Po Bronson

Caltech professor Gregg Hallinan and his team are scanning the universe for possible Earths with cheap antennae built from parts found online, cake pans, and, yes, chicken wire. They’re taking the lonely search for habitable planets and automating it.

Planet has about 140 shoebox-size satellites that take 1.2 million pictures a day. They’ve spotted North Korea’s nuclear tests, the massacre of Muslim Rohingya, and California forest fires — images that are changing how we look at the earth and technology itself.