A New Sensory Organ for Civilization
The air is broken.
Every day in India, thousands of people die from breathing. Not from lack of it, but from what’s in it. You don’t see it. You can’t point at it. But it’s there, quietly killing people faster than any war or virus.
And somehow, this doesn’t seem to be anyone’s fault.
The numbers that keep me up
1.6 million people died from air pollution in India in a single year. That’s 190 people every hour. Almost 5,000 every day. Source: Lancet, 2021
It’s not just about death. It’s about the years of life lost. In 2017, India lost nearly 39 million DALYs to air pollution. That’s 8 percent of the total national disease burden.
These are absurd numbers. And yet somehow they feel abstract. We’ve normalized the invisible.
This is the tragedy of the commons in its rawest form. No one owns the problem. No one is accountable. And so no one really solves it.
The market doesn’t care
This isn’t a sexy problem. There’s no consumer hook. No 10x photo filter. No viral loop.
- No one buys clean air directly
- Governments don’t have the tech or talent to measure and respond in real time
- Fixed monitoring stations are expensive, sparse, and dumb
So the market does what it always does with externalities. It looks away.
“The Moonshot”
We’re building a real-time, autonomous sensing network for the lower atmosphere. Think small, quiet balloons that drift above cities, packed with low-cost, high-resolution sensors.
They move. They learn. They talk to each other. They act like a swarm.
Each one maps pollution in 3D, watches for patterns, and sends back data in real time.
Together, they give us something we’ve never had a live, breathing map of the air we actually live in.
From there, we build models. Predict hotspots. Track sources. Alert schools. Trigger enforcement.
Over time, this becomes a new kind of infrastructure. A nervous system for the sky.
Why this matters
If we can reduce PM2.5 by just a few micrograms per cubic meter, we save thousands of lives every year.
At scale, this could outperform most health interventions on a cost-per-DALY basis.
And this isn’t just about India. This works in Lagos, Jakarta, Mexico City.
The Global South has no atmospheric intelligence layer. We plan to build it.
Why this hurts
I can’t sleep. Partly because of caffeine. Mostly because of urgency.
Every hour we don’t build this, someone dies from something they didn’t choose.
And all I can think about is getting our prototypes into the sky.
To let the cities see themselves.
To make the invisible, finally visible.
What we need
- Engineers who like field problems more than Figma
- Scientists who want to ship
- People who care more about impact than prestige
We’re not building an app. We’re building something closer to a new organ for civilization. One that senses the air around us, learns from it, and helps us act on it.
If you’re excited about this, if you want to help build the future of Atmospheric Intelligence (AI for the sky), shoot me an email at hello [at] chalkeindustries [dot] com.
If this works, it changes everything.
If we don’t build it, I’m not sure anyone else will.
LFG.