Why build a Planetary Nervous System?

This nervous system advances humanity’s understanding of and ability to thrive on Earth, especially in the face of a changing climate.

Human civilization only has adequate sensing where it exists: which is just 15% of the planet. But the atmosphere is a global system, and in order to accurately know the weather a week in advance, you must know the current state of weather everywhere. The limiting factor on weather forecast accuracy is weather data.

Our constellation of balloons, Atlas, is the most efficient solution for distributing sensors over the globe. The laws of physics limit satellites from measuring the full atmosphere, so in-situ sensing is required. A lightweight balloon can circle the globe multiple times, while being very expensive to build.

In the limit, each nerve in this nervous system need only consist of a single chip of silicon and a small, light balloon membrane, the size of a large soap bubble, that carries it. We can fly hundreds of thousands of nerves for a small fraction of the cost that is spent today on Earth observation.

Our AI-based atmospheric foundational model, WeatherMesh, assimilates weather observations from our nerves, as well as other sources like weather satellites, and produces more accurate weather forecasts than any other forecasting system on the planet. As we scale the nervous system, we will completely close the data gap, train AI-based weather models to the predictability limit, and solve weather forecasting.

Solving weather forecasting will bring certainty to all weather-related planning: from reliable hurricane evacuation warnings to never having unexpected flight delays due to weather. Most weather-related damage and disruption is highly mitigable and preventable with certainty in the forecast and a few days more notice, and a planetary nervous system is a technology requirement in achieving that.

A sufficiently advanced civilization would have a nervous system for its home planet. WindBorne is building that for humanity. If you took any other set of people on planet Earth to do what we are going to do, they would almost certainly fail. We aren't going to. No one else can build a Planetary Nervous System.