The Earth observation industry will enter the era of “permissionless persistence” in the 2030s: minute-by-minute surveillance of the world’s military assets that can’t be feasibly shot down, obstructed, or outrun. Multi-phenomenology, day/night, all-weather, low-frame-rate video of every key offensive and defensive asset in existence, even the ones on wheels, from the time they roll off the manufacturing line to the time they are decommissioned. A deep battery of low-cost, long-range weapons capable of destroying those assets will be locked and loaded at all times, often federated across multiple allied nations. Regimes intent on violating their neighbors’ sovereignty will be surrounded on all sides. This is our most practical chance as a civilization to enter an era of unprecedented peace without resorting to totalitarian dystopia. It provides many levels of effective (painful) escalation options before nuclear armageddon and equips both sides’ diplomatic cores with better information than at any other time in history to resolve disputes effectively. One of the many “peace dividends” of the deterrence effect enabled by the constellations providing permissionless persistence will be a service approaching free (Free) high-resolution, high-cadence, high-speed data about what’s happening anywhere on the Earth at any time intermediated by an artificial intelligence interpretation layer that is cheap, open, constantly self-improving, and instantaneous. The required investment to enable staring video in many specific places on Earth simultaneously also happens to result in near-zero marginal cost to serve nearly everywhere else via excess collection *and* communications bandwidth. Why not turn those countless empty revs into benefit for humanity? The Earth sciences will evolve from a backward-looking documentarian field to a forecasting discipline. Countless commercial niches will be revolutionized in much the same way “free” GPS/GNSS changed the world. No surface vessel will ever be lost at sea or able to go dark. No one will ever wonder how close the wildfire line is to their home or how far the flood extent has reached for longer than it takes to open their phone and find out. No nation will ever commit atrocities without the world watching and responding in real time as they unfold. I’m thankful every day to be in the right place at the right time. I get to play a small part in a company that will have a big role in this next era. I don’t know of a mission more important that I could work on, a team more talented or motivated I could work with, or a technology more critical to achieving permissionless persistence than ours.