Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

Tiltbrush is opensource, but not actively being maintained by Google and hasn't been for a long time. Some of the original team is involved in maintaining an opensource fork, however, but this is not a Google product. Daydream was sunset a while ago and cardboard support has stopped also. VR is an interesting category for Google because there are often no services to maintain in VR apps. So, like an indie developer with a failed game, they can leave their VR apps on the Steam store with zero maintainence as long as SteamVR works. There are zero employees working on Google's VR apps except for Owlchemy, which I suspect is still around because they cost very little or they're profitable. Google Poly, which is a service related to VR, is getting shutdown.

As for VR not picking up, it didn't pick up on startup folks timeline but there has been steady growth in the market and it's close to sustainable for many developers. Facebook, Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have been more persistent and came in with realistic expectations. I think this is a case where Google was premature entering the market and also premature exiting. If they re-enter they'll probably look like Microsoft trying to re-enter the mobile or tablet market in the 2010s after not succeeding in the 90s and 2000s. That's not to say that VR will "take over the world" like smartphones, but its on its way to evolving into a sustainable category with a variety of compelling use cases.

I'm unsure how low rates of growth in Europe will lead to a collapse of the species.

> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal?

In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.

Me too.

And then normalize it against the benefit Google provides with its services and I bet it would be super clear that they are a great use of energy.

Growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes, says keithwhor. We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing, he says. If we start mining and settling space, our growth would in fact be essentially unbounded, he adds.

We're another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures. It's certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though. We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we're in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems) It'd be cool to see 30% of the planet's surface as protected areas by 2030.

This week's episode of Dr Pimple Popper is the first episode in a series on the growth of the universe. The first episode is entitled "Growth" and is available on YouTube. The second episode is titled "Theory of Growth" and runs for over two hours. This week's show is hosted by ThalesX, the leader in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The show is sponsored by Google, and can be watched on YouTube at www.YouTube.com/DrPimplePopper.

Idea has been around for a long time. Most versions compare our civilizations progress to a cancer or virus, because of the way we treat our environment. Joe Rogan talks about the idea in an old clip: I think human beings are just a very complicated form of bacteria. There are vast number of parallels in the behavior of systems from the microscopic to the macroscopic. You are a plague, and we are the cure, says the Matrix. "We do precisely what bacteria does, albeit at a much more more complicated level," says slver.

Human history is a function with material conditions as an input. The bacteria within us certainly don't know anything about our consciousness. Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being. If we as humans look and act like bacteria when we zoom out, do we suffer the same myopia of our bacteria friends, unable to recognize the consciousness our collective activity creates? It's fun to think about. At least, we know but choose or are too lazy to do anything about it. We have to understand at a micro-level, how we can make an impact in aggregate.

Yes, there's a ton of complexity in there, but when you zoom out enough, it looks and acts very similar to the lower level. I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do. What the rational one wants isn't necessarily what we do, says OrbitRock. To a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don't realize the connection.

With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Google has bailed on VR apps (for the most part, Owlchemy is still there), so I imagine not. It'd be cool if Google Earth VR was opensource like Tiltbrush. It's fun to imagine a world where Google continued to put money into VR, but I'm actually not sure how that fits into their business outside of just another platform for Android.

Google Earth VR is "fantastic" during lockdowns, "felt like going out!" "Bailed" is a bit over the top, I would characterize it more as being at a stand still. VR didn't pick up the way most hoped it would, and at this point there isn't really much to do until we get another wave of innovation that pushes the boundary forward. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR. Cardboard was neat but just that. Google is letting what lead they had whither away. Its silly to think they had working inside out tracking (Tango) in 2014.

HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets work with Google Earth. Works on anything that supports SteamVR. Works with any headset that can use SteamVR, so like, damn near all of them. Motion sickness factor isn't zero, but its' small. Google Earth may be one of the most wondrous things ever created. Can you imagine what someone like Socrates, Newton, Galileo, or Darwin would say using this tool? . It's inspired me to work on my own map of live mountain shadows across the Earth (link in my user profile if you're interested) Timelapse timelapse tool allows users to watch aerial views of urban sprawl at a glance. Can be used to see how the environment is changing over time. Could be used in environmental impact studies to look at the effect of climate change on the environment. Can also be used for environmental impact data visualizations to help scientists better understand the impact of natural disasters. Google Search does let you limit the results to old sites. I miss the ability to get the cached version of a page easily. A time-lapse of the search algorithm is what I would like to see reply gipp to do.