Google Earth In 4D

Rockgod writes to tell us about Google Earth's latest expansion. From the article: "Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today." I suppose a link to Earth4 would have been good.

Comments

Pangea?

[Ingolfke]

Where's pangea? Come on Google... get with the program.

Re:Pangea?

[__aaclcg7560]

That would be upsetting the Intelligent Designers. Haven't you heard? The Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Re:Pangea?

[jlf278]

Totally lame, the Paleozoic Era was a geological snooze-fest. Call me when they get some decent Big Bang maps up.

Re:Pangea?

[Sax Maniac]

Why bother? Pangaea is not a panacea.

Re:Pangea?

[archen]

Actually that wouldn't be to hard. Get two of the brightest flashlights you can find, then stick them right up to your eye sockets. Wherever you look it should be the same blinding light.

Re:Pangea?

[Ingolfke]

Not all intelligent design people believe that that Earth is young. The basic premise of Intelligent Design is that the universe is too complex for it to just have happened... that doesn't speak to who or how it was created or how long it happened to take.

Either way though... they should probably have a checkbox for users to select which theory they believe in (young earth or old) and then if they select "young" they can get a nice error message.

Re:Pangea?

[superyooser]

It's not upsetting at all. I took Google Earth back to 3760 BC and confirmed that dry land did not appear until Day 3.

Shows how old those damn satellites must be :-)

[cheros]

It's going to be interesting how the usual historical inaccuracies are dealt with, including moving river deltas and/or later removal of objects such as the British Echelon site, Menwith Hill :-)

Re:Shows how old those damn satellites must be :-)

[tocs]

I think it will be interesting to see how the usual historic inaccuracies will be dealt with.

I recently spent several months looking over historic maps around Newark Bay in New Jersey. Most of what we looked at came from NOAA and while I have a great deal of confidence in the abilities of the mapmakers, there are still many issues having to do with datums and resolution that I never thought about before I started working with historic maps. When you deal with charts and maps you really have to start thinking about things like accuracy verses precision.

Here are a couple interesting documents about the accuracy of charts
Behind the Accuracy of Electronic Charts--What Every Mariner Should Know about Electronic and Paper Charts
Chart Accuracy

Hey, Christopher!

[Rob T Firefly]

It turns out we can't get to India that way. Whew, thank goodness we didn't waste an insanely long and difficult journey just to come back and look stupid in front of Queen Isabella.

well

[thejrwr]

wow, the dev team for google sure must be having fun, i mean come on, when you PAID to make new features when ever you want, no wonder working for google is a prized job (I'm only 10, if my grammer is bad, well oh well)

Re:well

[Plutonite]

It is illegal for 10 yo to post on slashdot. Leave quickly!

today's maps will be historical

[Speare]

I was thinking the other day about this. As new photos become available on Google Earth, the old ones will be removed... or pushed back in time, just like a CVS repository. A hundred years from now, you'd be able to walk the repository backwards and watch the suburbs shrink, the global waters recede, the forests regrow and the ice shelves stitch themselves together. (No guarantees expressed or implied.) Of course, Google would be one of those stodgy old companies that you wonder why they didn't implode in the nanostock scandals of 2065, but I digress.

Re:today's maps will be historical

[radl33t]

No thanks, I will choose free will!

Re:today's maps will be historical

[c6gunner]

Won't happen. While there have been numerous hiccups on our way through history, human progression hasn't ever seen any massive reversion. Even if the US and most of the western world gets wiped out by Islamic savagery, their society would become more liberal eventualy, and in the meantime you'd have countries like China to pick up the slack. I know it's not much comfort to you, but even if our society dies out, many of our ideals and most of our technological accomplishments will live on in other nations.

Re:today's maps will be historical

[famebait]

The "darkness" of the dark ages is severely exaggerated. True, the loss central power resulted in a lot of warring that had previously been confined to the outer frontiers of the empire, but most of the other "bad things" about it were equally present in roman society. The roman empire was not as enlightened and civilized a time as many seem to think. Their great strength was in military strategy and administration, but there was very little technological and philosophical progress (compared to its duration) from what the greeks already had. In fact the middle ages were much more productive in that department.

Re:today's maps will be historical

[c6gunner]

You see, that's my point. When Rome fell things got worse for a while, but their technology, their teachings, their culture, even their political system, all of it either continued to be used or was preserved and reused later. In modern times, there wouldn't even be any dark ages because it would require the destruction of not just the US, but also Canada, Australia, all of Europe, and much of Asia. No matter what, human-kind will continue marching upwards. There's only a few things that could really affect us as a race, and that's either global nuclear warfare, massive change in solar activity, or getting hammered by a really big asteroid.

A link to Google Earth would have been useful

[Anonymous Coward]

http://earth.google.com/earth4.html

4th Spacial Dimension

[onyx00]

I would have been more impressed if Google had been able to achieve the 4th spacial dimension.

Come on Google, I thought you guys were "innovators"

Re:4th Spacial Dimension

[MountainMan101]

They couldn't. The 4th spacial dimension is encumbered with patent rights. Only Microsoft and/or Novell customers can use it.

Re:4th Spacial Dimension

[ludo$06]

Where do you want to go today?

Almost there

[sharkey]

I am SO looking forward to Google Tesseract Beta!

Hah!

[MyLongNickName]

I tried to go back to 7000 BC, and didn't see anything. You scientist types can try to explain this one away, but we all know what it REALLY means.

Re:Hah!

[ronanbear]

Yeah. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was obscuring the camera as a practical joke on creationists.

Re:Medieval London here I come!

[Anonymous Coward]

They flung the more unpopular scribes and cartographers into the air with "Ye Olde Upsee-Daisy Catapulte" and told them to relate what they saw. Apparently, much like in today's office space, these critical documents were plagued by output errors.

Re:So I can assume

[dr_dank]

I hope they offer driving directions to the "Here be dragons" area.

Now what would be really cool...

[perrin]

I wish Google Earth would add the ability to go really far back in time, and see what the Earth (probably) looked like in prehistoric times. Always wanted to watch the movement of the tectonic plates in fast forward on my own PC...

Re:Now what would be really cool...

[suds]

I realised i went too far back when I noticed this in my bedroom...
http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/newspub/apr01rpt/Apr01gif/ ANDi-monkey.gif

Re:Now what would be really cool...

[Muffhead]

Try this.

Needs GE 4 to work.

Re:The fourth dimension has nothing to do with tim

[Per Abrahamsen]

> The fourth dimension has nothing to do with time. It's another plane that intersects X, Y, and Z.

Usually denoted "t"... :-)

Historical fun.

[B5_geek]

This would be a fun way for history teachers to teach. Imagine Google "Points of Interest":

Jack The Ripper victoms in olde London.
Ghangis Khan/Alexander the Great conquest & warpath
Marco Polo route to the East
Or my personal favorite; combine this data with the Geneology Project to map out the paths that early humans took out of Africa.

If it's not spatial it's not 4D

[Jekler]

The idea of time as a 4th dimension has been propagated erroneously. People who have no concept of the significance of a 4th dimension have grabbed hold of this concept and ride it into the ground.

Under the definition that time is a 4th dimension, Guild Wars, Quake, Morrowind, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2... they would all have the appearance of being a 4D games. Heck, checkers would actually be a 4D game.

Furthermore, spatial dimensions are interchangeable. Width/Height/Depth are all the same thing and only have meaning in relation to the others. Time is not interchangeable with the 3 known spatial dimensions. You can't have an object composed of x, y, t and still have the same dimensions as an x, y, z object. (3ft x 3ft x 3s) doesn't mean the same thing as (3ft x 3ft x 3ft)

Things do not sound inherently cooler by calling them 4D. Web 2.0 has brought with it many things, but a 4th dimension is not one of them. I'd rant some more but my 4D microwave has finished cooking my 4D hotpocket, and I need to grab that sucker before the 4th dimension causes it to be misshapen with lost heat!

Re:If it's not spatial it's not 4D

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea of time as a 4th dimension has been propagated erroneously.

Minkowski would like a word with you. You seem to have missed the point of relativity.

Time is not interchangeable with the 3 known spatial dimensions.

In relativity, space and time are unified into one 4-dimensional spacetime. You can always tell the difference between a spacelike interval and a timelike interval, but diffferent observers disagree on what specifically "the time dimension" is: a purely temporal separation according to one observer can be partly temporal and partly spatial to another observer. This is known as the "relativity of simultaneity". Mathematically, there is no unique way of slicing 4D spacetime into 3D space + 1D time; there are infinitely many ways of doing so, each corresponding to a different observer.

Re:If it's not spatial it's not 4D

[chrisb33]

While I agree that 4D is being used more as a buzzword than anything else, time is in fact considered as a fourth dimension in physics. You can look at special relativity if you want to understand how time and the spatial dimensions can be "interchanged":

In the geometry of special relativity, a fourth dimension, time, is added, with units of c, so that the equation for the differential of distance becomes:
ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^2 - c^2 dt^2
If we wished to make the time coordinate look like the space coordinates, we could treat time as imaginary: x4 = ict . In this case the above equation becomes symmetric:
ds^2 = dx_1^2 + dx_2^2 + dx_3^2 + dx_4^2

Special relativity goes on to say that you can exchange time and spatial coordinates using the Lorentz transform, which preserves the length of the 4D position vector.

If the special relativity example seems too bizarre, just think in terms of locating an event. If I wanted you to come to my party, I would tell you 4 pieces of info - the x,y,z, and t coordinates of the party. Each of these degrees of freedom is a dimension.


What's much more annoying to me are the "4D" shows that are 3D plus some user interaction (getting water shot at you or something like this). That is a misuse of "4D".

Re:Medieval London here I come!

[mikael]

They may not have had satellite imagery, but many artists and painters were hired to draw maps and paintings of the city to precise scale in perspective view.

Here is a supersized scan of a medieval map of London from the 1600's. Using some projective texture mapping/morphing, it should be possible to place this map on top of the Google maps of London.

Still Waiting

[dmomo]

For the "Earth is Flat" Version. Oh, wait. maps.google.com