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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

Now imagine doing this with a high res satellite anywhere on earth.

Satellites will never get such resolution due to optics and atmosphere. Drones however...

That would only be useful if everyone were outside, and you wanted a split second of many different people's conversations. Satellites move rather quickly relative to the Earth's surface.

Some of them do, there are geosynchronous spy satellites.

https://www.popsci.com/gaofen-4-worlds-most-powerful-geo-spy...

"It may also have a lower resolution video streaming capacity."

Ok I was coming to say "spy satellites at 40,000 km up - I doubt they can see anything. And if the linked article is correct the Chinese satellites up there have a resolution of 50m - good luck finding a crisp packet.

But the new generation "might" have a resolution of 1m. which is insane.

Then again, good luck knowing which square meter of the 1/3 of the earths surface you can see, has the crisp packet in.

I still think there will be a place for good old bribery corruption and sex spy techniques for a while yet.

Recent Chinese optical satellites are thought to have 10cm resolution. All these are low earth orbit. Depends on cloud cover, atmospheric turbulence and look angle.

Still impractical to get sound vibrations from that. But a drone with a laser would work for windows. Think listening in on a conversation in a car.

It was the (seemingly seriously ) proposed 1m resolution from geostationary orbit that had me.

Still all this tech is useless without knowing where to point it when. Which usually comes down to human led intel and intelligence led tasking.

I think ... when AI starts deciding which conversation to follow or record then ... we'll I for one welcome our new robot overlords

I guess I stand corrected. But the practicality, as others note, still seems limited.

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