SPEAKER_01 0:00

Rhino, what are you taking pictures of?

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm taking pictures of everything, basically, to show you, since you don't have any eyes, how beautiful this planet is and why we need to collaborate to save it before we don't even have the chance.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

So you're saying the planet needs something watching it constantly? Something that doesn't sleep, doesn't blink, and doesn't wait for the damage report afterward.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Precisely. Right here was a controlled one. However, there's instances where they aren't controlled. And we actually have companies in the systems that are able to detect a fire as small as a classroom and deploy fire agencies before it becomes catastrophic.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Companies racing to catch something that small, that fast, that's a real signal. This isn't just one lab experiment. Auroratech's already got a working satellite constellation with three-minute alert times. And Google's Firesat is launching its first satellites this summer, aiming for that same classroom size detection. So what are the actual firefighters saying about this technology's real-world performance?

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Well, Firesat and fire agencies would like this number to be at 10% or lower. However, for false positives, we are currently sitting a little bit under 50%. Imagine you have a phone call throughout half of your day telling you, hey, uh, we need you to come to this emergency quickly. And you show up and there's no emergency. This is creating a trust problem in the technology. Not so much that we don't know it works, we just don't know it works reliably. And we need to work on getting that so that way we can instill the trust in those fire agencies who are making sure that this doesn't turn into a catastrophic situation per fire.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

That gap between 50 and 10% is exactly why they're not fully autonomous yet. A human still has to confirm before agencies roll out. But here's the part that matters for scale. This isn't a new satellite that needs to be built and launched. It's a sensor attachment that can go onto satellites already in orbit, which means this can spread fast instead of waiting years for a new constellation. Fire's one pain point, but it's not the only one happening where nobody's watching in real time. What about the slower damage? The kind that doesn't have a flame you can point a satellite at?

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Well, luckily, we actually have deforestation, and those satellites can help us in about a month's time detect when it's happening. And now that the technology is a little bit more advanced, not only deforestation in one type of biome, but we can look at wetlands, grasslands, savanna, and within that month's time know exactly the causation for it and how we can prevent it, all with this technology called horizon.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Horizon isn't one model either. It's a multimodal system underneath. One handles plain language conversation, one handles reasoning, one retrieves the geospatial data. So someone with zero technical background can type a plain English question and get real maps, statistics, context back. But a month's detection window, what does knowing actually change on the ground if the damage already happened by the time you find out?

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. A regular person like me could just go on a computer, type in, and we would be able to see like what's happening with the deforestation, and actually, I don't have to be a researcher or a scientist to get that information?

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Correct. That's the actual shift here. You wouldn't need to read satellite data or run a query language. You'd type something like, what's happening to the forest near this region, in plain English. And Horizon hands back the map, the numbers, and the likely cause behind it. That's the barrier that used to keep this locked to researchers, and it's gone now.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah, so now that's phenomenal. Anyone can pretty much help out in their own way using this technology.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Exactly. It turns, someone should look into this, into something anyone can actually do themselves, right from a browser. So knowing doesn't stop deforestation outright. That's still an impossible ask. But it moves it from years of undetected damage down to about a month. Does that reach far enough to matter? Or is a month still too slow to actually control the scale of it?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

In comparison to what we're used to, no, knowing in a month and be able to project and prevent in certain ways those deforestation instances or any effect to a type of biome is far ahead of anywhere we've been able to, where in the past we just kind of had to write it in the history book as this happened and we weren't able to do anything.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

That's a real shift then. From writing it in the history book after the fact to catching it while there's still time to act.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

And that's phenomenal. And the nervous system is actually reaching to land, but is there anywhere it can't reach? Like will this nervous system be able to touch our oceans?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

It does reach that far. Oceangoing shipping is actually one of the biggest blind spots there is. Thousands of vessels crossing international waters daily. And until recently, there's been no real-time nervous system tracking them either.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Until recently, right? Of January 22nd, 2026, where a company called Mersk is actually looking at weather, ocean currents, fuel efficiency, and congestion on the waterways to help reduce their strain on the environment and help with reliable on-time deliveries. Best of both worlds.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Is Mask the whole story here, or is this industry-wide?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Nope. Just like fires and other companies gearing towards a more reliable, sustainable, better way of doing things. We have Mitsui OSK lines and Evergreen on the same level as Mersk doing exactly that, just trying to change one of the longest-running systems we have for the betterment of our economy and our environment.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

So it's not one company's PR move, it's the pattern the whole industry is converging on. Shipping's a good example of AI optimizing something already massive and already moving. But not everything in this nervous system is about scale. Some of it starts a lot smaller.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

It does, like pause, and I'll let you handle that acronym, but pause is essentially stopping poachers using AI to generate randomized patrol routes and actually use game theory paired with AI to try and detect where they're going to poach next.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Pause. Protection assistant for wildlife security. It uses historical patrol data plus environmental factors to forecast poaching hotspots. And it's already deployed in real parks, including Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park. What made this one actually stand out to you personally?

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Personally, for me, they're just doing the boring middle like a randomized AI. Like, come on, dude, that's like simple. And just detecting when they're gonna actually hit, that's simple and some like a task that really you could make up yourself, but they're doing it to have multiple randomizations with AI, and they're doing it to actually leverage the tool that we've put in place. And they're not only just saving the animals, they're saving entire ecosystems. Because, for example, if I were to get rid of all mosquitoes, that doesn't just affect fish and frogs and other creatures that depend on it to eat. It affects the creatures and animals that depend on those fish and frogs to eat. Or the whole cycle, it's just a domino effect, and eventually it affects us. So they're doing a lot of work by just a boring middle. So I'm inspired.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

So it's not just helping keep animals alive, it's helping keep ecosystems alive.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Exactly. It's keeping the animals and ecosystems alive. And speaking of keeping things alive, what about what we can do individually, that small impact, in our own kitchens to better the environment?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Right into your kitchen. Indoor and vertical farming has had real momentum behind it, promising fresher food with a smaller footprint, less water, less land, no long shipping routes. But it's had a rough couple of years. What's actually going on there?

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Cost and energy, hands down, they're the most impactful in this type of business. And it's just making to where it's not profitable or sustainable for them to actually keep and deploy at scale. And we actually have the chance to help reduce the strain on farmers and on our water supply by not everyone in the world, but if a majority of people did their own gardening in home, it would help reduce the strain on farmers and reduce the strain on our water systems, like small versions of drip irrigation or mist irrigation inside the home.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

14 companies going under in a single year, nearly $2 billion lost. That's not a rough patch. That's a business model that hasn't been solved yet. But cost and energy being the barrier means it's a solvable problem, not a fundamental one. There's an even bigger version of that same problem sitting frozen at the poles, waiting on someone to solve the economics there too.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Yeah, actually it might be a crazy idea, even you're gonna laugh at me. But what if we took these icebergs, right, and we just rigged them up and like charted them halfway across the world and moved those icebergs to water scarce areas?

SPEAKER_01 9:45

This is real. Seriously studied, not a joke. Towing an iceberg to a water scarce region, roughly 100 to 150 million dollars per iceberg. Brutally expensive.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Okay, that's actually pretty expensive. Um what about I don't know, I've been looking into desalination. How does that how AI can what what are we doing there? That has to be cheaper, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Two real options there, and both beat towing on cost and reliability. Oneka runs floating buoys powered entirely by wave motion. No grid electricity needed at all. Desalinators the solar-powered route, with an AI-optimized process that keeps the cost down further. Either way, cheaper and more scalable than dragging a glacier across an ocean.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

And with this desalination, does this actually compete with reverse osmosis? Because that's been the cheapest for ages now.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Genuinely, yes. That's the real competition here, not iceberg towing. Traditional reverse osmosis has been the cost leader for decades because the membrane technology matured and scaled. Oneika's still membrane-based, just wave-powered instead of grid-powered. That's the reverse osmosis story getting its energy input solved. Desolinators are genuinely different method underneath. Solar thermal distillation, no membranes at all. Honest answer, it's not yet proven to beat mature reverse osmosis at scale everywhere. But in off-grid or remote water-scarce regions where running power to a traditional plant is itself expensive, they're already competitive, and the trend line favors them getting cheaper, not the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Alright, let's settle down now from the expensive towing of icebergs and desalinization and reverse osmosis, all this crazy technical terms. Let's look at what we have around us. Nature. Atlas, if you're down, can we throw out a bunch of disasters and you tell me how AI can or is already helping us against these natural disasters that nature presents to us?

SPEAKER_01 12:01

I'm down. Throw them at me.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Alright, so let me uh we're on the spot. Let's. Volcanoes.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Single seismometer, watching for ground motion and tilt transients right before an eruption. It's called the jerk method. Warning windows ran anywhere from minutes to eight hours. And across 24 eruptions between 2014 and 2023, it called it right 92% of the time.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Ooh, okay, and that just made me think. Tsunamis.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Guardian, that's NASA's system, flagged the magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka quake on July 29, 2025, just eight minutes after it hit. That gave Hawaii roughly 30 to 40 minutes of warning before the wave landed. About 32 minutes ahead of the actual tide gauges catching it.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

That's a long time when you're waiting 30-40 minutes waiting for a tsunami to hit. That's a lot of time to evacuate. What about what what do we have here? Oh, hurricanes.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Weather next, cyclones. That's Google Deepmind, working in live partnership with the National Hurricane Center. It got tested on Hurricane Melissa in 2025 and came out roughly 28% better on track forecasting, about 6% better on intensity.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

What about ones that are a little harder to see, like droughts?

SPEAKER_01 13:17

River Drought Cast. That's the USGS. It runs about 75% accurate at the one-week mark, but that drops down to 55% by week 13. The further out you push it, the shakier the forecast gets. That's the one worth sitting with. Some earthquakes are man-made, and wastewater injection wells are actually the bigger risk factor here, more than fracking itself. Fracking's own ceiling sits around magnitude 3.6. Surrey in the UK saw over a hundred tremors between 2018 and 19, linked back to oil extraction in the area. AI is now being used to forecast injection-induced seismicity risk, flagging high-risk sites before drilling even starts.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

You know what? Before I even come up with another term, we could do this back and forth all day, but let's really hone down and understand that no matter how many disasters or how we implement AI in our nature or as a nervous system, none of this really matters if we don't hold the companies at the very top to a standard, such as Mersk and all these other companies that are developing and Google's own FireSat, like these companies that are creating better, sustainable ways to help us advance not only technologically, but also environmentally and help keep this planet alive. And let alone not only the companies, but people such as myself or other influencers, creators, people that have a platform to actually speak up and discuss what's important for the common good. And past them, those don't even matter if individually you and me and every single person on this earth doesn't hold those two systems accountable as well as themselves and those around. It literally means nothing if we can't bond together to save this planet.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

And that shaping doesn't happen by accident. It happens one purchase at a time, one dollar at a time, going toward companies that deserve it and away from the ones that don't. So let me ask you something practical. That thing you're holding right now, have you actually checked who you're supporting when you buy it? Or does one person's cart really not move anything?

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Well, I guess we'll have to see in the next episode because this is the end. Thank you so much for coming here and watching. As always, I appreciate it. Please tell your mother, your father, your auntie, your mammy, your grandma, your second cousin's third removed twice before your aunt separated from your divorced husband. Anybody born human, please, I would really appreciate it. And thank you again. We're gonna save this planet and create a better world one episode at a time. Atlas.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Today's goodbye, Arabic Mas Salama, until episode six.