Yet that knowledge somehow does not get into the depths of our psyches. Globalisation is not abstract but a scientific reality that is made visible in these timelapse images of our changing world. We are now a species in space, our lives as well as the health of our planet scanned by satellites. We just use the app to check how far we are from the meeting or pub we’re trying to get to. Yet do we go around pondering this magic? No, and perhaps it even seems naive to do so. Walking down the street, I can see myself move on the screen of my phone, in a real-time, real-life link between myself and a network of satellites. If you want to experience, directly, the gap between imagination and reality, science and common sense, that threatens our ability to act rationally to save the planet, just consider your smartphone. All the images of climate change, the timelapse videos of a crumbling Earth, the crash of glaciers, don’t apparently mean anything compared with the direct experiences people have in their own neighbourhoods. Pennsylvania miners were not happy to accept that their traditional jobs were doomed for the greater good. Specifically, Barack Obama’s environmental policies have been accused of creating a “war on coal”. The new vistas on Earth opened up by Apollo 8 in 1968 may seem to have sunk into the very fabric of human consciousness, but it also seems that we can watch any number of videos of expanding cities and vanishing ice without becoming globally conscious.Įxtreme scepticism about climate change has proved a vote winner for Donald Trump. This is one of the real problems of our time. Yet, are human beings capable of assimilating such global perspectives or is our consciousness tragically limited to a pre-space age, even pre-Copernican mentality? Are people only capable of acting on immediate, personal and local concerns, even though images from space can show us the bigger picture? We can also see, in timelapse videos of Arctic ice, great glaciers melt before our eyes. We can see, in these timelapse satellite videos, how the Earth is being torn apart by human acts. History has become a car crash in speeded-up motion. We contributed this new user interface to the open-source Time Machine project, used by Carnegie Mellon and others.It induces anxiety to watch, in just a few seconds, a desert in Saudi Arabia turn into a vast agribusiness complex, a lake in Bolivia vanish or cities grow spectacularly in China. The design of the new Timelapse interface leverages Material Design with simple, clean lines and clear focal areas, so you can easily navigate the immense dataset.
Now, users can see how any part of the planet has changed between 19. There’s also a fresh Material Design look that’s been added to Google Earth Timelapse. For one, the company has added two more years worth of data to the product’s library. Chrome and Firefox reinstated support for autoplay (with sound muted), so we’ve added mobile support with this latest update.įurther, Google is making some other notable changes to Google Earth Timelapse. Up until recently, mobile browsers disabled the ability to autoplay videos, which is critical for Timelapse (since it’s made up of tens of millions of multi-resolution, overlapping videos).
![google earth time lapse tool google earth time lapse tool](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/04/earth.jpg)
Now that Chrome and Firefox have enabled auto-playing videos on mobile devices (with sound disabled, thank goodness), Google Earth Timelapse can now work properly on smartphones and tablets. Google says that Timelapse couldn’t be added before now, as mobile browsers including its own Chrome browser disabled auto-playing videos, the critical functionality that makes Timelapse work.
#Google earth time lapse tool update#
Today, an update to the tool has extended support to mobile, added more years, and given the entire thing a redesign with Material theming.įirst and foremost, today’s update to Google Earth Timelapse brings the powerful tool to smartphones and tablets. Launched back in 2013, Google Earth Timelapse has been an interesting way to look at how our planet has changed over the years.