OK, this isn’t so much a post as a statement of fact.  The news loves to use the phrase that something “can be seen from space.”  In 2018, that really isn’t such a hard threshold to cross.  We’ll ignore the capabilities of non-civilian satellites for a moment and ask what can be seen from space from weather satellites.  The MODIS instrument on board the Terra satellite has an effective resolution of of somewhere between 250m-1km.  GOES-17 can resolve down to 500m.  And the grand daddy of resolution, LandSat-8, can resolve images at 30m!  Most of these resolutions are sufficient to effectively see most macroscopic terrestrial phenomena.  At 30m resolution, LandSat-8 could, theoretically, see a house fire.  So, let’s stop using the phrase when referring to objects/occurrences/phenomena that are clearly many, many times larger than these scales.