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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
How could maps have helped combat the Los Angeles wildfires that devastated Southern California in January of of this year.
For defense tech pioneer, Peter Wilczynski, this is a question he asks himself often.
In this talk, he shares the evolution of cartography in relation to the built environment.
He asks us to consider the untapped power mapping technology has and how it can, for example, help us fight fires before they start, acting as a canvas to build a better future.
I'm a digital cartographer by trade and maps historically they do really two things and we've really seen an amazing amount of the first understanding our world but historically maps weren't just about understanding they were also about creating about building about shaping the built environment around us they help us plan cities do trade fight wars and maintain peace And as we've digitized these maps, you've seen them fit into our pocket, things that used to take entire libraries, reams of paper are now in our pocket or, you know, in our eyes.
But as we move from the information age into the cybernetic age, an era dominated by the application of robotics and artificial intelligence to the physical world, cartography needs to change.
It's not enough to collaborate in a digital world.
The challenge in front of us is really to take those technologies technologies and to use them to build physically.
And for the first time in history, we have the remote sensing capacity on orbit and the technology to process all of the data into a dynamic living replica of the physical Earth inside a computer, what we call the living globe.
You can think of this as a sandbox, a place where you can take the digital representation of our Earth and combine it with a physical representation on the ground and go back and forth so that sensors can show you what's actually happening in real time.
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles wildfires devastated Southern California.
Many of us were personally impacted or know someone who was.
Satellite imagery and mapping played a critical role in understanding the impact of that devastation, guiding first responders, and shining a spotlight on the destruction that happened.
But it's not enough just to look, to observe, to react.
What's been nagging me since then is that what LA needed, it wasn't satellite imagery, it was water.
Large -scale infrastructure projects, megaprojects, rapid response systems with firefighting robots that would be able to take out the fire before it started.
This used to be how we thought.
200 years ago, we were a civilization of builders with a culture of action.
We built the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Hoover Dam, megaprojects that fundamentally reshaped our Earth, our physical world.
But these projects had devastating ramifications.
Unable to predict their impact and know what the results would be, we retreated into the virtual world, a world of iPhones and personal computers dominated by individualism.
The problem is the problems of the 21st century, they're fundamentally physical.
They're problems of moving atoms. When you think about climate change, energy abundance, housing affordability, global security, These are problems that require regaining a builder's spirit and starting to act upon the physical world once again.
What we've done is we've taken dozens and dozens of different data sets.
We've fused them together into a dynamic and living representation of the earth.
By pulling these into an ontology so that computers and people can interact with them together, we can programmatically start identifying patterns so that we can delegate the monitoring of those patterns to a computer.
What we see here is Vancouver, a combination of tree height data, Landsat vegetation data, and information from the affordable housing district, what we can start to identify is patterns, things that we can see about the city that affect the way that people live in it.
You can tell that the areas that have a lot of trees protect us against heat.
So what we've identified is really two patterns here.
One, that trees are great for economic development.
People really desire living in places with trees.
and two, that trees are critical for building a lovely, wonderful city.
But it's not enough to have a static map looking at the past. Our goal is to have a really dynamic map that's updating in real time.
And in the background, dozens of satellites are orbiting the Earth, taking images of Vancouver, so that we can start to move from mapping to monitoring to building an instrument panel and a dashboard where we can really understand what's happening in our city in real time.
time. This lets us move away from thinking about individual projects towards thinking about the city as a cohesive whole.
An integrated system where all of the projects play together to achieve multi -dimensional goals.
So here we have all of the building permits in Vancouver right now.
But that doesn't really tell us what's actually happening on the ground.
If we use satellite imagery, we can run change detection algorithms and actually see the places where change is really happening, where ground is being broken.
Zooming into one of those, we can see the actual development that's occurring in Vancouver.
We can see a satellite image of a construction site moving back in time and turning the trees red with infrared sensors.
We can really see trees blossoming and growing, the vegetation changing over time, and we can see that this particular one small development in Vancouver cut down a bunch of trees, which is very natural.
But in order to have our goal of having a more forested city, we're going to have have to plant these trees somewhere else.
This is what I mean by using maps to build.
We get a dashboard and an instrument panel for understanding the change in the globe over time, not just in terms of the spatial information, but in terms of a time series, in terms of metrics and measures that we can use to guide development.
For the last 50 years, we've really framed the question we have as a society very narrowly, to build or not to build.
But the important thing about out technology is that it eliminates trade -offs.
It lets you do more with less.
This living globe, it's not just a mirror for the world.
It's also a canvas to build a better future, to visualize it, and then to summon the collective will to make it happen.
I'm really excited to be here and share this with you, and thank you so much for having me.
That was Peter Wilzinski at TED 2025.
If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at ted .com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today's show.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmarnivon.
It was mixed by Christopher Fasey -Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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