In my lab there is a masters student working on monitoring deforestation for palm fields in Indonesia using Google Earth Engine, which is similar to Earth on AWS. There is a whole scientific field devoted to analysing this kind of data: remote sensing. It's underrated in the hacker community honestly.
Geo as a whole in my observation. There are decades of research effort that have got us to where we are now, well developed study programmes worldwide, advanced proprietary and open software and data available, and geo is effectively mainstream in google maps and sat nav. Yet for some reason this contextual background is missed by many, and so I see commenters making statements about what a leap forward this or that is, when in fact it's just part of an evolving history. I'm not criticising people for not knowing what they don't know - my question is - why does it seem like geo as a whole has trouble communicating this context? I wonder whether there are any other areas of tech that suffer from this lack of awareness?
That sounds really interesting. Does your colleague blog — or are there remote sensing tech blogs to follow?