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.

Pangea?

[Ingolfke (515826)]

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

Re:

[creimer (824291)]

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

Re:

[Ingolfke (515826)]

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:

[superyooser (100462)]

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.

Re:

[jlf278 (1022347)]

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

Re:

[archen (447353)]

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:

[Sax Maniac (88550)]

Why bother? Pangaea is not a panacea.

Shows how old those damn satellites must be :-)

[cheros (223479)]

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:

[tocs (866673)]

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 think

Hey, Christopher!

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

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 (1024073)]

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)

today's maps will be historical

[Speare (84249)]

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:

[IflyRC (956454)]

You can get that now if you play a video of Al Gore backwards. There's also a freaky backware message. "Believe (2 second pause) in global warming. We must put earth (2 second pause) in a lock (5 second pause) box."

Re:

[c6gunner (950153)]

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 nation

Re:today's maps will be historical

[famebait (450028)]

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:

[c6gunner (950153)]

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 af

Re:

[radl33t (900691)]

No thanks, I will choose free will!

A link to Google Earth would have been useful

[by Anonymous Coward]

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

4th Spacial Dimension

[onyx00 (145532)]

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 (714389)]

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

Re:

[ludo$06 (995200)]

Where do you want to go today?

4th dimension!?

[Bananatree3 (872975)]

You think there's a 4th dimension? There is depth, height and length...count'em 3 dimensions.

Come on onyx00, get with reality.

Almost there

[sharkey (16670)]

I am SO looking forward to Google Tesseract Beta!

Medieval London here I come!

[Rik Sweeney (471717)]

I can't wait to see what London really looked like in Medieval times, the satellite imagery back then must have been... wait a second, there's not going to be any satellite imagery for back then would there? Computers hadn't been invented so what would they store the pictures on?

Silly me.

Re:

[by 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:

[Hijacked Public (999535)]

Glass plates mostly.

I'm sure dagguerotypes would handle space just fine if they could have figured out the logistics of getting them up there.

Re:

[oldave (160729)]

Papyrus

Re:Medieval London here I come!

[mikael (484)]

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 [pitt.edu] 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 [google.com] of London.

Hah!

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

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 (924575)]

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

Now what would be really cool...

[perrin (891)]

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:

[suds (6610)]

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 [nih.gov]

Re:

[Muffhead (22590)]

Try this [gearthblog.com].

Needs GE 4 to work.

Historical fun.

[B5_geek (638928)]

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.

Re:

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

... the site where my villagers researched ARMOR...

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

[Jekler (626699)]

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:

[wjsteele (255130)]

Heck, checkers would actually be a 4D game.

I think you mean that Checkers would be a 3D game (as there is no Z axis used in the game.)

Bill

Re:

[EnderGT (916132)]

Didn't see this post before I made mine. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought this way.

Re:

[EnderGT (916132)]

Actually checkers would only be 3D - there's no vertical dimension in play, really.

Re:

[EnderGT (916132)]

Picking up your pieces and moving them has no real bearing on gameplay. The entire game could be represented in two dimensions (not counting time) with no loss of playability.

Re:

[by 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

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

[chrisb33 (964639)]

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 [wikipedia.org] 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".

Wrong

[Bryansix (761547)]

Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth

Google already had 3-D models of some major cities as an option you could turn on in Google Earth. This included models of most of the sky scrapers that would really pop out on a format like the streaming GIS system that Google Earth is.

Still Waiting

[dmomo (256005)]

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

Chronoogle?

[mmalove (919245)]

Wonder what they will call this feature?

When I first read the sub. title, I thought they had superimposed some kind of 4th spacial dimension on google earth, and was thinking, why the hell would you do that?

Interesting concept they have here, and going forward it will be much cooler now that we have satellites actually photographing the earth instead of reliance on a single explorer's math skills.

Ok, the scene is ripe - bring on the nukes! We can do before and after pictures now!

Re:

[dr_dank (472072)]

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

Re:The fourth dimension has nothing to do with tim

[Per Abrahamsen (1397)]

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

Usually denoted "t"... :-)

Re:The fourth dimension has nothing to do with tim

[Doctor Crumb (737936)]

So, which one is the third dimension? X, Y, or Z? The point is how many dimensions you are using, not the order they are in.

Re:

[bcmm (768152)]

Er, in relativity gravity waves are assumed to propagate at the speed of light.

So I'm afraid your idea obviously won't work.

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

Umm... How does good and plentiful access to human knowledge and culture relate to an Orwellian vision? :-S