at the 10-centimeter mark, can be extremely beneficial for studying our planet. It's hard to list the benefits in full, but they include weather monitoring, studies of our climate, including sea level rises, CO2 levels in our atmosphere, tracking aerosol emissions, and seeing the current dimensions of the ice sheets, tracking surface temperatures, crop health, irrigation

use, water quality. You can even use precise satellites with cloud penetration to see the hotspots on wildfires, giving firefighters a better chance at tackling blazes, or we can better understand hurricanes, atmospheric dust clouds, and other disasters. In one incredible application, a NASA satellite intended to study cyclones was used to track locust swarms across eastern Africa, mapping out the most fertile, water-rich areas that locust like to lay their eggs in, or feed in during their juvenile forms. In so doing, they helped reduce swarms in Kenya in 2019, which was incredibly beneficial to farmers and the people whose food they

supply. Perhaps the bit that feels uncomfortable is if it seems like the people watching us do not to have our immediate benefits at heart. Studying the planet feels like a positive and worthy goal, and accurate data is helpful in that. However, it's also undeniable that businesses across the world would love to keep track of where people are shopping, population trends, and other metrics that allow them to better sell to customers, which is a goal you're less likely to want to sacrifice your own privacy for. might help city planners to keep track of the flow of traffic on roads and get a better sense

of where to build relief roads or other helpful interventions. Spy and law enforcement agencies also, in fairness, do a lot of good. They stop terrorism and catch criminals. But it's scary to think that once the technology is here, if ever the government in possession of it decides to use it for more invasive goals, there's not much that can be done to stop them. At the end of the day, perhaps this is something inevitable that we will all simply have to to get used to. It's difficult to stop the flow of progress.

As long as there are advantages to better resolutions on satellites, people will want to pursue developing them. In any case, it's at least good to know just how effective it's all becoming, because then your decisions on the matter can be informed too. You can decide whether this is becoming something that makes you nervous, or something you aren't really bothered about. Whether this needs tighter regulation through lawgivers, or whether it is a necessary cost to be paid for the ease and security of modern life. Wherever you stand on this matter, best put a brave face on. Smile. After all, you never know

who is watching. You tell yourself, no one wants your college-era band teas, but on Deep Hop, people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now, a teenager who quote, them vintage, will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Deepop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste will be a money-making machine? Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Deepop where taste Recognize his taste. There are 8 billion people who exist in the world today,

and they are being watched by things that aren't human. You are being watched right now, by metallic eyes that orbit far above you outside our planet's atmosphere. But they do not just watch you from space. They're in your computer. They listen through your phone. Even right now, as you're watching this video, be advised. Something is watching you back.

They examine the patterns of what you buy, of where you go, of what you search for on Google, all the data that exists in the world about you, they attempt to scrutinize. They are AI, and they are here to stay. To some degree, AI is an aspect of modern society that we've come to accept as normal, even if we're a little uncomfortable about it. But if you think we're talking about only commercial AI today, the algorithms that companies try to use to convince you to buy things, you're wrong.

There is something that governments have been developing that exists at a level of power and complexity above that. Military-grade AI, the sort used by surveillance agencies and battlefield operators, hidden in hard drives in a secret, remote location, in America, there is one AI in particular we are going to look at. Its name, sentient, its goal, to predict the future. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum.

Join me today as we discuss the classified AI that America is using in its space-based spy programs, one that has so much autonomy, it doesn't just receive data from satellites, it actually directs them. What exactly consentient do? And what does it mean for humanity's future both in this world and of it? Obviously, as a disclaimer,

this is a classified program. So there are many things we don't know. But by looking at the officially publicized statements and accounts from former officials, and by examining similar commercial AI in the private sector, we can make some pretty educated assumptions.

Using AI in intelligence gathering does make a lot of sense. Whether you are a company trying to take advantage of market trends, or a nation trying to stay on top of threats to your security, it's useful to know what everyone is doing, and also extremely difficult to properly analyze everything. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, there are 8 billion humans on Earth right now. Each one has a complex life filled with routines, hobbies. interests and affiliations. The sheer amount of data that it would take to keep track of everyone is overwhelming, as illustrated by how hard it is to keep up with all your friends on social

media. To some degree, this is true for space as well. There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. If you took as little as a second to look at each one individually, it would take 6,000. point three quadrillion years for you to see them all. Keeping tabs on so many stars is a mammoth task beyond the scope of any one person or even a large group of people. So for surveillance or science, there are immense benefits for the organization or nation that can troll through the endless data and find patterns or anomalies. And AI is extremely good at processing large amounts of information quickly. This makes it wonderful when it comes to the world of astronomy,

as it can identify interesting observations for humans to take a closer look at. Only, AI doesn't care whether we're above the microscope or beneath it, and the sort of AI that are being used to look at the actions of humans are becoming much more powerful than the ones looking at the stars, which is why you may find yourself in the uncanny situation of talking about a subject, with your friend, and then suddenly you find adverts for that same subject on your phone. This usually isn't just coincidence. Rather, this is your digital footprint being examined for marketable trends. We all have a digital footprint.

Every time we make a transaction, visit a web page, log in at a certain IP address, or Google a search term, we reveal a little bit about ourselves. Following pet stores, you probably have a pet, and might be in the market for pet food or products. Buying a plane ticket? Well, if that's a holiday, travel companies might be able to convince you to buy a hotel room, travel insurance, sunglasses, swimming suits. Businesses are keen to gain this information, and often we give it to them freely. Whenever you see a pop-up on your webpage asking you to accept cookies, chances are those cookies

relate to tracking what you do on that page. Apps on your phone ask you permission to use your microphone. If you grant that permission without reading it, there have been some unscrupulous cases where phones use your microphone to listen in to your day-to-day conversations, where they'll look out for keywords. That information will then be sold on to advertisers so they can better know what to sell you. This can already be unfortunate.

you might not want certain adverts popping up on your computer. A pregnant woman might not want to tell the world she's pregnant yet, but if AI analyzing her data figures it out, she and her partner might get adverts for baby gear, potentially tipping off anyone who happens to see their phone. But what happens if we're not just talking about businesses, but governments? Then, the means of information gathering become much more vast, and the stakes much higher. Governments like the US are interested in protecting the lives of their citizens from foreign threats, and being able to form a digital profile of persons of interest can be the difference between a bomb threat being prevented or hundreds of lives being lost.

So governments will use every trick in the book to gain as much information as possible. Google searches, shipping patterns, spy satellite images and video, financial transactions, weather reports. All these things help paint a picture. But the sheer quantity of information out there has always made it difficult to analyze everything to spot the patterns. Unless, of course, you have a really powerful AI. AI, like Sentient, are not just able to analyze data to spot patterns. Sentient is an automated, learning, adapting AI with the ability to direct satellites to locations of interest. Again, a lot of the information about it is classified, but the NRO

in 2016 did release some information about it, revealing some clues as to its abilities. Sentient is described in this document as data ingesting and processing, meaning specialists will feed it vast quantities of data. It is sense-making, meaning it will evaluate the data itself to try to discern patterns of behavior in what it's seeing. If a foreign power's jets are normally stationed in one air base, and suddenly they're congregating at another near the border of a neighboring nation, Sentient can conclude that they might be about to launch an attack, and then Sentient can take that one step further.

Rather than just flag what is identified as interesting, Sentient is able to direct satellites to photograph certain locations to fill in gaps in its knowledge. That's where the learning, adapting part comes in. Once the satellites are in place and Sentient can see what they see, it'll evaluate the data and try to predict where it needs to go next. The whole process is completely automated. How do we know this is real? Firstly, because commercial companies are attempting to do the same thing.

Black Sky is using its large numbers of satellites driven by automated AI to give buyers foresight. By using space-based intelligence, Black Sky is attempting to build a picture of what's happening right now on battlefields and in foreign countries. A repaired bridge, a new airport being constructed. Put raw data like that through the right kind of analysis, AI driven analysis, and they're figuring out what's about to happen too. That new bridge might hint at the need to transport troops quickly to a new war zone.

The airport might serve as a staging base for fighter jets in a planned offensive. In their own words, through AI, they hope to give companies the chance to act not just fast, but first. Black Sky is scanning ports around the Black Sea with frequent overhead flybys of small satellites. With its 15 passes a day, it has made 70,000 ship detections, helping it build a picture of exactly where Russian ships are and where they're likely headed, and where they might be vulnerable. This information is part of the reason Russia has lost so many of its ships to Ukrainian attacks.

And secondly, when in 2019 at a space symposium, a National Geospatial Intelligence Agency executive was asked directly about how to the space. good military and intelligence community algorithms had gotten at interpreting data and taking action based on those interpretations. They simply responded, that's a great question. And there's a lot of really good classified answers before swiftly moving on. If Black Sky can do that, it's assumed that Sentient can do that and more. Black Sky does not just use satellite images though. As well as from 25 satellites, it uses data from 40,000 news sources, 100 million mobile devices,

70,000 ships and planes, 8 social networks, 5,000 environmental sensors, and thousands of Internet of Things devices, according to a Verge article on the subject. What does sentient use? Presumably, a lot more. A retired CIA analyst suggested the answer is, every single. Everything. Images, financial information, weather records, pharmaceutical purchases. All of it paints a picture.

All can help identify patterns or abnormal behavior. There are even reports of it keeping an eye out for UFOs. I'd love to know what it found. Obviously, the NRO isn't keen to reveal exactly what Sentient is paying attention to, as then foreign powers could try to manipulate that information for their own advantage. But the sheer scale of information it consumes must be vast. And unlike humans who would be swamped trying to make sense of it all, Sentient can swiftly skim through the noise to identify the key points of interest.

Is this a problem? Yes and no. On the one hand, it certainly suggests that privacy is going to be harder and harder to come by. I've spoken before about how satellite images are becoming higher and higher resolution, and this could mean governments can keep tabs on you at all times. Now, they're not just looking at you physically. They're examining your social media feeds, your spending habits, and more. Which is fine if you've got nothing to hide, but it's unsettling nonetheless.

Yet, there will always be benefits. Sentient will be able to identify. identify threats which help the government prepare for them and keep its citizens safe. AI programs never tire and never stop. If science ever gets AI of the same level, we might one day see space missions that are completely automated. AI looking through telescopes to identify places they want to learn more about, and then launching their own probes to take a closer look with an army of data analyzing AI to evaluate

the result. A lot of fascinating discoveries could be made that way. If it's any consolation for American viewers, Sentient is bound by the usual NRO restrictions on when the US can spy on its own citizens, which is not all the time. But don't rest too easy. If the US is developing AI like this, it's very likely that other governments and private companies are doing the same thing too. the Pentagon is concerned about online profiles being built up on their staff, filled with

information that foreign spies might be able to utilize. Beyond that, problems can arise when our tools become too powerful. I'm not talking about some terrifying SkyNet scenario, but instead what naturally happens when AI gets powerful enough that humans will struggle to check its workings? In the UK, there was a recent, large scandal when the accounting system Horizon, that was used by the post office incorrectly accused about 900 employees of theft and fraud. Many of these employees were prosecuted simply because the post office assumed that the information horizon was giving it was correct.

In New Zealand, a woman was incorrectly identified as a shoplifter because facial recognition software struggled to precisely identify men and women of colour, leading to a false positive. AI tasked with making scientific discoveries could make similar mistakes, warping our understanding of the universe instead of enhancing it. And AI can just as easily ignore important information if it's been taught to ignore those things. When in 2023 an alleged Chinese spy balloon was caught flying over the US, officials realized that their radar was set to detect things moving at the speed of missiles, but not small. small and slow things like balloons.

When they adjusted their settings, several other balloon-like objects suddenly showed up on their radars and were subsequently shot down. Although not all of these later objects were necessarily spy balloons, it does prove that an object that behaves in an unusual way can sail right past the artificial systems designed specifically to watch out for them. AI might be very good at answering questions, but it is not so good yet. at knowing what questions to ask. What happens if powerful AI programs do not have sufficient oversight? What biases and assumptions could creep in, particularly for classified AI that not many

people are scrutinizing? It's a concerning thought. AI is here to stay. A digital profile is being created about you, and without proper laws and regulations being put into place, there's not a lot you can do to stop data broker companies from selling your personal data, beyond clicking reject all on those cookie pop-ups on websites. Not unless you're willing to go through the arduous process of getting those companies to delete your information, or are willing to campaign to governments to put tight restrictions in place. I mean, that's not such a bad idea.

The ability of AI like Sentient to troll through all of that raw information, along with a host of satellite footage and other sorts of such a sort of. sources, to then attempt to predict what will happen in the future and send satellites to key locations to see if those predictions were correct, only to make even more predictions. Well, it's certainly a powerful tool, a slightly chilling powerful tool. It makes perfect sense why we might want it, but it will have an impact on society, and perhaps a similar impact one day on our relationship with space. Perhaps with its predictive capabilities, the only one who will see what that impact on society will be is sentient itself.

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