Mars, Moon on Google Maps

You bring up a good point, this is actually really bad. It's bad because the kind of position Google is in, because of its brand power, because of its authority in the modern world. They cannot joke around like this at this point. They need to take this down.

> And this is what brings fake information into the world.

Others are saying "you don't have a sense of humor" -- wrong response. I remember when I was younger my older brother explaining to me and my dad how Google works... by some pigeons sitting in a large building behind keywords because they're quick and have great vision. Yeah he bought the prank. I'm surprised he believed it, because he was pretty bright (did math + EE double major in 2 and a half years, now a manager at a large successful tech company). But this happens, all of us have blind spots, jokes like these hit us in bad ways. Even really smart folks can be had. This is like the stupidest and most contemptible kind of humor really.

They're now a lot more detailed.

> You should be skeptical of everything Google tells you, like every other organisation. If anything, this should be a pointed reminder of that fact.

Okay so you're driving to your parent's house and open up Google Maps for directions, are you going to start doubting its directions?

There is a difference between a joke being made by a person or a small company vs. implanting fake information in a source (Google Maps) which is taken prima facie by almost everyone in this day and age to be true and accurate.

Since you're on this site, I will assume for now (for sake of explaining my point) that you have a lot of knowledge on tech related stuff but perhaps have a blind spot in your medical knowledge. Suppose you have some illness and you go to research it at a popular and well-reputed site which claims to have information about medical illnesses. The site in the middle of nowhere has a joke about some random fact about the human body that someone without a medical science background could easily spot but you couldn't. You see now how this could suddenly fuck up your understanding of things and propagate down in your knowledgebase to then start affecting your decision framework? I'm tired and my example is a little far-fetched but I think you get the point I'm trying to make. Google can joke around come april time, but this kind of bull shit in "google maps" is not acceptable. My niece could easily take from this that human beings have the technology to pull off something like this in the way google is showing and make wild and inaccurate extrapolations that will confuse her.

Street view on Mars, with rover: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@19.098134,-33.250752...

The images are of quite a high resolution — they're even better than what you can get with celestia [0] and the (amazing) best surface and normal maps (by John van Vliet) [1]. Compare [2] and [3].

Celestia still has advantages — nicer zoomed out view (due to lack of "striping"), better navigation, arbitrary point of view, offline access. (Also, the lack of sufficiently detailed planetary maps adapted for Celestia isn't technically a flaw of the program itself.)

[0] https://celestiaproject.net/

[1] http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/mars.php

[2] https://i.imgur.com/0R70L1r.jpg

[3] https://i.imgur.com/VUPhwIw.jpg