Last year I had reason to search for a missing walker from my remote home. I went to all the satellite image sites google could find and got nothing - months ou

Last year I had reason to search for a missing walker from my remote home. I went to all the satellite image sites google could find and got nothing - months out of date pictures, too low resolution to be of use. It was a long shot but close enough to be imaginable that there might be a “put credit card in, get high res photo of area from the last flyover”. Lo and behold a few weeks later just such a service appeared on HN. The person was eventually found by people in the area, and had died on a path in an open field, (sudden collapse and no chance to have used their phone to call anyone) so being out of tree cover etc. might plausibly have been found by a good clear overhead image. Probably still too small for a non-military satellite image, maybe a drone flyover. I do often wonder what it would take for humans to actually save people Thunderbirds style. We’re getting closer and closer to ubiquitous surveillance, but when you look at the nutty putty cave incident or the Thai schoolchildren in the cave, locations were known there was just no way to blast the rock without crushing the people, and rescue or failure came down to human effort. Very little future tech would have made either rescue attempt enormously easier, would it? To get to people trapped under rock quickly you need to move or melt a lot of rock and you can’t blast or drill casually because of the risk to the people. That leaves slow or low-energy rescue which is slow and limited in what it can try. How are today’s emergency services doing compared to a platonic ideal emergency service which can find and save anyone anywhere on earth from any trouble they are in, Superman style? Are we almost as good as it’s possible to be (but not evenly distributed), or nowhere near?