Discovery Earth

I discovered the absolute joy of Google Earth yesterday in the midst of a generally terrible day. It was my light in hard times. The program is seriously incredible - I can't believe I'd never actually downloaded it or at least heard some nerd talking about the wonder of its programming or something. You literally open it and immediately you've got your own globe in front of you, waiting to be zoomed in upon to 1,000,000,000x or so. For crying out loud, you can zoom in from tens of thousands of miles down to a thousand feet. The notion seems absurd, but with all of our technology it seems almost commonplace.

I found my old Houston schools and where we went on our summer Hawaii vacation, before searching Austin town, finding my dorm and my window in the 3D application that allows for the UT campus to stand up like a rotatable pop-up book. Additionally, by pinpointing the International School of Aberdeen, I located all of the points of interest I recall while living in Scotland. There's our roof. There's the ditch behind our house we'd play in when it snowed. There's the playground by the bus stop. Then of course, a little ways away, there's our school - the recess area, the little patch of trees where one day several of my friends took on a number of nasty wasp stings. Finally, I devoted some time to sight-seeing around the globe. It's quite an enjoyable program for anyone with a definite thirst for adventure without the resolve to actually leave the home.

The whole system makes me a bit fearful about issues of privacy though, with these superpowered satellites stationed around the globe. I don't see how we can have so many fugitives that we can't find when we can spot people from space, using FREE Internet software. Rest assured, government, I have nothing, and no one, to hide - in case you're just as closely monitoring the blogosphere (which would be pretty much useless) - but I'd like to think that I could escape to some haven if you guys ever wanted to have me killed. It really is incredible technology though. I'm constantly amazed at new scientific as well as Google innovations - I eagerly look forward to the release of Google Space sometime in the near future.