Technology evolution will have an enormous impact on what we do by 2030, but demand-driven changes are probably even more important. The ability of governments and businesses to improve efficiency and grow productivity requires increasingly sophisticated information about the world they work in – implying greater use of remote sensing. Most interesting over the next twenty years will be demand for filling in what can be called the ‘scale gap’. No longer is moderate spatial resolution with regional coverage at low refresh rates sufficient. Tomorrow’s applications will require us to work at a wide range of scales – global coverage with low refresh, high-resolution hyper-local, and more. We are faced with a seemingly impossible challenge: understanding the Earth simultaneously at scales ranging from hyperfine to global. Moreover, the need to integrate across multiple scales is growing as well. Energy is a great example – accurate knowledge of both long-term climate and near-term weather are needed to optimize power generation, particularly in the rapidly growing renewable energy sector. Much of this will be driven by the needs of individuals and communities (both consumer and business) rather than centralized governments. It all illustrates remote sensing’s fundamental ‘scale gap’: society’s demand for information at diverse space and time scales is growing exponentially, while the ability of our traditional sources to supply the information grows linearly.