Sarah Parcak Quotes

What is sure is that the satellite view of our world and its evolution is now a common reality.

To understand how quickly we're cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites.

I love that the work that we do is so vital to science. We're in a lot of ways at the scientific front line. The work that we're doing to build up the computational defense system for infectious diseases, whether it's finding the vaccine as fast as possible this time or next time to detect early outbreaks.

Doctors and nurses, with their training and their experiences, they would be able to detect unusual patterns of disease. That's why we say it is important for every country to have a proper surveillance system. The function of the surveillance system is to detect unusual patterns of diseases.

Drones watch for disease and collect real-time data on crop health and yields.

I do want to emphasize that we've seen an explosion in the use of Google Maps and Google Earth for education. The earth is a special place. It is our home and it's why we're all here. And the ability to see what's really going on the earth, the good stuff and the bad stuff, at the level that you can, is phenomenal.

But by providing the background picture - the universal situational awareness that we desire - by showing the anomalies, the Space-Based Radar will change the nature of how we do our analysis and our intelligence.

I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.

Being at NASA and having the access to both computing capability and satellite observation capability is kind of the ideal research situation to try to understand global climate change.

The scientific community should work as hard as possible to address major issues that affect our everyday lives such as climate change, infectious diseases and counterterrorism; in particular, 'clean energy' research deserves far higher priority. And science and technology are the prime routes to tackling these issues.

My understanding is that Exxon, in particular, did fund a variety of small think tanks to generate what amounts to propaganda against understanding of what climate change was doing, the human role in causing it.

All of us know today the value of communications satellites, weather satellites, resources satellites, etc.

I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes.

Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.

Once you start to look into the guts of climate change you find that just about every scientific institution in the world is conducting research on the issue.

Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.

Ah, to be a conservative climate change denier. While real scientists must do all the research and engage in heated debates about just how bad things are going to be, the deniers can rest easy in the bliss of willful ignorance.

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.

You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible. You're actually able to see settlements and tombs - and even things like buried pyramids - that you might not otherwise be able to see.

We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.

GIS is being influenced by and integrating with all kinds of new innovations such as faster computing, big data, the cloud, smart devices, and distributed processing.

We're looking at Earth science, observing our planet. Also space science, looking at the ozone in the atmosphere around our Earth. Also looking at life science. And on a human level, using ourselves as test subjects.

We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from 'real' work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science. Improving the way that science is done means speeding us along in curing cancer, solving the problem of climate change and launching humanity permanently into space.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A satellite image is worth a million dollars.