Humans are constantly burning carbon all over the world, and it has been increasing every single year. This has led to high carbon concentration not just in the atmosphere but in the soil as well. In this episode, Doctor Awesome is joined by Lars Dyrud, CEO of Earth Optics. Together, they discuss how satellite imagery and machine learning are being used to measure the planet’s soil, paving the way for the development of various solutions addressing soil carbon emissions. Lars also shares how they guide farmers on improving food production and why scaring people is never the best approach in encouraging them to fight climate crisis.

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The Future Of Soil And Satellites – A Conversation With Lars Dyrud

We have Lars Dyrud, who is the CEO of EarthOptics, which is an interesting company, but respectively, he’s done many different companies. I talked to Lars about his thought leader role in the technology space and how he’s trying to measure everything from satellite imagery to sensors, you name it. He got his hands in it. Lars, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing at EarthOptics. I know that you are trying to bring on the revolution of measuring everything. I want to know more about that and how that’s going to affect our future.

Thanks so much for having me. I’m a space scientist by training, but now I’m working in soil. Throughout my career, one of the themes is I’ve been looking for difficult-to-measure but important problems. EarthOptics has been around for several years. One of the core things we’re focusing on is trying to help farmers and ranchers. We go from food production causing about 30% of global emissions and reducing food production. It’s something that’s completely within the realm of our ability, and it won’t even take that long.

It starts with measuring. It’s a common phrase you can’t manage but don’t measure. Soil is incredibly complex. For us, it starts with, step one, making detailed, accurate measurements of the soil, including carbon, and providing that data to other smart people, capable farmers, and ranchers who will use it to start becoming not only food producers but carbon farmers.

The future is filtered through this lens of the environmental implications of carbon emissions. That’s something that you’re specifically working on now. How are we measuring this, to begin with? From the micro scale to the macro scale, how are you doing it? How are other people doing it? That’s always something that I wanted to talk to someone like you about.

The Earth’s carbon cycle is incredibly complex. The one thing that’s easy to find is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’ve been making measurements. The gold standard single measurement is in Hawaii on the top of Mauna Kea Observatory. We’ve been measuring, since the ‘50s, the carbon concentration several times a day. That part we know well. We know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily going up. It goes up and down every season as the Northern Hemisphere goes into winter versus summer. Every year, it has slowly marched upwards. That we know so well.

One of the fascinating things that got me into this field is that every year, humans burn about 18 to 20 billion tons of carbon through petroleum, natural gas, oil, gasoline, and all the other petroleum inputs. That’s what’s been causing the atmospheric carbon concentration to go up. I got fascinated because I’m not a carbon cycle expert by training. When I learned that even though we’re burning 18 to 20 billion tons per year, the carbon concentration is only increasing by about 8 to 10 billion tons. Half of that carbon we spew into the atmosphere every year doesn’t stay there.

I asked the experts, “Where’s the carbon going?” They’re like, “It’s going into the terrestrial biosphere. For every plant and tree that’s on the land that we’re familiar with, the other half goes into the ocean.” I asked, “What do you mean it goes into the ocean? Does it get dissolved? What happens?” The ocean is straightforward. We think we understand that well. Phytoplankton grow. They’re made out of carbon. When they die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean. They stay sequestered there forever.

What’s a lot more complicated is the terrestrial biosphere. Half of that access carbon is going to the terrestrial biosphere. In principle, it’s straightforward. It makes sense. Every single plant is built out of carbon. That’s what we’re made out of. That’s what all plants on the Earth are made out of. When plants grow, they take carbon out of the atmosphere. At the high level, what’s happening is they’re growing more. When plants decay, they make carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

On a global scale, what’s happening is there’s more carbon that stains the ground than is admitted through that plant growth and decaying process. What we don’t know is where that’s happening. We don’t have a good understanding of where this excess carbon is being put in the terrestrial biosphere. If you ask the question, “What does it mean for the terrestrial biosphere to store an additional 5 billion tons of carbon every year?” That’s happening in the soil.

If you look at the large numbers, there is three times more carbon in 1 meter or about 3 feet of soil than in the atmosphere. There are five times more in that same top 1-meter soil than in all the plants and trees on the surface of the Earth. If you look at that from that perspective, there are two places where carbon resides, and the much larger sink is in the soil, but it’s the atmosphere in the soil. Plants cause respiration. All the plant growth and plant decay activity is causing respiration between those two pools of carbon.

To me, that was fascinating, the fact that the soil, even the top 1 meter of it, we’re not talking deep, where we get oil. The top 1 meter has way more carbon than the atmosphere, which means it could easily store the excess carbon we’ve been putting in the atmosphere for many years. Since plants are doing this already, they have been helping us out all along the way. They’ve been taking their 4 billion or 5 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere on our behalf without us even thinking about it or trying anything for it.

Plants have been helping us all along by taking four to five billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere on our behalf without us even thinking or trying anything for it.

I got fascinated with the whole concept of, “If we tried a little bit, could we make that go from 4 billion tons a year to 10 billion or 12 billion?” The soil pool can hold plenty of carbon if it’s three times larger than the entire atmosphere. The scientists of the United Nations worked out a long before. They had a campaign that never stuck to show that if we could increase the soil carbon content by four-tenths of 1% on all our global working lands, we would cancel out all our petroleum emissions.

Four-tenths of 1% is not a crazy amount of carbon. That seems doable. As soon as I started reading about that, I was like, “We should do that. How hard can that be?” It turns out it’s not terribly hard, but the amount of carbon in the soil is only a few percentage points of the soil. Everyone has some familiarity with soil. When you think of potty soil that you buy at Home Depot or Lowe’s, it is black. That blackness is carbon. Clay is usually gray or orange. Soil is made up of clay, sand, and silt. None of which are usually black.

When you think of black-rich soil, that’s the carbon and the organic matter that make it look black, but carbon only represents a few percent of soil. Measuring it is hard. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack measurement trying to measure the human impact that we can have on carbon concentration. It changes slowly. The changes are small, but integrating them over the entire globe has a significant impact. One can be impactful as all our petroleum emissions.

At EarthOptics, we focus on that measurement part. How can we measure soil accurately that’ll allow ranchers, farmers, and foresters to understand the carbon impact they’re making, whether positive or negative, and allow them to do the same thing they’ve done for food production for the last decades? Food production has skyrocketed on a per-acre basis through our innovation and our more productive farming. If you go back many years, we’ve gone from about 30 to 50 bushels of corn per acre. We’re now in some of our most fertile land in the Midwest. In the US, we’re producing well over 300 bushels of corn per acre on that same acre of land.

We’ve gotten 5 to 6 times more efficient at food production over the last several years. If we could get a couple of times more at soil carbon production with that same activity, we would completely reverse climate change. That seems such a full notion. This is what I’m going to spend my time doing. I’m like, “Why is not everybody doing this? How come this is what everyone’s talking about?”

One of the reasons why is the measurement part has been hard. It’s hard to understand whether you’re making a positive or negative impact. The one part I could do is contribute to making that measurement cost-effective and accurate enough to be useful. There’s been a lot more people taking a harder look at this as the solution to climate change.

I didn’t even know that. Your company is called EarthOptics. You’re looking at it from a top-down type of perspective. You’re sitting here and making these large measurements. There are two questions that I have for you. 1) How much have you measured already? 2) Have you noticed any trends in those measurements?

The reason why I say that is you hear on the news that the soil is getting worse, and we’re having all of these problems with our food production. It’s tough to know what’s real and what’s not. As somebody who is getting objective data, how do you feel like the status of our food production is from a soil perspective?

We have technicians throughout the country and partners we work with using our equipment and method throughout the world. We’re physically going to measure soil. We combine them with sensor data on tractors and satellite data to make it more cost-effective. We measure, take soil samples, and send them to the lab. That’s the only way to get that ground accurately. Our technology comes in because it allows us to take a lot fewer soil samples yet still get accurate characterization over hundreds of thousands of acres. We’re making real measurements.

That’s one of the parts why it’s been hard and expensive. We still need these gold-standard soil samples and send them to a lab, but what if we could take the 10% we used to have for the same level of accuracy? That’s where our technology developments have been focused. What we’re learning is we make measurements for a lot of carbon programs. There are a lot of food companies that stood out with carbon programs as part of their scope 3 reporting requirements or because they’re trying to have a better handle on their supply chain and where our food is coming from.

What is a scope 3 reporting requirement for somebody?

There are a bunch of companies and countries that have committed to being carbon neutral by various dates. The regulations they set up outline scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions. Scope one is your easy-to-measure emissions. They’re your electricity or fuel consumption as part of your production. Scope 2 is the rest of the emissions you do from the things you source. Scope three is your supply chain. What are the emissions as part of your supply chain?

If you’re a consumer packaged goods company or a grocer, the food ingredients you’re sourcing from farmers or ranchers are your scope 3 emissions. It’s part of your supply chain. If you’re a beverage producer, the bottles would also be part of those scope 3 emissions, whether they’re plastic. For most food production, that carbon sequestered or emitted as part of the food growing and porting to the grocery store falls under these scope 3 emissions.

The point is you’re measuring this. What trends are you noticing?

For the programs, we have a decent, at least initial, understanding of what it takes to increase or decrease soil carbon. It’s imperfect, and soil is highly variable. We got good at food production by farmers understanding what to do on those acres they manage. There’s no one silver bullet solution to say, “If all farmers did insert blank here, we’d solve climate change.” This makes it complex and hard to measure carbon accurately. Figuring out what works and doesn’t work for that particular acre, like farmers did for food production, is necessary.

For the programs we’re working on where the goal is to reimburse farmers for climate-smart activities, we see that a lot of those programs work. Some work better than others in certain areas, but in general, we’re seeing anywhere from ranches to farmers. Ranchers are able to increase the amount of carbon sequestered in their soil in many areas by as much as one ton per acre per year. That’s more like three tons of CO2 equivalent per acre per year. It’s a significant amount.

What is the percentage of increase in sequestration?

For most farming soils in the United States, when they were untouched prairies, that soil is about 5% carbon. Now, many of those soils are 2% to 3%. That’s what people are talking about. The soil is getting degraded. Organic matter is critical for nutrient transfer and moisture retention in soils. It’s key to food. You can get by with less carbon but less carbon in your soil and less organic matter. That means more fertilizer in the soil and less resistance to drought. You can grow stuff in the sand if you want to. You have to put enough grow stuff hydroponically. You don’t need any soil, but it means you have to apply a decent amount of fertilizer, and the soil is going to dry out a lot easier.

As we enter periods where we’ve got changing weather patterns, those crops become a lot less resistant to some changes. In many of our working soils, we are sitting at a much lower level of organic matter and carbon than we used to before we started farming them. In many cases, that’s caused its own emissions. Scientists have estimated that, globally, in all our working lands, we’ve evaporated somewhere between 120 billion to 150 billion tons of carbon from soils in the last several years alone.

Scientists have estimated that we have evaporated between 120 to 150 billion tons of carbon globally from our working lands just in the last season.

The simple idea is that returning soils to their original level of carbon through these climate-friendly practices that we’re starting to learn more about would reverse several decades of climate change all on its own. We’re not even talking about doing something unnatural or new. If we could simply put back the carbon in the atmosphere that we evaporated from the soil, we would dial the whole climate change problem backward a couple of decades.

There’s no easy way to say this, but is this stuff real? I hear so much about carbon sequestration and carbon capture being a pipe dream. It’s not something that is a viable option, but you’re seeing it. Objectively speaking, you’re a scientist. This is something that you see from year to year based on your measurements. What are some good technologies and methods to do it that people can know about that this is a viable option?

It’s tossed around, especially on the political trail these days. Everybody’s talking about carbon sequestration and carbon capture being a way out for changing emission standards. I’m not choosing any sides. I don’t know where the science lies. For somebody that has your training, how do you feel about it?

When it comes to soil sequestration, it is not the right word. One of the things is I try to get people to think about soils differently. There are carbon sequestration technologies. We have direct air capture where you’re taking air and centrifusion that separates the carbon dioxide from all the other gases, liquefies it, and injects it into old oil wells. That is sequestering carbon. It’s expensive. It costs several hundred dollars per ton.

When we think about food production, farming, and ranching, they’re already making emissions in many cases. In some cases, they’re not. What we don’t do is pay farmers and ranchers for when they’re sequestering carbon versus when they’re emitting it. That’s not part of the economics. Once we make it part of the economics and understand when we’re emitting carbon and when we’re sequestering it in our food production, we can manage our soil significantly more effectively from a carbon perspective than we do now, which is in most cases, we do nothing to manage soil organic matter or carbon at a widespread level.

When you think about soil being carbon and certain soil, it’s less about sequestering. It’s not locked in there forever. The carbon in the soil a couple of feet is old. If you do carbon dating of organic matter in the top 1 meter of soil, you’ll find that once you get down below half a meter, about a foot and a half, that carbon there is 500 years old. If you go down to a meter, it’s 1,000 years old. The carbon sitting in the soil meter deep represents organic matter that a plant grew about 1,000 years ago. That’s the rate at which it cycles down, lowers the soil, and the soil builds up over time.

At some level, it’s sequestration, but what we’re talking about is how we can manage our food production in a way that critically includes the soil and has more net carbon going into the soil than it has left it. It’s a continuous management problem, not one of like, “I have to do this one thing once, and then I don’t have to worry about that carbon anymore.”

Our food production is already responsible for 30% of emissions between soil and transportation. It’s not something that we cannot do something about. We have to make our food production system less carbon-intensive. Soil represents such an awesome opportunity. We can make food production carbon-positive. It can contribute to all our other emissions if we manage the soil optimally.

It’s about what is needed to manage a particular acre in a particular climate optimally. That requires data to understand what’s working and what’s not working. Once we see people doing that and figuring out what’s working through the programs that we make measurements on, it’s a significant reversal. We’ve seen ranchers who are overgrazing areas. They’re losing about half a ton of carbon per acre per year and completely reverse that within a few years to gaining a ton of carbon per acre per year.

We operate on such massive amounts of land globally. Scientists reported several years ago that humans are now doing something on 51% of the terrestrial biosphere. We are the majority shareholders of the terrestrial biosphere now. It’s not Mother Nature doing her thing. It is for 49%. We have 49% of the land that’s untouched by humans, and Mother Nature is doing whatever Mother Nature’s going to do.

We’re responsible for that other 51%. If we don’t understand whether our management is degrading or evaporating carbon rather than increasing it, that’s a huge missed opportunity from my perspective. We work on so much land from our forests, raising land, and raw crop food production. We have access to more than enough acres to reverse the other human impacts and emissions. It’s about figuring out what works and implementing it.

I can tell the optimism and everything that you’re talking about. There’s pessimism associated with the idea of environmental changes in the next several years. That’s not giving humanity enough credit. We are going to figure a way out of this, whether it comes from soil, renewable energies, or changing to electronic vehicles. All of them have pros and cons. I’m not going to say one is right. There’s a lot of ingenuity and innovation happening in this space, and that’s exciting to watch.

Having spoken with a lot of different people who are trying to innovate this space, many of the futurists that I’ve talked to are bullish on alternative food technologies like artificial meat. For a while, they were talking about hydroponics and vertical farms being the next big thing. That still has yet to produce a reliable economic model. It’s not the only thing you’re focusing on, but from a general perspective, you’re closer to the ground than many other people who are reading this. How do you feel about those different technologies?

There are some food production technologies that will benefit, like vertical farming. We’ll get that model figured out. That’s fantastic from a fresh fruit and vegetables perspective of growing them more locally. I’m on the East Coast. We truck a lot of food from California all the way across the country to get here. That has an inherent level of emissions associated with it. If some of those fruits and vegetables could be grown locally at grocery stores, that would be an obvious reduction in emissions.

A small amount of our calories are ever going to come from that type of stuff. The bulk of our global calories will come from traditional food production on farms and ranches. That’s because you can’t compete with free water and nuclear reactors in the sky that provide energy for all these things. It is the cheapest and most practical way to feed the 8 million people on this planet.

Tying in your comment on pessimism, it’s unfortunate, especially with a bunch of the younger folks. It’s older people in my generation who are responsible for a lot of that pessimism because there’s a bunch of misguided people who are concerned about climate change and appropriately concerned. They thought the solution was scaring people into action. A lot of the action they ask people to do is, “We need you to go without these things that you enjoy and love.”

I don’t think that’s ever worked in the history of humans to get people to do stuff by scaring them into action. Maybe for a short period of time, but it’s never a long-term solution. You have to paint a better picture of the future. What does living on Earth without climate change look like? Why is that something that we need to get as opposed to saying, “You have to live without these things.”

We don’t have to live without these things, even new food technologies. People demonize meat all the time. That’s misguided. European settlers got to the United States. We had more large, hoof animals roaming the planes than we do now. There were a lot more buffalo. Scientists think about 35 million to 38 million buffalo roaming the great plains in the United States and Southern Canada when settlers arrived. Fortunately, they started killing them. We have about 30 million cows now across the same country. We have less large hoof animals.

We have these jokes about cow burps. There’s no doubt that methane from cattle contributes to climate change. In my view, it’s a necessary contribution. We need large hoof animals. The ecosystems that we inherited required large hoof animals. The prairies were designed to burn every 5 to 10 years in sweeping wildfires. That’s why they didn’t have trees on them. They were designed to have large roaming herds of buffalo, every single blade of grass, and, quite frankly, poop all over the place and move on to some new location.

The hoof action pushes the seed into the ground. If you don’t have animals heavily walking around pushing seed to the ground, you only get grasses and growing plants that don’t need to be pressed into the ground. That changes our ecosystems. It’s less about like, “We should go without meat.” I don’t even think we should be going out going without meat per se. Everyone who wants to be a vegetarian can and should, but our ecosystems in the US need 35 million large hoof animals roaming around.

We have to learn to deal with the amount of methane emissions at that number of animals, but they always have been making those emissions. We have to make sure we’re managing our ecosystems. We’re free to raise cattle when possible. We’re not feeding them corn in small pens to the extent possible or letting them do the thing they were designed to do in the ecosystems where they mostly belong.

That’s a great example of trying for the future that is better off having healthier meat from happier cows that were free-range produced. It’s the same with dairy. If we can have more free-range dairy production, that’s better for our ecosystems and environment. We can graze cattle, both dairy and beef-producing cattle, using techniques that mimic the way buffalo roamed the great plains.

It’s called intensive rotational grazing, where you pack the cows together and force them to stay in one spot, which the herds naturally did with herd mentality. They show up at some spot and eat all the grass. Some members of the herds decide it’s time to move on somewhere else, and they would all move rapidly on somewhere else.

You can mimic that traditional buffalo behavior with intentional grazing, where you’re moving the cow several times per day but letting them intensively graze like they would in a natural environment. That is beneficial for carbon production in the soil. In the Northern Areas of the country, you can easily get one, maybe even two tons of carbon sequestration in the soil with that type of grazing methodology. In the Southern States, as much as half a ton per acre. How can we understand how nature works and try to produce food in a way that’s closest to the way it was traditionally working before we came and changed everything?

That was interesting. When you were painting the picture about that stuff, I could tell that you had taken a lot of satellite imagery because you were talking about the rolling hills. That’s another thing that I wanted to talk with you about because one of the many contributions of your technological career is that you’ve been helpful in satellite imagery and machine learning to process that and gain some insight from that, which I did want to talk with you about because I feel like the bounty from that technology has not been realized to its full extent.

For an introductory or a layperson like myself, GPS technology is when I think about the benefits of satellite technology. There’s no data that’s analyzed in such a way that we gain insight from that other than traffic patterns. There’s so much stuff happening from that macro perspective that I don’t know about. Tell us a little bit about where you see satellite technology evolving in the future.

When we think about the technology of satellites, I feel like it’s either GPS or spying on people. Those are the two different technological groups from satellite technology that I know about. What are some other things that you think are coming down from the pipeline from that vein of technology that will produce a lot of tangible benefits for lay people like myself?

I’m a space scientist. I’m trying to spend most of the early part of my career designing satellite systems. It’s something that’s near and dear to my heart. Much has been changing over the last decade. NASA and the European Space Agency have been launching Earth observation satellites for many years. We’ve dramatically increased the amount of measurements we take of Earth from space.

Space is a convenient place to make measurements of Earth. You can put a single camera in space in an orbit of Earth. You can take a picture of everywhere on the globe. That’s an awesome leveraging capability. If you build a sensor that can measure something and is able to put it in space, you go global with that single sensor and single measurement.

We’ve been first at our government agencies at NASA and ISS. We’ve been dramatically expanding the number of measurements we make, but we are still barely scratching the surface. If you go back several years and take imaging, the non-spy satellite images are high resolution. They don’t measure useful Earth stuff. They’re designed to get a high-resolution picture, but it’s like looking through a soda straw.

The US has launched LANsat for several years. We’ve been making consistent measurements of the Earth’s surface at a coarse resolution, 30 meters, and in each pixel. That’s a coarse resolution. We’ve been making global measurements using the LANsat system, which consistently covers the Earth. Every two weeks, you get an update. Clouds get in the way, but it spans the entire Earth once every two weeks.

When you even think about that image of the Earth, including clouds updated only once every two weeks at very course 30-meter resolution, that has a phenomenal impact. You see ecosystem change. You can see cities crop up upward than they used to be, but there’s still a lot that it’s leaving out, like an update once every two weeks. Even on top of that, most satellites create a consistent shadow angle. Because clouds globally are a little bit less at 10:30 in the morning, they’re in a single what’s called sun-synchronous orbit. They’re orbiting the Earth such that when they look down, it’s 10:30 local time wherever they are. We have a lot of data about the Earth at 10:30 in the morning.

One of the things that have been changing in the last several years is the amount of satellites we’ve launched, which has gone up about a factor of 100 times per year. We launch 100 times more satellites per year than we did several years ago. That’s going to continue to grow because satellite technology has gotten low cost as small satellites have gotten commercialized in the last couple of decades.

We’re doing things instead of imaging at 30 meters once every two weeks. There are commercial satellites that are imaging, and more government satellites are imaging the Earth once per day and increasingly at different times besides 10:30 in the morning. There are radar imaging technologies that can see through clouds that still give you information regardless of whether there’s cloud cover or not. You can think of some of the places that you visited. It’s cloudy almost all the time. It’s hard to get information in some of those spots. There are certain places on Earth where you get in at 10:30 in the morning, and it’s cloudy like 350 days a year. You’re not going to get a lot of information in there.

These new technologies are always going to be beneficial. We’re dramatically growing the amount of data we’re producing on the Earth’s surface, which helps feed folks like myself and a whole bunch of other people working with that data set to help us understand how humans are impacting the planet and how we can do things more effectively and sustainably. We’re all just getting started.

Data produced by satellite imagery provides an insight into how humans are impacting the planet and what can be done to make things more sustainable.

The amount of data now has the ability to be processed by machine learning and not human beings. I feel like the exponential increase in technological benefit is that we’re on the cusp of that. What do you think are some things that are going to trickle down to everyday people? One of the most interesting things about satellite technology is GPS and full self-driving. That’s such a basic understanding.

Full self-driving is going to be huge. Don’t get me wrong. Full self-driving is gonna change the way that we have a daily commute. It’s going to have an interaction with our social life in such a way. That’s going to be a protected time where we’re going to have more valuable time available to us. It’s such a small niche. I don’t know enough about satellites to know what are some other benefits of it. What do you think are some benefits that you or your family are going to see down the line?

You hit it right in the head with machine learning. Who has time to look at an image of the Earth every day? Nobody does. Nobody can do anything useful with that, but machine learning can. Machine learning has time to process high-resolution imagery of the entire Earth every day and other types of measurements that are useful.

Having this ubiquitous and constantly updated global intelligence will drive change in every single industry that we’re familiar with, like farming. You’re worried about pests coming in. We use a lot of pesticides to manage crops, but if you could catch them early with high-resolution satellite imagery designed to identify certain pest pressures, as a small little location popped up, you can do something about it. You don’t need to spray your entire field. You can spray it a quarter acre as that grows.

It’s one obvious way that will impact and benefit farming, but imagine knowing everything you would ever need to know and having that be translatable through machine learning to actionable information on every location on Earth. How busy it was at any particular moment in time? How busy is this parking lot? I want to be able to ask that question anytime and anywhere and have that available via imagery. I understand you’re managing your yard with high-resolution imagery updated daily of your yard and being able to use that in a number of ways that will benefit you, whether it’s the security or helping manage your landscape more effectively. It’s letting you know it’s time to apply more fertilizer.

The planet will certainly benefit from gathering every single piece of knowledge on Earth and making it translatable through machine learning.

You can reduce the fertilizer you apply on the same green lawn you love or let you know that one of the heads of the sprinkler you’re using is broken or leaking over here because you can see it’s much greener than the other areas. There are all these little small ways that once you have this ubiquitous global information that machine learning can tap into, you can ask and answer almost any question. As long as it’s visible from the surface of the Earth, you’ll be able to ask and have anything answered for you you’d ever want to know.

I’m a gardener myself. That would be interesting to have. If I had even a one-acre garden, I could get a lot of information for that. Are satellites able to detect changes on that small or granular level?

Increasingly, they will. One thing that’s true with all these satellites getting launched and the cost coming down is the spatial resolution, and the data we gathered several years ago started at the pixel size of 30 meters. Now, we’re capable of getting down to 30 centimeters and beyond. We can get way lower than that, but 30 centimeters is regulated by the commerce department. It’s illegal to operate and possess commercial imagery better than 30 centimeters. That’s an international treaty.

I didn’t even know that was capable, but it’s interesting.

They keep lowering it. It used to be one meter. They lowered it to 50 centimeters and now 30 centimeters. They’ve lowered it again. It’s starting to compete with aerial imagery from a resolution standpoint. It’s more cost-effective to collect aerial imagery because you don’t have to fly a plane. You watch a satellite, and it takes pictures continuously. Resolution is going up or what they call revisit. The frequency with which those images are updated is going up almost exponentially.

How do you feel about the amount of satellites and their contribution to people who are stargazing? I hear online every now and again about people complaining about the Starlink satellites and how they affect the view of the rest of the cosmos. What is your take on that?

They’re small. You can’t see them. The Iridium Satellites are a lot larger. You can get the solar panels with the right configuration to see the glint from the sun off the solar panels. Beyond that, space is big. There’s not that much stuff up there. I spent some of my career working on the space junk problem or how to handle that.

All these new satellites like Starlink go up in a low Earth orbit once. The atmosphere doesn’t stop. It exponentially decreases when you get high up. There is an atmosphere up at 300 kilometers altitude and 400 kilometers altitude. Anything launched below 500 kilometers will naturally degrade due to drag from the tenuous atmosphere that’s up there in less than 25 years, and it’ll burn up in the atmosphere. It’s okay to be in more of the Wild West than it currently is. There are no permanent space junk problems we’re going to create as long as all the stuff we launch is at low elevation.

This might be a contemporary problem.

A collision could cause a real problem, and it creates junk that will ruin the whole orbit for a couple of decades. It’s not this existential thing like, “We’ve permanently ruined space.” You can do that if you go higher up. You can permanently ruin space at a much higher altitude. We have geosynchronous satellites.

There’s an orbit that once you’re 6.6 Earth Radio IOA from the surface, that orbital period is 24 hours. If you launch something into that orbit, it hovers over the same spot on the Earth forever. That’s where all our satellites originally went. That’s where all our TV satellites and our original communication satellites are because it’s a straightforward duty. That’s how you can have a satellite ditch that points in one spot. It doesn’t have to track and move.

A lot of the new technologies we’ve developed have made low earth orbit. It’s a few hundred kilometers off the surface, practical offendings like communication radio and television. That’s a lot more sustainable place to be. If you have a collision with the geosynchronous orbit, it will ruin that and be covered with space junk for millennia. For the rest of human existence, there’ll be a bunch of junk unless we figure out how to clean it all up.

How realistic is that? Are collisions happening up there? Is that something that we need to worry about?

I don’t know how much we worry about. I had a collision a couple of years ago. I suspect they were doing it on purpose to test. The biggest concern is that countries are doing it on purpose to gain an advantage against the United States, in particular, that dominates satellite technology and satellites in space. It’s easy to blow up a satellite. It’s hard to clean up.

How far away do you think we are from the global internet? When I’m in the bush in Zaire, am I going to be able to connect to Starlink? How far away are we?

We’re there now. Starlink is the number one, but even Iridium has been around for a long time. You’ve been able to access the internet with Iridium and make voice calls for several decades. It was expensive, and the bandwidth was low. It’s the Iridium Constellation that launched a few years ago. Starlink has taken it to that next level.

There are going to be more Starlink satellite launches and more competitors. There’s another company that’s launching a few satellites right now that directly broadcast into 5G. Their goal is to directly communicate with the satellite. There is no specialized technology necessary. We’re there now and only a few years away from being direct to mobile technology.

For our next episode, I’m going to go to Zaire, and I’m going to have you help me get a setup where I can do a Zoom conference from Zaire. Sounds like a plan?

That sounds like a deal. We got Starlink for our field tech because they work in remote ranches in many cases where there’s no good internet. Our software they use can work offline, but it works a lot better when you’re online. From a safety perspective, make sure they have continuous high-speed communication. If they get injured, they can contact somebody and make sure our apps work effectively no matter where they are. That’s something we switched to a couple of months ago.

This was interesting, and I appreciate you spending your time with us. We are getting to the end of our episode, where I always ask all of my guests three general questions to know what they think on a deeper level. I’m going to start out with, where do you gain your inspiration from? Science fiction is big for me. I get a lot of interest from cutting-edge technology and learning about what the future holds. What about yourself? Satellites and soil are disparate interests. Where do you get your inspiration from?

It’s twofold. One of them has shared with you. Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by space and space exploration, and I still am. One of my lifelong goals is to make sure I go to Antarctica, the North Pole, and space. I got one out of those three done. I’ve been a big supporter of the commercial space industry for a long time. Expect to take a ride as soon as is reasonable and affordable. Since my days, being an asset has probably not been long gone. I’ve been heavily inspired by space exploration in general.

On the flip side, I’ve been motivated to do whatever my small part is to help make the Earth a better place for its growing number of inhabitants. I’m not the type of person that says, “You need to live without it.” I want to do whatever I can to make it sustainable for everyone to live this happy life with the things they enjoy and not to be hungry, cold, or hot if that’s not required or necessary. Whatever innovation can do to make the world a better place and a more optimistic place for its inhabitants is something that’s been motivating me my whole life.

The next question I always ask, specifically in your field, is, where do you see satellite technology? Where do you see soil technology? Where do you see something in ten years that is going to be significant for us as a species but other people might not know about it?

It is one of the things everyone is talking about these days, but a large language model is ChatGPT and similar models. That’s a big revolution. That, combined with the type of ubiquitous data that we were talking about, will bring this global intelligence to everyone who needs it. What we focus on is farmers. We think farmers will have this voice in their ears that tells them everything they need. They’ll have the most intelligent collective agronomist understanding of everything happening. It’ll help them be more effective food producers with less fertilizer and pesticides and more effective carbon producers.

Understanding by knowing how to deal with this diverse set of nature because they’ll have all the intelligence and knowledge of the world described to them in their ear or on their phone and specialized and tailored for them. It’s that translation of ubiquitous information and translating into useful, actionable advice for us individuals.

First was machine learning, but now, the large language models take that next step. Helping humans talk to us in the way that we need to be talked to allows us to do smart things easier and better. Is it no good to have all the data in the world if you can’t translate that into a smarter choice yourself? Large language models are helping us with that last step. All that coming together will be a blistering pace of innovation.

I have my own personal AI assistant. I tell the people on this show all the time that the admin work of being a human being in 2024 is overwhelming to the point where I want an assistant. We’re on the cusp of that. That’s what I’m most excited about, which is in a similar vein to what you said. Last question. Aside from some of the technology you deal with, what are you most excited about, like you are reading in the news and can’t put it down? The anti-aging vein of technology is interesting. As a surgeon, even though it’s tangentially oriented to my field, it’s something that has piqued my interest. What are some technologies or future technologies that you are excited about?

Anti-aging interests me. I’m not a biologist. Unlike you, I have zero biology training, but I’ve learned a lot about microbiology over the last few years thanks to COVID. That sparked some thoughts, like, “This is fascinating genetic technology.” We already talked about it, but I spend the most amount of time looking at large language models to understand what impact they’re going to have in the next several years. The other hobby interests I have are our ability to measure, manipulate, and benefit from understanding DNA. It is going skyline over the next years.

Did you see the news the other day about how this guy, the new sickle cell anemia, has genetic therapy for it? That’s interesting. You pay $120,000, and you’re not sickle cell anemic anymore. That’s crazy to me. You know? If that’s one trait that we could control for this price that’s not out of this world for people who have the disease, that’s something that we could manipulate any trait. If I wanted to have blue eyes, I could be like, “It’s time for me to have blue eyes.” I could go in and get this treatment, and I would have blue eyes. That’s going to be an interesting time for us.

Thank you so much for being on the show. We appreciated hearing your insight and all of the different future possibilities for us as a species. I want to appreciate all of the readers and everybody who tunes in on a regular basis. We’re growing, and I can see that. I appreciate all of your interest. If you guys don’t mind liking and subscribing, I would appreciate it. If you want to follow Lars on all of his social media, it will be available for all of our episodes, as always. Thanks again, Lars. Thanks, everybody. We will see you again in the future. Have a great one.

Thanks, Doctor Awesome.

Important Link

• EarthOptics

About Lars Dyrud

Lars Dyrud has founded three companies. He enjoys advising engineers and scientists on innovation and entrepreneurism.

Prior to EarthOptics, Lars founded, developed, and led OmniEarth to a successful exit through acquisition by EagleView Technologies, where he most recently served as the Senior Vice President of Business Development. OmniEarth developed and provided machine-learning-based imagery analytics tools to the insurance, public utility, and land management industries. In his career as a scientist Lars has served as PI on R&D grants and contracts from NSF, DOE, NASA, AFOSR, Air Force SMC, and industry in range of Earth and Space Science and engineering applications.

He was the founder of the APL Center for Public/Private Partnerships and has led space-related missions and projects as head of the Earth and Space Science group at Draper Laboratory and previously as senior scientist and section lead at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the areas of space physics, GPS tomography, Novel Earth observation missions, and mobile applications.

Lars is from Minneapolis MN, received a BA in Physics from Augsburg College. He was a Fulbright Scholar in space and plasma physics at the University of Oslo and received a Ph.D. from Boston University.