The large language models (LLMs) that have captivated the world are among the most powerful tools ever built. Many can give PhD-level answers to virtually every discipline under the Sun. They are revolutionary. But for all this brilliance, they are, in a fundamental sense, blind. They know the world the way a scholar locked in a library knows it: deeply, but without any lived experience. For all their brilliance, they are largely disconnected from the physical world.

The marvel of human intelligence and consciousness, however, did not arise from computation alone. They arose from computation coupled to sensing and interacting in a physical environment. The feedback loop between organism and environment is foundational; we humans learn, adapt, and become self-aware in substantial part because we have bodies that receive a constant, high-bandwidth stream of physical reality.

Though it may sound like science fiction, we are on the verge of providing this exact grounding to AI. By converging the vast, continuous visual memory of our planet captured by satellites and other real-world sensors with artificial........

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