and Seasat. vehicles. Improvements in their remote sensing 
packages, as already scheduled for future generations of these 
vehicles, will make it all the more feasible to acquire globally 
uniform resource inventories through analysis of the remote 
sensing data acquired by them. 
Some advocates of.a globally uniform resources information system 
have singled out agriculture as the field in which the greatest 
benefits might be derived. They look forward to the time when 
crop forecasting will have progressed sufficiently to permit 
a determination to be made, well in advance, that the northern 
hemisphere in some particular year is about to produce an 
over-abundance of oats, for example, but a serious dearth of 
wheat. Areas in the southern hemisphere that are capable of 
producing small grains are, of course, approximately six months 
out of phase with the grain-producing areas of the northern 
hemisphere. Hence the above information should be available at 
exactly the opportune time, so that grain-growers in the 
southern hemisphere could be encouraged, in the instance cited 
above, to plant much more wheat and much less oats than they 
had intended, the better to balance out the global production, 
that year, of these two highly important crops. This is but 
one example of the potential improvement in the global management 
of natural resources likely to result from more uniform and more 
timely inventories of those resources. 
B. There will be a Very Appreciable Reduction in the Presently 
Intolerable Delay Between Data Acquisition by Remote Sensing 
Satellites and the Supply to Users of Needed Information 
Derivable from Such Data. 
In a recent paper, Colwell, et al. 1978, a tabulation appears 
that first indicates the frequency with which various kinds of 
information about resources should be made available to users 
and then introduces the concept of "half-life" in relation to 
that frequency. In so doing, the paper emphasizes that just as, 
in radiological research, the usefulness of an experimenter's 
radioactive isotope "decays" in conformity with that isotope's 
half-life, so the usefulness of a resource manager's information 
decays in conformity with a similar half-life concept. In the 
case of the resource manager, however, the half-life is based 
at least in part on how frequently a given type of information 
is needed by him. While analogy is by no means perfect, it 
serves to highlight the importance of minimizing the delay 
between the time when remote sensing data is acquired and when 
it has been "reduced" to information that can be used by the 
resource manager. 
C. Great Progress will be Made with Respect to the "Compression" 
of Remote Sensing Data. 
Judging from plans that are even now developing in U.S.A.'s NASA 
and elsewhere, remote sensing from spacecraft in the future will 
entail higher spatial resolution, more spectral bands and more 
frequent coverage. The price to be paid for all of this is more 
   
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