Yeah that’s not even close to the most powerful satellite that the US government has. They only allow public images to be shared with a resolution of ~25-30cm/Pixel if memory serves correctly. They have had much more powerful spy satellites for years now.
Now I am fully aware that those types of satellites would never be allowed to be “wasted” on silly things like counting whales, but again hypothetically if they really really wanted to they absolutely could use them to do that sort of thing.
You would probably want to tag several pods with physical trackers and then watch those whales with the satellite. After training it on that data for long enough you could hypothetically make software that spots whales surfacing and then sees what direction they are likely going and it can then start to guess where they think that same pod will pop up later using the data it gathered from those pods being tracked physically with trackers from before.
Obviously I am simplifying and hand waving away a ton of unbelievably complicated things but given enough time and money I think you could absolutely create a system that is able to track and count whales using satellites in a way that would likely be more accurate than any only human based counting method.
Yeah that’s not even close to the most powerful satellite that the US government has. They only allow public images to be shared with a resolution of ~25-30cm/Pixel if memory serves correctly. They have had much more powerful spy satellites for years now.
Now I am fully aware that those types of satellites would never be allowed to be “wasted” on silly things like counting whales, but again hypothetically if they really really wanted to they absolutely could use them to do that sort of thing.
You would probably want to tag several pods with physical trackers and then watch those whales with the satellite. After training it on that data for long enough you could hypothetically make software that spots whales surfacing and then sees what direction they are likely going and it can then start to guess where they think that same pod will pop up later using the data it gathered from those pods being tracked physically with trackers from before.
Obviously I am simplifying and hand waving away a ton of unbelievably complicated things but given enough time and money I think you could absolutely create a system that is able to track and count whales using satellites in a way that would likely be more accurate than any only human based counting method.