I recently went to Delphi, where ancient Greeks pilgrimaged seeking oracles and wisdom. As a physicist, and stubborn rationalist not learned in Greek mythology, it brought unexpected provocation.
I. Apollo
Delphi stands on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, and lies home to the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. From there the ground drops into the Pleistos valley—with more than half a million olive trees stretching to the sea. The ancient Greeks called this the centre of the Earth, and 3,000 years ago this temple was the ultimate Birds Eye view. And thus it was that it became the home to Apollo – the God of light and logic.
Delphi was a high point overlooking the valley below every day for 3,000 years that it has been a temple. Indeed, Apollo’s mythological predecessor, Helios, built an all-seeing chariot that Apollo rode across the sky from East-to-West every single day. Its defining characteristic was being an all-seeing eye of the cosmos, ensuring that no changes, no crises, and no issues on the ground went unseen.
Today’s Earth observation satellites are Helios’ chariot, bringing that overlook to a global scale.
At Planet in particular, we have been mapping the entire earth daily (three million times the area, from a thousand times higher!) but for a mere three thousand days not years – a drop in the bucket of deep time. It’s a significant new tool.
Still, as a company and as a society, we must confront a vital question: What is all this data actually for?
II. Back to Gaia
First, a back story. Apollo starred here, but before him, this wild mountain belonged to Gaia, the primordial Earth goddess, and his grandmother. At that time the place was raw, unmediated. The myth tells us that when the young god Apollo arrived, he had to battle and slay Python, a monstrous serpent-dragon that guarded Gaia’s shrine. In the traditional, triumphalist Western interpretation, this myth has often been read as the victory of human civilization over the chaotic wild.
This is one early part of a foundational justification for a worldview that has dominated the West for centuries: that nature is an adversary to be categorized, quantified, and ultimately conquered.
This is the very frame that has led to our current global delusion: in treating the Earth as an extractable resource and garbage dump we’ve caused gross damage. Indigenous cultures globally have long recognized the folly of this separation, maintaining deep reverence to nature and treating rivers, forests, and mountains as living entities with rights. Only now, having massively cuts our forests, coral reefs, indeed most wildlife on earth – that is having hurt the ecosystems upon which we are dependent for our water and soils and clean air, i.e. our life support systems on spaceship earth--is the Western framework beginning to awkwardly catch up to this ancient, obvious truth.
But if you look closer at the architecture of Delphi, the ancients didn’t actually destroy Gaia’s presence; they integrated it. Right next to the towering columns of Apollo stands the raw, uncarved jagged mass of the Sibyl’s Rock. The Greeks left it completely untouched in the middle of their polished monuments. They understood that Apollo’s sky-oriented logic meant nothing if it disconnected from the raw earth beneath it.
III. Enter Artemis
But the real punchline is next door. The site was also home to Apollo’s twin sister Artemis, the fierce goddess of the wilderness, wild animals, the hunt, and the living biosphere. Though sometimes overshadowed by her brother, Artemis is the purpose, and in Greek mythology they acted as a necessary duo: in many ways she represented the purpose and end of Apollo’s powers.
I have spent my entire career at Planet building and launching constellations of satellites to look down at the Earth, capturing a near-daily scan of our planet’s changing surface. It is an exercise in ultimate logic, engineering, and mathematics. But the driving impulse behind that work—and the reason I spend my spare time helping wildlife conservation, why I chose a vegetarian life—is to protect life. It is an instinct that feels deeply woven into my own heritage, stretching from my father’s work protecting mountain gorillas in the Congo, and way back to my 27th great-grandfather who drafted the Forest Charter, establishing some of history’s earliest legal protections for natural ecosystems.
Standing at Delphi, the boundary between the cold, analytical sky-perspective of physics and the warm, urgent ground-truth of ecology, dissolved. The tension we feel today between technology and nature seemed more clearly a false dichotomy. Three thousand years ago, before the Western mind split reason away from the living biosphere, the ancients understood that logic and the wilderness were meant to work in tandem…
IV. Arming the Army of Artemis
So, Apollo and Artemis ruled together. And in one specific myth, when the balance of nature was threatened, Apollo used his supreme logic and precision to forge the ultimate, flawless golden bow and arrow. But not to use himself. **He handed that weapon directly over to Artemis and the protectors of the wild.**
Walking away from the stones of Delphi, a core reflection emerged. At Planet, we have done a magnificent job of “Apollo-ing.” We have mastered engineering, the data pipelines, the automated daily imaging, and the cloud analytics. We have built an incredible tool of high-altitude clarity and its shining light on the world.
But data alone does not plant a tree, stop a crop blight, halt a poacher, or restore a fishery. The real mission—the “Artemis” phase—is about enabling the action. It’s about ‘arming the army of Artemis’. It is about putting that digital golden bow directly into the hands of the modern-day guardians on the ground: the local conservationist, the civil government doing disaster response or resource management, the wildlife scientist, the small farmer monitoring soil health, and the indigenous communities protecting ancestral forests from extraction.
Many use this data to serve critical global security and stability operations—monitoring borders, tracking threats, and keeping the peace—which is its own form of necessary, logical stewardship. But it’s the tip of the iceberg of what is possible.
And so it is for society more broadly: we’re over-indexed on the tools of observation and categorisation, and severely under-indexed on the capacity to act, especially in defense of life – on which we humans fully depend. One could say we are using our collective intellect to brilliantly map our own decline rather than to empower communities and wildlife in the right relationship.
V. Wisdom: from the personal to planetary scale
Engraved onto the walls of Apollo’s temple was the ultimate Delphic command: “Gnothi Seauton”—Know Thyself. The ancient philosophers, from Socrates to Plato, wrote extensively from this foundation. They argued that analyzing the outward world was mere cleverness; real wisdom required inner alignment. Across the world, the *Tao Te Ching* rhymed: “Heaven will last, earth will endure... So wise souls, leaving self behind, move forward, and setting self aside, stay centered.”
To know thyself could be understood at a planetary scale, too. And to “stay centered” as a modern society means we must use our highest technology not to consume the Earth, but to be in good relation with it. The data we collect from orbit is not an end in itself; it is a tool meant to enable smarter action by humans in alignment with our living planet.
Humanity’s now found over 6,300 planets outside our solar system. Not one is as good as this one. Not even close. Life is either very rare or singular. Yet we’ve wiped out ~70% of life on earth – the 6th major extinction event – in my lifetime and we’re not done. This has to be turned around, and we can.
As we look forward, the transition we must make requires a whole-of-society effort. Planet’s role is to ensure that the protectors of the earth are never left fighting in the dark. We must swiftly expand our efforts to lower the friction for actors globally to access and deploy these insights.
We have built the chariot of Helios. We have forged the bow of Apollo. Now, it is time to fully empower the army of Artemis on the ground, ensuring that our highest intellect is permanently harnessed to enable life to thrive here on Earth.
Addendum: Know thyself & space; NASA’s Apollo & Artemis
Of course, there was another Apollo – the NASA space program. It was named so in part because it was a tremendous feat of logic. But it also shone a light. Yes, on the Moon of course, but perhaps more so on the Earth: the Earthrise and Blue Marble images – showing the small planet in the vastness of space, protected just by a thin film of atmosphere. It became some of the most distributed images in history, and helped birth the global ecological movement. One historian quipped that ‘Apollo went to the moon, only to discover the Earth’.
Apollo did its job and turned things right around: space is not an escape hatch; it is a mirror. Which is why it’s fitting that NASA’s new Lunar program is actually dedicated to his sister Artemis. Although it was far less watched, the recent Artemis II mission was inspiring and re-energised that perspective and mirror that Apollo left in our conscious for any that did tune in.
Some continue to see space as an escape hatch, to Mars and beyond. Ultimately, that will be true, of course; but it’s science fiction today. Today the value of space is not that it takes us further out—fueling a Mars-bound philosophy of leaving our problems behind—but that it connects us directly back to Terra Firma. Space, despite feeling so far away, is so incredibly grounded: it literally serves farmers, protects soils, monitors fisheries, and manages forests. It serves critical global security and stability operations—monitoring borders, tracking threats, and keeping the peace—to prevent humanity from tearing itself apart.
And I think the greatest role for space, generally, is helping understand our home and giving us cosmic perspective to the significance of life in a universe so huge, but where life is singular or very rare.
Thus, in ‘Know Thyself’ there is a profound lesson from the Greeks to our current space-faring ambitions. Exploring the cosmos is a noble, natural extension of human curiosity — as leaving on a quest of self-discovery is. In an analogous way, exploring other planets has helped us in understanding our own: it was studying Venus that scientists started to worry about the greenhouse effect. It’s satellites that underpin climate models today. And, per above, it was NASA’s Apollo picture of earth that helped us revolutionize human consciousness. But attempting to build civilizations and alter planets elsewhere while our own cradle burns is a failure of wisdom. We cannot be a wise species until we have mastered the stewardship of our home planet.
WILL MARSHALL · FOUNDER & CEO, PLANET LABS · 2026
Delphic Wisdom//connection · An essay by Will Marshall · Planet Labs PBC