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Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

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Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#221

What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes. 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…

Sounds similar to the micro story “Mold of the Earth” (1884) posted to HN a few weeks ago: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mold_of_the_Earth

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#222

Google Earth may be one of the most wondrous things ever created. When else in human history can you zoom in on the entire geography of the Earth, and now the timelapsed geography of the Earth? Can you imagine what someone like Socrates, Newton, Galileo, or Darwin would say using this tool?

Visualising the Earth at planet scale is incredible. I was blown away when the first wind map [1] made it's way onto HN almost a decade ago. I always thought of wind being localised but to see all the currents flow across the USA was soooo cool. 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) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37678…

Woah, your shade map is awesome! I was playing around with it for a long time there, lol.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only difference being that we can understand the impact we're having. And yet...

If we REALLY understood it then maybe we would stop doing it. My bet is that we don't really get it.

We do. Problem is, while individually, we're much smarter than bacteria, as a large group, we're just as dumb as groups of them.

Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone.

We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths.

Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#224
post #185
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recall slime molds are optimal planners regarding surrounding resources so it just sounds like a natural optimality to me. I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? Looking at it is disparagingly is we…

> 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. Hu…

An advanced civilization..

Like where do you think we are? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Seems to me like you are expecting too much. Worst part is, if that kind of thinking - do not exploit nature wins out - we might not even get there. Exploitation is key for scientific advancement in capitalism.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#225
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t agree more regarding misanthropy. I would like to note though that if we start mining and settling space, our growth would in fact be essentially unbounded. Combined with the fact that some types of stars are expected to continue radiating energy for trillions of years...

A substantial amount of Earth's resources would need to be eviscerated to accomplish that goal, the the space colonies are extremely likely to fail anyway, in the end.

Nah, we just need to bootstrap a cislunar economy. There's plenty of resources to use upwell, more than there ever were on Earth - but we need to seed the infrastructure for turning them into useful goods, and make it self-sustaining.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#226

What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes. 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…

I agree that from a certain distance, we look like simple bacterias doing their thing.

But to me the fascinating part is that we're aware of looking like bacterias. We are matter that became conscious of itself.

Isn't that the weirdest thing?

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#227
Wasn't this exact feature already at https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse ?

Previous discussion from eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005047

There's also the "Historical Imagery" feature in the downloaded version of Google Earth ("Google Earth Pro") which has even more detail. I get that there's some benefit to making it more visible as a feature in the browser version of Google Earth though.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#228
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Via Link? (I hadn't ever gotten around to verifying that would work. I partly ask, as the Google Earth VR experience was particularly epic in a way the Google Street View app--which was available on Quest--was not, even if the latter still causes a feeling of wonder in me... and the GP is talking about street view and people surrounding their position and the such.)

I have yet to run into anything on Steam VR that won’t work on the Quest 2 with a link cable

Of course the kicker is that you need Steam VR.

Which is PC-only, no Macs.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#229
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recall slime molds are optimal planners regarding surrounding resources so it just sounds like a natural optimality to me. I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? Looking at it is disparagingly is we…

Yup, to me it’s fascinating. 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 proc…

I think biodiversity within the structure of human occupied areas is very unrealistic and potentially counterproductive.

I also think we shouldn’t attempt to constrain growth but instead constrain footprint upon the Earth.

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