28 ms·

Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

1209 points by braymundo 6y ago

neither_color 6y ago
With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. This is amazing, will this be included in the VR versions of google earth? For those who haven't tried it yet Google Earth is the first thing I show friends who've never tried VR before by giving them a Godzilla's eye view of Tokyo. I've yet to find someone who doesn't ":o"
- hawk_ 6y ago
  Are there headsets other than HTC Vive and Oculus Rift that work with it?
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    Any headset that can use SteamVR, so like, damn near all of them
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    It works on all the usual suspects (anything that supports SteamVR). Valve Index, HP Reverb G2, WMR headsets, Oculus Quest (via link cable or wifi streaming) etc
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      I can't find any way to get it to work with the Quest on my Mac. (Short of installing Bootcamp that is.)
      - Rebelgecko 6y ago
        Unfortunately SteamVR dropped Mac support last year
- Impossible 6y ago
  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. Like Tiltbrush it was one of the foundational early VR apps that people demoed, 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.
  - gpspake 6y ago
    It's a shame. Google Earth on VR is probably the most amazing and practical use for VR for normal people at the moment. I like to street-view in to other countries and stand in the middle of crowded places with people around me imagining that it's a thousand years from now and humanity is gone and it's the documentation of life on earth. I've had good times passing the headset around in a room full of people to share places we've been. It's also cool to look down, as a giant, at paths you've taken irl and get a sense of scale. I love google earth in VR
    - vidar 6y ago
      What headset did you use?
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        I don't know about the GP, but I use a Quest 2.
        saurik 6y ago
        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.)
        6y ago
- 101008 6y ago
  I have a Play Station VR headset and it's awesome but I always felt sad that I coudln't experience this. How is the experience? I know a lot of friends felt sick when we play a space videogame or some game where the environment isn't clear and they can't see where they are standing, I guess having a view from outer space can trigger same feelings.
  - andybak 6y ago
    It's got the usual "comfort controls" (i.e. vignetting while moving). If you leave those switched on then it's OK for people that haven't got their VR legs yet. But - yeah - with everything switched off it can be at the "intense" end of the spectrum.
  - appleflaxen 6y ago
    It's amazing. The motion sickness factor isn't zero, but its' small.
deleted 6y ago
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nullifidian 6y ago
>unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.
- daemoens 6y ago
  Overpopulation isn't really a problem currently.
  - Rompect 6y ago
    Underpopulation is actually the problem in most Western countries.
    - frosted-flakes 6y ago
      Not under-population, per se, but low rates of growth.
      - cromwellian 6y ago
        Low rates of growth lead to a population collapse in 2 generations or so and an inverted demographic pyramid where mostly old people exist with few youngsters. Not a good recipe for the species or a civilization. Look at predicted population numbers in Japan for example.
        SamBam 6y ago
        I'm unsure how low rates of growth in Europe will lead to a collapse of the species.
    - SamBam 6y ago
      Not really sure how you can call it underpopulation. Was underpopulation also a problem in the preceding 30,000 years or so of human civilization in Europe leading up to today, when the population has always been always smaller? The population in Europe is larger than it has ever been in any point in history.
voldemort1968 6y ago
Is it just me or is this feature not showing up? When I put in my address, the little place card on the side doesn't show any controls to move through time.
- tomduncalf 6y ago
  It's a little unintuitive, but seems like you need to search in the search box in the timelapse side card panel thing, rather than the main search box
- 2ion 6y ago
  You can get there through the "voyager" menu.
nynx 6y ago
Looking at Google earth always gives me a feeling that I suspect is similar—though lesser—to what astronauts feel when they look down at earth.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
It makes the loss of the Amazon rain forest actually tangible instead of some vague conception of 10% gone. This is outstanding.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  There’s lots of great tools to explore such things as well. https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-... I built an app which visualizes global fire history per year from 2001 to 2020, still working out some kinks but maybe will share here.
mschuetz 6y ago
I consider Google Earth something like a modern digital world wonder. These things are absolutely amazing, especially in VR.
izolate 6y ago
Most striking to me is that Google registered a custom TLD (.gle) just to use as a URL shortener. Impressive use of funds.
- hobofan 6y ago
  IIRC, once you've proven that you can reliably run a registry (which Google does anyway for their other TLDs), the application and fees for an additional TLD is much cheaper than you would expect (5-low 6 figures/year)
  - Ayesh 6y ago
    I think I remember hearing at DNW that the uncontested TLD application fee and annual fee are flat $185K and $25K. Donuts probably owns many more TLDs than Google, but I'm pretty sure they still paid the $185K fee.
- jamespwilliams 6y ago
  In theory Google could serve their URL shortening service on the root of their .google TLD (links like https://google/xyz123 https://google/xyz123). Would probably break some apps which don’t correctly handle TLD-only domain names though, I suppose.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    I would assume most fairly-tech-savvy people wouldn't trust such a link. It doesn't obey the rules for what we've been taught a real URL should look like.
ketanhwr 6y ago
Incase anyone is having trouble finding this feature, visit this link: goo.gle/timelapse
pow_pp_-1_v 6y ago
That's pretty cool! Like it or not Google does all this with the ad money they bring in. Imagine if all Google service were subscription based. Will they even have 25% of the capabilities they have now?
- andrew_v4 6y ago
  I agree with you, its something only possible because they are throwing off cash. But is it worth them having turned much of the internet into a cesspit? I'm conflicted. On one hand you could argue it's like some dictatorship putting on lavish parades while conditions in their regime are generally terrible (I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of the problem, just the idea that having something fancy to show doesn't necessarily cancel out all the harm done) Or is it a natural positive byproduct of capitalism that the internet has garbage strewn corners filled with listicles and "content" alongside genuinely cool stuff. And trying to clamp down on this would just make everything mediocre. Anyway, there are definitely lots of good things Google had done, in research, in public availability of tech, and in cool stuff like this. Are we making the right tradeoff against all the bad they have done, I don't know.
  - dharmaturtle 6y ago
    Are we blaming listicles on Google now? There's plenty of shit to throw at Google (Timnit Gebru). Let's not dilute concrete criticisms with bland whatevers like "turned much of the internet into a cesspit".
  - pow_pp_-1_v 6y ago
    FWIW, I was not trying to pass a value judgement on whether Google, on net, is good or bad. It was just a thought I had when I saw the time lapse thing. But I don't think Google turned internet into a cesspit. Yes, Youtube's recommendation algorithms are pretty bad. But there other actors who deserver a bigger share of the blame.
- npteljes 6y ago
  I appreciate the cool stuff, but I could also accept a reality where there's much less tracking going on, and Google Earth and smartphones are less impressive.
simias 6y ago
This is really cool. However I'm going to bring you the Traditional HN Nitpick: it's very odd to see Google use these horribly over-compressed gifs over proper videos: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_images/Draping.gif https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
- judge2020 6y ago
  Ya, it seems like someone really wanted a gif and threw it in a free video -> gif converter. Gifs can have over 256 colors (with some tricks) or they could have used `video autoplay loop muted` and achieved the same effect.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    I don't think the surprise is they made a bad gif as much as they used gif at all considering this is the company that literally made vp9 and webm for this exact use case.
krm01 6y ago
This is the stuff I'd like to see Google do more of. Build things that are true to their mission of Collecting and organising the world's information. Truly remarkable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aimor 6y ago
Is this different than the historical imagery feature that was introduced in 2009? I played around with it a bit. Timelapse seems to only exist at large scales. I can't seem to resolve anything more detailed than a highway. Previously Google had higher resolution historical data. I used this to see how my house, neighborhood, and city changed over decades. There was black and white photography at the far end of the data. This was in the desktop version of Google Earth. I just downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth and was happy to find out the historical data is still available there. :) Hope that makes it to the web version.
- PEJOE 6y ago
  AFAIK the imagery you want has been relegated to the desktop app (now called google earth pro), and is still available. There is a little clock icon above the imagery area with a counter clockwise green arrow you must click to access historical imagery. Luckily they do release a version of the desktop app that works on linux. [Download page] https://www.google.com/earth/versions/#download-pro https://www.google.com/earth/versions/#download-pro
  - devenblake 6y ago
    Google Earth pro (I think) used to be a paid product. I remember downloading it and using GETPFREE as my activation key thinking it was so cool that benevolent Internet leader Google would give that out for free. 2013 was a different time.
dsaavy 6y ago
This is an incredible tool. I know there are other ways to look at timelapses of aerial views but this is just so easy and useable. Watching the change of specific suburban areas in the US brings a lot of negative emotions for me. Seeing what used to be green areas slowly transform into more suburban sprawl, I can't help but think of the number of species who experienced their ecosystem's walls closing in on them. As someone who builds a lot of data visualizations, this would be in my top experiences for the category. It's in a way... an art piece.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  I’m into geospatial science, and I get so much aesthetic appreciation out of it. It is super artistic. The earth is beautiful!
  - samstave 6y ago
    Agreed, and great username. I cant wait to see what everyone, including myself can create with this! EDIT; This should be one of the most important augmenting data tools for Environmental Impact studies. Take a site that was built at the beginning of this dataset - which had an EIS done, compare the results seen in this tool to the predictions in the EIS... and use that for MANY EIS which had some of the same impact or variables and see how the surroundings compare etc...
- dekerta 6y ago
  Hasn't this tool been available at https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/ https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/ for several years now?
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    Yep, but now it’s on Google Earth instead of Google Earth Engine
- skybrian 6y ago
  What's an example that you particularly like?
dognotdog 6y ago
There's also https://earthtime.org/explore https://earthtime.org/explore which is based off the same satellite imagery, but in the browser. And, it has a lot more available data layers with social, economic, and environmental data on a global scale.
- briffle 6y ago
  Google earth also works in the browser. A few years back, they made that the default way of accessing it.
  - dognotdog 6y ago
    Geez, I'll just go and blame the pandemic for a complete loss of sense of time on that! I could've sworn I saw a beta of that just not so recently, but I had no idea it's been mainstream for that long.
sbehlasp 6y ago
Outstanding!! now we can have a look at how we all were blessed with our planet (history) and what we have had done to it. Hopefully we all contribute to restore it for better future...
fasteddie31003 6y ago
I'm no fan of the deforestation that is being shown here, but for a Westerner to tell people in the Global South to not deforest is hypocritical and economically deceitful. Look at pretty much all of Europe and the Eastern United States. It has almost been all deforested and replaced with farmland at some point. Agriculture is an important step in a county's economic stability and progress. Some trees need to be cut down and that land be turned into farmland to help that developing county's citizens. Imagine being a poor framer supporting a growing family with an opportunity to grow more of your crop by cutting down some trees and having rich white people in a post scarcity society telling you you're a bad person.
- bricemo 6y ago
  Bill Gates covers this extensively in his recent excellent book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Even if all the rich world countries went to emissions zero, that wouldn’t be enough, because the developing world needs to continue to develop. This is a good thing but it is a problem of progress, and underscores how complicated the solution is
  - varispeed 6y ago
    He is one of those do as I say, not as I do type of toxic people (e.g. tells everyone to cut emissions while himself enjoying private jet flights). I don't feel that he is genuine, but for entertainment value could be worth a try.
    - GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
      He also does a lot to offset his private jets. > I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint, so I’m taking extra steps to do my part. In the book I briefly mention how I’m offsetting my own emissions. I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint. As of now, the standard calculation for carbon footprints is based on an estimate of $400 per ton of emissions. But since the way we calculate carbon footprints is still in its infancy, I take our family’s carbon footprint and double it to make sure we are fully covering our footprint and then some. > I also like to think of my investments in zero-carbon technologies as another kind of offset for my emissions. Investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I am responsible for creating. I have given more than $1 billion toward innovations and ideas that I hope will help the world get to zero—including affordable and reliable clean energy, low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/What-you-can-do-to-fight-climate-change https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/What-you-can-do-to-fight-c...
doersino 6y ago
I’ve built a Twitter bot around these timelapses a while ago – just updated to use the newly released data set: https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime You can take a look at the source code here if you’re interested: https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime
- swyx 6y ago
  feedback - the bot might be a bit more compelling if it reported the city it is focusing on. hard to tell.
  - doersino 6y ago
    There's reverse geocoding data at the end of each video – and most of the time, it picks spots in the middle of nowhere, which is difficult to reverse geocode in a way that's useful, so I don't show this information more prominently.
cozzyd 6y ago
ok, but what about reaching parity with the desktop version?
BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
I kinda wish that there was a timelapse for Google search. Search seems to be heavily biased towards stuff popular right now. It seems older things disappear fairly quickly. I've been in a position where I wanted to search for a website that was popular in 2012 without having the exact name, and having to find an old forum post that linked to it to find it.
- dweekly 6y ago
  I hear you - it would probably need to be cross integrated with web.archive.org in order to actually vend most results given how rapidly we are seeing bit rot.
  - xnx 6y ago
    I think I read somewhere that behind-the-scenes the Google crawler is in-effect a super-archive.org, keeping a copy of every page it has crawled. This sounds outrageous, but I believe it's feasible with compression.
- saurik 6y ago
  Google Search does let you limit the results to old sites (though I realize this isn't quite equivalent).
  - Black101 6y ago
    A time-lapse of the search algorithm is what I would like to see
    - gipp 6y ago
      Given that the set of possible searches is unbounded, first instinct is that the whole system would have had to be designed around that use case from the bottom up for the problem to be remotely tractable
      - Black101 6y ago
Finnucane 6y ago
It's like watching mold spores growing.
shortlived 6y ago
Is the data open source and available without using google earth?
- devrand 6y ago
  Almost certainly not. I'm fairly certain Google is licensing the imagery.
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    Google spun off its own satellite imagery business a while again, but retains usage rights: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/google-gets-out-of-the-satellite-business/515841/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/googl...
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  Pretty sure it’s just Landsat data, which is freely available. As is Sentinel, MODIS, and a number of other satellite platforms. Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).
gallegojaime 6y ago
Something cool and kinda sad to behold - the plastic greenhouses in El Ejido grow as a white blob.
keithwhor 6y ago
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 a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing.
- detritus 6y ago
  The only difference being that we can understand the impact we're having. And yet...
  - ditegashi 6y ago
    If we REALLY understood it then maybe we would stop doing it. My bet is that we don't really get it.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      Because individual motivation and macro-behavior aren't necessity aligned, individual understanding might not be enough to changes behavior of the system as a whole. Maybe individual bacteria understand the impact they might have on a host system and are concerned about outcomes as well. 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
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > 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 I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we? In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
log101 6y ago
I found the video unneccesserialy dramatic.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Quite bearable without sound. Nowadays I default to watching Youtube muted, unless it's music.
lastgeniusua 6y ago
anyone still believing global warming could be stopped, and more than that, stopped with capitalism?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
q_andrew 6y ago
The growth of Dubai is crazy, as well as most major Chinese cities. What are some interesting, less obvious things to look at with this feature?
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  Filling of the three gorges dam?
  - samstave 6y ago
    Or find some of the ghost cities in China as well Rainforest everything. Singapore
- q_andrew 6y ago
  Also, it's too bad this doesn't go before 1980, because I'd love to see how the Mt St Helens eruption affected the landscape around it (I know there are pictures, but google maps makes it feel more hands-on)
detritus 6y ago
I want to love this, but the interface is too opaque. How on GoogleEarth do I get back the timeline option that I've somehow closed? I'm probably being an idiot, but I'm not a total idiot, and it's not at all clear to me how I access the timeline now. The "I'm feeling lucky" icon is WAY too prominent. A misclick there quickly screws whatever it was I was just looking at.
- nevster 6y ago
  I was totally confused by this as well. If you click the close button on the Timelapse panel, how do you get it back? The trick is to click on the Voyager icon and then choose Timelapse in one of the panels that comes up.
thrower123 6y ago
For most places, this looks to be incredibly low-resolution at present. It's still kind of interesting to watch chunks of forest that my dad clearcut twenty years ago regenerate though.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
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?
- tppiotrowski 6y ago
  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=3767889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767889
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    Woah, your shade map is awesome! I was playing around with it for a long time there, lol.
  - ehershey 6y ago
    That shade map is awesome! Does it include buildings? (Could it, if not?) I’ve been dying for this for ages.
    - tppiotrowski 6y ago
      Including buildings in urban areas and choosing a custom date to see how shadows change over the course of the year are next on the backlog. Contact info is in my profile if you want to keep in touch.
  - folli 6y ago
    Shade map is cool, which data source are you using for the height map? I've been working on something similar (link also in user profile).
macando 6y ago
Google Earth often is the most mind-blowing thing for the people who never used the Internet in their lives. I don't use it often but I have to say that it's one of the delivered promises of the Internet. It's tech done right. What an outstanding video.
rexreed 6y ago
I'd love to see a timelapse over the past 20 years showing Google's energy usage / consumption across all their data centers and offices.
- lanevorockz 6y ago
  Propaganda only goes one way. More power to those on the top.
- meowkit 6y ago
  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.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  Google has invested quite a bit into decarbonizing their data centers. They do a lot better than AWS for example.
- jonas21 6y ago
  Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but it does have a timeline: https://sustainability.google/commitments https://sustainability.google/commitments And if you open the PDF at the bottom, I think it has the data you wanted.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Already had this tool for over a decade. Why did google took so long to implement it ? Anyways, better late than never.
intrasight 6y ago
Is this only in the web version? I don't see a new version of the desktop.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Do they have a version of earth VR for oculus Quest 2 yet?
- samstave 6y ago
  What does that mean? OoTL
neolog 6y ago
It would be much more useful for learning about climate change if the timestamp included the month instead of just the year.
- Nition 6y ago
  The original, downloaded version of Google Earth shows the month (and has already had a historical imagery feature for the long time). Get "Google Earth Pro" (it's still free, that's just what they call it now), go to View->Historical Imagery, and you can scrub left and right on the slider.
r34 6y ago
I predict ML models predicting how will the Earth look like in the future:) loads of fun!
fudged71 6y ago
Many of the timelapses uses images from different time of year etc so you see different hues across frames. Would it be possible to apply something like neural style transfer across the frames (from a representative frame) to smooth the colors out without changing the features in the frames?
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  There’s a tool called landtrendr that sort of does this, but it’s less for visualization than for analysis of trends https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE/index.html https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE/index.html
  - fudged71 6y ago
    Thank you so much for this, really incredible tool. The vegetation loss visualizations are too complex for me to tweak properly. I hope there are data science journalists who are using this tool.
fudged71 6y ago
What's exciting to me is that children/students will be able to see an incredibly local and objective history of their area. As a sort of "how did I get here" perspective.
ttty 6y ago
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.
adelarsq 6y ago
Its like to watch the Earth to be destroyed. Afraid from the coming years.
slacktide 6y ago
Pretty cool. Just the other day I was using timelapse to research the history of an aircraft radio navigation aid that used to be around the corner from my house. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_radio_range https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_radio_range It had been part of the four-course radio range network, which was discontinued in the 1960s. The transmitter site was identifiable until 2006 when it was developed for housing.
theknocker 6y ago
Eat shit, corporation so evil and dystopian that it's like satire.
Nition 6y ago
Wasn't this exact feature already at https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse ? Previous discussion from eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005047 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.
- ryankrage77 6y ago
  What's up with the image quality over the years? Looking at my home in the UK, it's a blur in 1985, then the next image in 2003 is fairly sharp. The image quality is consistent/slightly improves from 2003 until 2014, and then from 2014 - 2017 it's a blur again. 2018 is the sharpest of all the historical images, better even than 2020.
  - Nition 6y ago
    You mean in the Historical Imagery thing? Sometimes the "blur" is just taking a long time to load, and if you wait longer it'll become sharp. Other times it's just a blurry image. Some are better than others.
calylex 6y ago
What's this whole guilt shaming all about? And must the voice in the video be British and the sound of a girl on the verge of crying? Finally I don't think there is anything wrong with more farmlands in poor countries in South America. That's extremely hypocritical when the West did the same thing only a couple of hundred years ago and continues to do to this day, but oh if the poor South Americans learn how to farm on their own, the world will end. The answer to side-effects of human progress is not stopping it, it's to accelerating the growth of technology so we can mitigate the issues we create and fix the harms the cause. F*ck Google!
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  Well, there’s a tipping point of deforestation beyond which the Amazon rainforest might collapse.
- MarkLowenstein 6y ago
  Regardless of the spin put on by the video producers, the tool itself is very useful for letting people see reality, which may work to temper alarmism. If the reality is that most of the earth hasn't changed that much, then that is now available for view. And if the reality is that the Brazil rainforests really were a vast sea of dark green not long ago but are already medium-brown-looking today, then that is also now available for view. I'm curious to see people search for the growth of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". I'm pretty sure most people will be surprised to find that there is nothing to see. But I'll try it out.
halfeatenpie 6y ago
This is very fascinating and great. I mean this dataset has been available for a while know (from what I recall), but re-packaged and organized in this manner would be very useful. One thing that really stands out to me is the change in our land use/environmental changes over time. You can even see the different reservoir levels for various years and can "guesstimate" what year certain droughts were. I'm sure there's some amazing ideas to use this tool, I'm just excited about it.
amelius 6y ago
Nice, but it would be even nicer with emissions data, e.g. from ESA's Sentinel-5P satellite: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
faldore 6y ago
why they have to make it political. why not just show information without spinning it.
skeletonjelly 6y ago
Looks like it's written in web assembly too. https://earth.google.com/static/wasm/9.134.0.0/earthwasm.wasm https://earth.google.com/static/wasm/9.134.0.0/earthwasm.was...
TeeMassive 6y ago
Seeing forests disappear and Iceland's ice having less and less ice was quite saddening and eye opening.
fidesomnes 6y ago
Congrats google, most obnoxious voiceover ever.
8note 6y ago
What's keeping google earth running? I find it surprising that it hasn't been shut off and/or merged into maps years ago
tillalive 6y ago
Really? 15 years? Google earth was released in 2005?
ecommerceguy 6y ago
I remember when GE was Keyhole and we we're paying $600 a year for 1m per pixel digitalglobe imagery. Still zooms into 15th and Kasold in Lawrence on default. RCJH
arjunkava 6y ago
I really liked the presentation of the blog, it is actually making me uncomfortable and guilty.
tails4e 6y ago
Is the resolution of the images off? In my area where recent images have decent resolution, all images in time-lapse mode are very low res, including ones from. 2016, 2020.
teekert 6y ago
Does anyone know where to find this feature in Google Earth for iOS?

1209 points by braymundo 6y ago

With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. This is amazing, will this be included in the VR versions of google earth? For those who haven't tried it yet Google Earth is the first thing I show friends who've never tried VR before by giving them a Godzilla's eye view of Tokyo. I've yet to find someone who doesn't ":o"

hawk_ 6y ago
Are there headsets other than HTC Vive and Oculus Rift that work with it?
- mrguyorama 6y ago
  Any headset that can use SteamVR, so like, damn near all of them
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  It works on all the usual suspects (anything that supports SteamVR). Valve Index, HP Reverb G2, WMR headsets, Oculus Quest (via link cable or wifi streaming) etc
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    I can't find any way to get it to work with the Quest on my Mac. (Short of installing Bootcamp that is.)
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      Unfortunately SteamVR dropped Mac support last year
Impossible 6y ago
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. Like Tiltbrush it was one of the foundational early VR apps that people demoed, 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.
- gpspake 6y ago
  It's a shame. Google Earth on VR is probably the most amazing and practical use for VR for normal people at the moment. I like to street-view in to other countries and stand in the middle of crowded places with people around me imagining that it's a thousand years from now and humanity is gone and it's the documentation of life on earth. I've had good times passing the headset around in a room full of people to share places we've been. It's also cool to look down, as a giant, at paths you've taken irl and get a sense of scale. I love google earth in VR
  - vidar 6y ago
    What headset did you use?
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      I don't know about the GP, but I use a Quest 2.
      - saurik 6y ago
        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.)
        6y ago
101008 6y ago
I have a Play Station VR headset and it's awesome but I always felt sad that I coudln't experience this. How is the experience? I know a lot of friends felt sick when we play a space videogame or some game where the environment isn't clear and they can't see where they are standing, I guess having a view from outer space can trigger same feelings.
- andybak 6y ago
  It's got the usual "comfort controls" (i.e. vignetting while moving). If you leave those switched on then it's OK for people that haven't got their VR legs yet. But - yeah - with everything switched off it can be at the "intense" end of the spectrum.
- appleflaxen 6y ago
  It's amazing. The motion sickness factor isn't zero, but its' small.

deleted 6y ago

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nullifidian 6y ago

>unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. four decades of meaningless uncontrolled overpopulation, destruction of pristine nature and its ecosystems, a march of techno-globalism across the planet. Every time I see these timelapses it depresses me quite a bit.

daemoens 6y ago
Overpopulation isn't really a problem currently.
- Rompect 6y ago
  Underpopulation is actually the problem in most Western countries.
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    Not under-population, per se, but low rates of growth.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      Low rates of growth lead to a population collapse in 2 generations or so and an inverted demographic pyramid where mostly old people exist with few youngsters. Not a good recipe for the species or a civilization. Look at predicted population numbers in Japan for example.
      - SamBam 6y ago
        I'm unsure how low rates of growth in Europe will lead to a collapse of the species.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Not really sure how you can call it underpopulation. Was underpopulation also a problem in the preceding 30,000 years or so of human civilization in Europe leading up to today, when the population has always been always smaller? The population in Europe is larger than it has ever been in any point in history.

voldemort1968 6y ago

Is it just me or is this feature not showing up? When I put in my address, the little place card on the side doesn't show any controls to move through time.

tomduncalf 6y ago
It's a little unintuitive, but seems like you need to search in the search box in the timelapse side card panel thing, rather than the main search box
2ion 6y ago
You can get there through the "voyager" menu.

nynx 6y ago

Looking at Google earth always gives me a feeling that I suspect is similar—though lesser—to what astronauts feel when they look down at earth.

nickthemagicman 6y ago

It makes the loss of the Amazon rain forest actually tangible instead of some vague conception of 10% gone. This is outstanding.

OrbitRock 6y ago
There’s lots of great tools to explore such things as well. https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-... I built an app which visualizes global fire history per year from 2001 to 2020, still working out some kinks but maybe will share here.

mschuetz 6y ago

I consider Google Earth something like a modern digital world wonder. These things are absolutely amazing, especially in VR.

izolate 6y ago

Most striking to me is that Google registered a custom TLD (.gle) just to use as a URL shortener. Impressive use of funds.

hobofan 6y ago
IIRC, once you've proven that you can reliably run a registry (which Google does anyway for their other TLDs), the application and fees for an additional TLD is much cheaper than you would expect (5-low 6 figures/year)
- Ayesh 6y ago
  I think I remember hearing at DNW that the uncontested TLD application fee and annual fee are flat $185K and $25K. Donuts probably owns many more TLDs than Google, but I'm pretty sure they still paid the $185K fee.
jamespwilliams 6y ago
In theory Google could serve their URL shortening service on the root of their .google TLD (links like https://google/xyz123 https://google/xyz123). Would probably break some apps which don’t correctly handle TLD-only domain names though, I suppose.
- SamBam 6y ago
  I would assume most fairly-tech-savvy people wouldn't trust such a link. It doesn't obey the rules for what we've been taught a real URL should look like.

ketanhwr 6y ago

Incase anyone is having trouble finding this feature, visit this link: goo.gle/timelapse

pow_pp_-1_v 6y ago

That's pretty cool! Like it or not Google does all this with the ad money they bring in. Imagine if all Google service were subscription based. Will they even have 25% of the capabilities they have now?

andrew_v4 6y ago
I agree with you, its something only possible because they are throwing off cash. But is it worth them having turned much of the internet into a cesspit? I'm conflicted. On one hand you could argue it's like some dictatorship putting on lavish parades while conditions in their regime are generally terrible (I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of the problem, just the idea that having something fancy to show doesn't necessarily cancel out all the harm done) Or is it a natural positive byproduct of capitalism that the internet has garbage strewn corners filled with listicles and "content" alongside genuinely cool stuff. And trying to clamp down on this would just make everything mediocre. Anyway, there are definitely lots of good things Google had done, in research, in public availability of tech, and in cool stuff like this. Are we making the right tradeoff against all the bad they have done, I don't know.
- dharmaturtle 6y ago
  Are we blaming listicles on Google now? There's plenty of shit to throw at Google (Timnit Gebru). Let's not dilute concrete criticisms with bland whatevers like "turned much of the internet into a cesspit".
- pow_pp_-1_v 6y ago
  FWIW, I was not trying to pass a value judgement on whether Google, on net, is good or bad. It was just a thought I had when I saw the time lapse thing. But I don't think Google turned internet into a cesspit. Yes, Youtube's recommendation algorithms are pretty bad. But there other actors who deserver a bigger share of the blame.
npteljes 6y ago
I appreciate the cool stuff, but I could also accept a reality where there's much less tracking going on, and Google Earth and smartphones are less impressive.

simias 6y ago

This is really cool. However I'm going to bring you the Traditional HN Nitpick: it's very odd to see Google use these horribly over-compressed gifs over proper videos: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_images/Draping.gif https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

judge2020 6y ago
Ya, it seems like someone really wanted a gif and threw it in a free video -> gif converter. Gifs can have over 256 colors (with some tricks) or they could have used `video autoplay loop muted` and achieved the same effect.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  I don't think the surprise is they made a bad gif as much as they used gif at all considering this is the company that literally made vp9 and webm for this exact use case.

krm01 6y ago

This is the stuff I'd like to see Google do more of. Build things that are true to their mission of Collecting and organising the world's information. Truly remarkable.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aimor 6y ago

Is this different than the historical imagery feature that was introduced in 2009? I played around with it a bit. Timelapse seems to only exist at large scales. I can't seem to resolve anything more detailed than a highway. Previously Google had higher resolution historical data. I used this to see how my house, neighborhood, and city changed over decades. There was black and white photography at the far end of the data. This was in the desktop version of Google Earth. I just downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth and was happy to find out the historical data is still available there. :) Hope that makes it to the web version.

PEJOE 6y ago
AFAIK the imagery you want has been relegated to the desktop app (now called google earth pro), and is still available. There is a little clock icon above the imagery area with a counter clockwise green arrow you must click to access historical imagery. Luckily they do release a version of the desktop app that works on linux. [Download page] https://www.google.com/earth/versions/#download-pro https://www.google.com/earth/versions/#download-pro
- devenblake 6y ago
  Google Earth pro (I think) used to be a paid product. I remember downloading it and using GETPFREE as my activation key thinking it was so cool that benevolent Internet leader Google would give that out for free. 2013 was a different time.

dsaavy 6y ago

This is an incredible tool. I know there are other ways to look at timelapses of aerial views but this is just so easy and useable. Watching the change of specific suburban areas in the US brings a lot of negative emotions for me. Seeing what used to be green areas slowly transform into more suburban sprawl, I can't help but think of the number of species who experienced their ecosystem's walls closing in on them. As someone who builds a lot of data visualizations, this would be in my top experiences for the category. It's in a way... an art piece.

OrbitRock 6y ago
I’m into geospatial science, and I get so much aesthetic appreciation out of it. It is super artistic. The earth is beautiful!
- samstave 6y ago
  Agreed, and great username. I cant wait to see what everyone, including myself can create with this! EDIT; This should be one of the most important augmenting data tools for Environmental Impact studies. Take a site that was built at the beginning of this dataset - which had an EIS done, compare the results seen in this tool to the predictions in the EIS... and use that for MANY EIS which had some of the same impact or variables and see how the surroundings compare etc...
dekerta 6y ago
Hasn't this tool been available at https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/ https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/ for several years now?
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  Yep, but now it’s on Google Earth instead of Google Earth Engine
skybrian 6y ago
What's an example that you particularly like?

dognotdog 6y ago

There's also https://earthtime.org/explore https://earthtime.org/explore which is based off the same satellite imagery, but in the browser. And, it has a lot more available data layers with social, economic, and environmental data on a global scale.

briffle 6y ago
Google earth also works in the browser. A few years back, they made that the default way of accessing it.
- dognotdog 6y ago
  Geez, I'll just go and blame the pandemic for a complete loss of sense of time on that! I could've sworn I saw a beta of that just not so recently, but I had no idea it's been mainstream for that long.

sbehlasp 6y ago

Outstanding!! now we can have a look at how we all were blessed with our planet (history) and what we have had done to it. Hopefully we all contribute to restore it for better future...

fasteddie31003 6y ago

I'm no fan of the deforestation that is being shown here, but for a Westerner to tell people in the Global South to not deforest is hypocritical and economically deceitful. Look at pretty much all of Europe and the Eastern United States. It has almost been all deforested and replaced with farmland at some point. Agriculture is an important step in a county's economic stability and progress. Some trees need to be cut down and that land be turned into farmland to help that developing county's citizens. Imagine being a poor framer supporting a growing family with an opportunity to grow more of your crop by cutting down some trees and having rich white people in a post scarcity society telling you you're a bad person.

bricemo 6y ago
Bill Gates covers this extensively in his recent excellent book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Even if all the rich world countries went to emissions zero, that wouldn’t be enough, because the developing world needs to continue to develop. This is a good thing but it is a problem of progress, and underscores how complicated the solution is
- varispeed 6y ago
  He is one of those do as I say, not as I do type of toxic people (e.g. tells everyone to cut emissions while himself enjoying private jet flights). I don't feel that he is genuine, but for entertainment value could be worth a try.
  - GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
    He also does a lot to offset his private jets. > I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint, so I’m taking extra steps to do my part. In the book I briefly mention how I’m offsetting my own emissions. I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint. As of now, the standard calculation for carbon footprints is based on an estimate of $400 per ton of emissions. But since the way we calculate carbon footprints is still in its infancy, I take our family’s carbon footprint and double it to make sure we are fully covering our footprint and then some. > I also like to think of my investments in zero-carbon technologies as another kind of offset for my emissions. Investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I am responsible for creating. I have given more than $1 billion toward innovations and ideas that I hope will help the world get to zero—including affordable and reliable clean energy, low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/What-you-can-do-to-fight-climate-change https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/What-you-can-do-to-fight-c...

doersino 6y ago

I’ve built a Twitter bot around these timelapses a while ago – just updated to use the newly released data set: https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime You can take a look at the source code here if you’re interested: https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime

swyx 6y ago
feedback - the bot might be a bit more compelling if it reported the city it is focusing on. hard to tell.
- doersino 6y ago
  There's reverse geocoding data at the end of each video – and most of the time, it picks spots in the middle of nowhere, which is difficult to reverse geocode in a way that's useful, so I don't show this information more prominently.

cozzyd 6y ago

ok, but what about reaching parity with the desktop version?

BenoitEssiambre 6y ago

I kinda wish that there was a timelapse for Google search. Search seems to be heavily biased towards stuff popular right now. It seems older things disappear fairly quickly. I've been in a position where I wanted to search for a website that was popular in 2012 without having the exact name, and having to find an old forum post that linked to it to find it.

dweekly 6y ago
I hear you - it would probably need to be cross integrated with web.archive.org in order to actually vend most results given how rapidly we are seeing bit rot.
- xnx 6y ago
  I think I read somewhere that behind-the-scenes the Google crawler is in-effect a super-archive.org, keeping a copy of every page it has crawled. This sounds outrageous, but I believe it's feasible with compression.
saurik 6y ago
Google Search does let you limit the results to old sites (though I realize this isn't quite equivalent).
- Black101 6y ago
  A time-lapse of the search algorithm is what I would like to see
  - gipp 6y ago
    Given that the set of possible searches is unbounded, first instinct is that the whole system would have had to be designed around that use case from the bottom up for the problem to be remotely tractable
    - Black101 6y ago

Finnucane 6y ago

It's like watching mold spores growing.

shortlived 6y ago

Is the data open source and available without using google earth?

devrand 6y ago
Almost certainly not. I'm fairly certain Google is licensing the imagery.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Google spun off its own satellite imagery business a while again, but retains usage rights: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/google-gets-out-of-the-satellite-business/515841/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/googl...
OrbitRock 6y ago
Pretty sure it’s just Landsat data, which is freely available. As is Sentinel, MODIS, and a number of other satellite platforms. Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).

gallegojaime 6y ago

Something cool and kinda sad to behold - the plastic greenhouses in El Ejido grow as a white blob.

keithwhor 6y ago

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 a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing.

detritus 6y ago
The only difference being that we can understand the impact we're having. And yet...
- ditegashi 6y ago
  If we REALLY understood it then maybe we would stop doing it. My bet is that we don't really get it.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    Because individual motivation and macro-behavior aren't necessity aligned, individual understanding might not be enough to changes behavior of the system as a whole. Maybe individual bacteria understand the impact they might have on a host system and are concerned about outcomes as well. 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
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > 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 I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we? In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.

log101 6y ago

I found the video unneccesserialy dramatic.

kubanczyk 6y ago
Quite bearable without sound. Nowadays I default to watching Youtube muted, unless it's music.

lastgeniusua 6y ago

anyone still believing global warming could be stopped, and more than that, stopped with capitalism?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

q_andrew 6y ago

The growth of Dubai is crazy, as well as most major Chinese cities. What are some interesting, less obvious things to look at with this feature?

Baeocystin 6y ago
Filling of the three gorges dam?
- samstave 6y ago
  Or find some of the ghost cities in China as well Rainforest everything. Singapore
q_andrew 6y ago
Also, it's too bad this doesn't go before 1980, because I'd love to see how the Mt St Helens eruption affected the landscape around it (I know there are pictures, but google maps makes it feel more hands-on)

detritus 6y ago

I want to love this, but the interface is too opaque. How on GoogleEarth do I get back the timeline option that I've somehow closed? I'm probably being an idiot, but I'm not a total idiot, and it's not at all clear to me how I access the timeline now. The "I'm feeling lucky" icon is WAY too prominent. A misclick there quickly screws whatever it was I was just looking at.

nevster 6y ago
I was totally confused by this as well. If you click the close button on the Timelapse panel, how do you get it back? The trick is to click on the Voyager icon and then choose Timelapse in one of the panels that comes up.

thrower123 6y ago

For most places, this looks to be incredibly low-resolution at present. It's still kind of interesting to watch chunks of forest that my dad clearcut twenty years ago regenerate though.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

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?

tppiotrowski 6y ago
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=3767889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767889
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  Woah, your shade map is awesome! I was playing around with it for a long time there, lol.
- ehershey 6y ago
  That shade map is awesome! Does it include buildings? (Could it, if not?) I’ve been dying for this for ages.
  - tppiotrowski 6y ago
    Including buildings in urban areas and choosing a custom date to see how shadows change over the course of the year are next on the backlog. Contact info is in my profile if you want to keep in touch.
- folli 6y ago
  Shade map is cool, which data source are you using for the height map? I've been working on something similar (link also in user profile).

macando 6y ago

Google Earth often is the most mind-blowing thing for the people who never used the Internet in their lives. I don't use it often but I have to say that it's one of the delivered promises of the Internet. It's tech done right. What an outstanding video.

rexreed 6y ago

I'd love to see a timelapse over the past 20 years showing Google's energy usage / consumption across all their data centers and offices.

lanevorockz 6y ago
Propaganda only goes one way. More power to those on the top.
meowkit 6y ago
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.
bosswipe 6y ago
Google has invested quite a bit into decarbonizing their data centers. They do a lot better than AWS for example.
jonas21 6y ago
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but it does have a timeline: https://sustainability.google/commitments https://sustainability.google/commitments And if you open the PDF at the bottom, I think it has the data you wanted.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Already had this tool for over a decade. Why did google took so long to implement it ? Anyways, better late than never.

intrasight 6y ago

Is this only in the web version? I don't see a new version of the desktop.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Do they have a version of earth VR for oculus Quest 2 yet?

samstave 6y ago
What does that mean? OoTL

neolog 6y ago

It would be much more useful for learning about climate change if the timestamp included the month instead of just the year.

Nition 6y ago
The original, downloaded version of Google Earth shows the month (and has already had a historical imagery feature for the long time). Get "Google Earth Pro" (it's still free, that's just what they call it now), go to View->Historical Imagery, and you can scrub left and right on the slider.

r34 6y ago

I predict ML models predicting how will the Earth look like in the future:) loads of fun!

fudged71 6y ago

Many of the timelapses uses images from different time of year etc so you see different hues across frames. Would it be possible to apply something like neural style transfer across the frames (from a representative frame) to smooth the colors out without changing the features in the frames?

OrbitRock 6y ago
There’s a tool called landtrendr that sort of does this, but it’s less for visualization than for analysis of trends https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE/index.html https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE/index.html
- fudged71 6y ago
  Thank you so much for this, really incredible tool. The vegetation loss visualizations are too complex for me to tweak properly. I hope there are data science journalists who are using this tool.

fudged71 6y ago

What's exciting to me is that children/students will be able to see an incredibly local and objective history of their area. As a sort of "how did I get here" perspective.

ttty 6y ago

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.

adelarsq 6y ago

Its like to watch the Earth to be destroyed. Afraid from the coming years.

slacktide 6y ago

Pretty cool. Just the other day I was using timelapse to research the history of an aircraft radio navigation aid that used to be around the corner from my house. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_radio_range https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_radio_range It had been part of the four-course radio range network, which was discontinued in the 1960s. The transmitter site was identifiable until 2006 when it was developed for housing.

theknocker 6y ago

Eat shit, corporation so evil and dystopian that it's like satire.

Nition 6y ago

Wasn't this exact feature already at https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse ? Previous discussion from eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005047 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.

ryankrage77 6y ago
What's up with the image quality over the years? Looking at my home in the UK, it's a blur in 1985, then the next image in 2003 is fairly sharp. The image quality is consistent/slightly improves from 2003 until 2014, and then from 2014 - 2017 it's a blur again. 2018 is the sharpest of all the historical images, better even than 2020.
- Nition 6y ago
  You mean in the Historical Imagery thing? Sometimes the "blur" is just taking a long time to load, and if you wait longer it'll become sharp. Other times it's just a blurry image. Some are better than others.

calylex 6y ago

What's this whole guilt shaming all about? And must the voice in the video be British and the sound of a girl on the verge of crying? Finally I don't think there is anything wrong with more farmlands in poor countries in South America. That's extremely hypocritical when the West did the same thing only a couple of hundred years ago and continues to do to this day, but oh if the poor South Americans learn how to farm on their own, the world will end. The answer to side-effects of human progress is not stopping it, it's to accelerating the growth of technology so we can mitigate the issues we create and fix the harms the cause. F*ck Google!

OrbitRock 6y ago
Well, there’s a tipping point of deforestation beyond which the Amazon rainforest might collapse.
MarkLowenstein 6y ago
Regardless of the spin put on by the video producers, the tool itself is very useful for letting people see reality, which may work to temper alarmism. If the reality is that most of the earth hasn't changed that much, then that is now available for view. And if the reality is that the Brazil rainforests really were a vast sea of dark green not long ago but are already medium-brown-looking today, then that is also now available for view. I'm curious to see people search for the growth of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". I'm pretty sure most people will be surprised to find that there is nothing to see. But I'll try it out.

halfeatenpie 6y ago

This is very fascinating and great. I mean this dataset has been available for a while know (from what I recall), but re-packaged and organized in this manner would be very useful. One thing that really stands out to me is the change in our land use/environmental changes over time. You can even see the different reservoir levels for various years and can "guesstimate" what year certain droughts were. I'm sure there's some amazing ideas to use this tool, I'm just excited about it.

amelius 6y ago

Nice, but it would be even nicer with emissions data, e.g. from ESA's Sentinel-5P satellite: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

faldore 6y ago

why they have to make it political. why not just show information without spinning it.

skeletonjelly 6y ago

Looks like it's written in web assembly too. https://earth.google.com/static/wasm/9.134.0.0/earthwasm.wasm https://earth.google.com/static/wasm/9.134.0.0/earthwasm.was...

TeeMassive 6y ago

Seeing forests disappear and Iceland's ice having less and less ice was quite saddening and eye opening.

fidesomnes 6y ago

Congrats google, most obnoxious voiceover ever.

8note 6y ago

What's keeping google earth running? I find it surprising that it hasn't been shut off and/or merged into maps years ago

tillalive 6y ago

Really? 15 years? Google earth was released in 2005?

ecommerceguy 6y ago

I remember when GE was Keyhole and we we're paying $600 a year for 1m per pixel digitalglobe imagery. Still zooms into 15th and Kasold in Lawrence on default. RCJH

arjunkava 6y ago

I really liked the presentation of the blog, it is actually making me uncomfortable and guilty.

tails4e 6y ago

Is the resolution of the images off? In my area where recent images have decent resolution, all images in time-lapse mode are very low res, including ones from. 2016, 2020.

teekert 6y ago

Does anyone know where to find this feature in Google Earth for iOS?