KASS GREEN, American Society for
Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing
: Say you're in
California, where I live,
and you want to know how
susceptible your house is
to a wildfire.
[SIRENS]
So we put sensors, like
our eyes, on satellites.
We collect information, and
then computers create maps.
OK, now you have a map, so
you want to analyze that map.
Well, you'll take the
information about the slope.
Are you on a dead-end street?
Do you have a lot of
fuel around your house?
You put all that
information into a computer.
And it can tell
you how at risk you
are for losing your
home to a wildfire.
MARK BRENDER, GeoEye:
Ever since the Babylonians
etched the lay of the land
on clay tablets in 2300 BC,
mankind has needed accurate
representations of the earth.
KASS GREEN: Maps used to be
made on horseback in the 1800s.
They took a long
time to make, so we
evolved to aerial
photography, and that's
made a huge difference with how
humans understand the earth.
[PILOT'S VOICE]
JACK DANGERMOND, ESRI GIS &
Mapping Software: In the '60s,
people began to think about
the notion of encapsulating
or abstracting
geography in a computer.
And people could look at the
database and visualizations
or analytics.
And that was just
a magical idea.
[CROWD CHEERING]
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I,
Barack Hussein Obama,
do solemnly swear that I will
preserve, protect, and defend
the Constitution of
the United States.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS:
So help you God?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: So help me God.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS:
Congratulations, Mr. President.
CONGRESSMAN JOHN SARBANES:
The Obama campaign
took to a new level
their use of technology
with respect to mapping.
KASS GREEN: They knew
what voters to target.
They knew where the
marginal voter was.
And, frankly, the ones that
use it the most effectively get
elected.
MARK BRENDER: After 9/11, US
troops went into Afghanistan,
and they went in
with Russian maps
because who would
ever think you'd have
to have maps of Afghanistan.
VICE ADMIRAL ROBERT MURRETT:
Geospatial intelligence
has become really the foundation
for just about anything that
happens in the military.
It has to do with understanding
in a very time-sensitive
fashion things that
may be developing
in different parts of the world.
HON.
JAMES R. CLAPPER:
It's the ability
to enable decision
makers, whether they're
someone sitting in the
White House or someone
sitting in the fox hole.
MARK BRENDER: More than half
the world's population now
lives in urban areas.
Thirteen of the 20 largest
cities are on coastlines.
So how do you model in potential
rise of sea level because
of climate change?
RICHARD ALLEY, Geoscientist,
Nobel Prize Winner, Penn State:
We simply could not
know how the earth works
without geospatial technologies
telling us where things are,
how they're related,
how it's put together
to tell us the story of
what really is happening.
SCOTT EDWARDS,
Amnesty International:
The conflict in Darfur is
over five years old now.
Somewhere around 400,000
people have died.
We wanted to go to the
place, collect testimony,
take photographs.
The Sudanese government
had very little interest
in having us on the ground.
So we purchased
satellite imagery,
and we saw whole
villages destroyed.
We took those images to
the Sudanese government
to let them know that
people around the world
were watching these
villages remotely.
DAVID DIBIASE, Mapping
Scientist, Penn State:
For the insiders, the
transition to digital geography
has been truly revolutionary.
We can navigate our world
with much greater confidence
then we could have before.
It's changed the science agenda.
It's changed the technology.
It's created new occupations.
But for those outside,
who may not even
be aware that there is a
field called geospatial,
it has made geography
ordinary, which
is the most revolutionary
thing of all.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
