Who needs angels when you have geosynchronous satellites?

At a time when the world seems to be spinnin' hopelessly out of control,
There's deceivers an' believers an' old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go.
- Willie Nelson, "Hands on the Wheel"

My bias has been to think of the satellites that orbit our planet in military and commercial terms only, but the below photo and blurb from io9.com gives us a positive side of big brother. It also poses a few dicey questions - the kind you get when philosophy and practicality collide head-on.

This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27.

The degree to which our activities can be (and often are) unnecessarily tracked by the state in all its forms - not to mention corporations who have even less real accountability - has made me deeply uncomfortable for years.

And so it's nice I suppose to see satellite imagery being used for more altruistic purposes. Park an orbital camera over the evil men who think they are far removed from prying eyes. Maintain a perspective on what's really going on in a hot spot long after your assets in the region have been reduced to a skeleton crew of diplomats, spooks and marine embassy guards.

Technology is generally supposed to make things easier, and I wonder if those of us with the greatest exposure to it don't consequently allow ourselves to sometimes fall asleep behind the wheel of the large morality automobile. How often in this world is the "right" thing done out of fear of being tripped up by a camera or database rather than because it's simply the "right" thing? How would you even begin to guess the percentages on that?

Their value as tools cannot be denied or understated, but when satellites function as U.N. observers, do we allow them to excuse us from a more rigorous and preemptive brand of diplomacy? I wonder sometimes.

How can you even fully trust any electronic image anymore? You can't of course. What about the entity that obtained the image - or possibly even tweaked or fabricated it - and then deliberately released it along with a prepackaged blurb of interpretation and a side of fries? Can you believe them? I dunno, but I'm willing to bet a round of drinks that the answer is "sometimes, but not as much as we'd like."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why trust will never go out of style. Why trust will never be made obsolete by the technology of today or tomorrow. Why the profoundly organic virtue of trust is as important today as it's ever been, made even more so by technology - not less.

We're drowning is a flood of digitally transmitted words and pictures. If we're as sharp and savvy as we aspire to be, then we already have the tools to interpret the raw data and arrive at presumably intelligent conclusions. Or at least put ourselves in a position to ask some probing and meaningful follow-up questions. But how do we know the raw data is valid unless we've directly observed it? "Are these figures accurate?" "Are these photos real?"

Fact is that we don't know, so we have to defer to the people are on the ground. We have to rely on the independent corroboration of our fellow human beings. We have to rely on people we can trust. A tough gig on a planet with more than 6.7 billion points of view, but you gotta start somewhere.

If this post has a frayed end or two, it's because I'm still mulling some of this over. There's once thing I can assure you of though, and that is if you're reading this then you're someone Bronco Billy trusts.* And I don't trust just anybody.

Sleep well, good citizens!


* The execption being Zed when he's liquored up on that low-grade thermonuclear hooch he brews in his basement. The man's a veritable loose cannon in that state. Or loose boomerang. Whatever.