If you let me be entirely honest I’m not sure if this post will get ‘out of the scientific tone’ but between you and me I’ve been going through some writer’s block lately and I feel like I need to write something, anything, so I can be back ‘on the scene’.

That does not mean that my post is going to be completely isolated from Dr. Wulder’s presentation. In fact I was already familiar and always admired how the scientific comunity has done massive improvements in terms of data production and data availability. I think that is remarkable how much is available for a ‘regular citizen’ an how much we can retrieve from that. The actual trend suggests that better information will be generated from now on: more accurate, better resolutions, perhaps ever with wider wavelength coverages; and, with the proper decisions through the way chances are is going to be widely distributed as well.

Are we winning then? 

Let me go further with this question, winning what? more information? more data? omnivision? Some data says yes, massive improvements to human legacy, but how does that feel? For me, it looks like the humankind has a massive need for gathering more information, to acquire more numbers, to have more storage capacity: it all feels like, somehow, only the ammount of data available gives some sort of purpose to science, which might be nonetheless a representation of humankind final goal. Have more power, more information.

Yet in the other hand we have seen presentations regarding endangered ecosystems or losses over water streams, to name a couple of examples. When did it happen that being objective and setting yourself (as a scientist) out of the study population to avoid biases on your job automatically meant to act carelessly about it? And tying everything together: what is the purpose of developing more technologies and gathering more information if we are not going to do something about it? Is so we can have a HD image of how the world is slowly dying?

I am not sure, but perhaps we should stop focusing too much on creating new technology to gather even more data and instead try to make those numbers more meaningful. No linear regression itself would help solve the problems that are increasing, at the same time as technology

I need to exclude some researchers out these conclusions, there are still passionate people wanting to make a difference, instead of just getting more info. I am glad I am surrounded by those in my research and on the program. My point of view stands for the massess, the ‘average citizen’ or ‘average scientist’ that who is obssessed with more and more power. I like to think that as much as ‘satellite imagery data available for everybody’ are indeed great news, there should be a perpetual invitation to reflect what are we doing as humankind.

Thank you for reading,

Sergio