A Spire scientist reflects on climate change from Colorado’s Royal Gorge, then explains how small satellites, data simulation, weather forecasting and machine learning support a global view of Earth. The film connects a personal experience of landscape with the company’s international network of satellite, software and ground-station specialists.
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Transcript Auto-generated from Vimeo
I just passed a very delicate, beautiful suspended bridge here in Royal Gorge in Colorado. It made me think, while walking by and enjoying this beautiful landscape, that it might disappear due to the dramatic consequences of climate change.
My hope is that we can come together as one people to save our planet and slow down climate change as fast as we can, using maybe the best data available. And my hope is that I can provide some of the data and some of the methods to understand why climate change is happening.
Spire is a global company that makes small satellites that observe Earth globally. Spire has many different covers, many different countries, by having different offices around the world: people who have different specialties, experts in small-satellite engineering, experts in software engineering, experts like me in data simulation, weather forecasting, even machine learning, ground-station building, that are needed for tracking satellites and getting data from that.
If you ask a question about anything, there is a high probability that there will be a person working in Spire knowing something about it, and even giving you a good answer. I think diversity is important in nature as well. If we were all the same, we would never progress.
Moving to Colorado, wow. It’s just everything. There are mountains, there are flat terrains, there are so many different colors. There is wildlife: deer, moose. I’m just enjoying all of that. I like going hiking to the mountains, like Rocky Mountain National Park. River rafting was something that I learned: how you can raft, how you can deal with danger, and it requires collaborative teamwork.
There are so many problems that all of us need to address to get better, and there is so little time that we need to understand how we can mitigate or slow down climate change. Observing the Earth, knowing what’s actually happening today, I see the pale blue Earth as this boat that we are all rowing, and we have to row in the right direction. There is hope that the Earth can be saved. There is still time, but we have to react now. If we are to save the Earth, there is no other choice.
