2006 Google Earth Census: Find people on the virtual planet
» Visit the 2006 Google Census Page [Updated on 3/13/06].
In January, I wrote a post on Google Earth in which I complained about the eerie lack of people on the virtual planet. Since then I have been alerted of human sightings on Google Earth. Derek first noticed people in Saint Peter’s Square and around Nelson’s Column. Then Rosi left a comment saying that she saw a guy playing tennis, but she didn’t remember where.
In light of these sightings, I decided to open the 2006 Google Earth Census. If you find people on Google Earth, leave a comment on my blog or send me a note with the number (or approximate number) of people and the location and any other detail you can collect. Make sure to send the Lat/Lon coordinates, so I will be able to find the exact location of the sighting.
In the next few months, I want to know how many people inhabit Google Earth, where they live, what they wear, and any other detail you learn when exploring the planet.
Update 2-17-06: Thank you for all the sightings! This is great! And thank you for the link love, too (hi, Derek!): Jeneane Sessum at Blogher, Inside Google, Manuel at MitchPeru, and Metafilter.
Update 2-18-06: I have created the 2006 Google Census Page. Continue to send sighting!
Update 4-1-06: Look at the latest unusual Google Earth Sightings.
Google Earth
I learned from Derek at PenMachine that Google finally released the Mac version of Google Earth, so I downloaded it and played with it for a while last night.
OMG! I visited Katy in California (I could even see her old red car parked outside the garage), the Google Campus in Mountain View, looked at my house (of course), went to see my sister and my mom in Rome, visited Barcelona, Spain, the Republican Palace in Bagdad and the Red Square in Moscow. I spent hours traveling the world.
Earth looks so small, so beautiful, and so one. You can hold the world on the palm of your hand and look at it in wonder. At the same time, there is something unsettling in these beautiful images. There are no people on Google Earth.
Where the resolution is higher–for example, the Google Campus–you can see cars, and even tables and chairs. But no people. It feels like the post-nuclear San Francisco portrayed in On the Beach.
So, Google Earth made me feel existential and strongly environmentalist. Please, let’s keep Earth alive. Let’s keep it full of people, animals, and plants. Let’s take good care of her and us.
In a land far far away…
On September 4, scientists observed the most distant explosion in the universe. The gamma-ray burst (a really bright and powerful explosion that happens when a huge star dies and collapses in a black hole) happened 12.6 billion light-years from Earth, which means 12.6 billion years ago, just 900 million years after the birth of our universe.
If you think of it, being able to detect something that happened 12.6 billion light-years from Earth is quite something. In an article published on Scientific American, Gehrels, Piro, and Leonard describe the effect of another gamma-ray burst that was detected in January 1999:
Though just barely visible through binoculars, it turned out to be the most brilliant explosion ever witnessed by humanity. We could see it nine billion light-years away, more than halfway across the observable universe. If the event had instead taken place a few thousand light-years away, it would have been as bright as the midday sun, and it would have dosed Earth with enough radiation to kill off nearly every living thing.
A few thousand light-years away, hu? Why do I suddenly feel so small?
No Hollywood ending (Or the unbearable fragility of the most powerful nation on Earth)
I have had a really hard time writing about Katrina. It’s hard to write about things one doesn’t understand, and there is a lot I don’t understand about what happened there before, during, and after the hurricane.
The effect of Katrina was predicted.
Why did it take so long to react?
I do not understand why it took so long to give the order to evacuate the city. There was enough information to predict accurately what a category 5 hurricane would do to New Orleans.
A seminar of the American Meteorological Society’s held in June of this year in Washington DC described how the environmental disruption of natural protection combined with the social reality of New Orleans could have caused a serious disaster and catastrophic loss of human lives if a category 4 or 5 hurricane hit the city:
Dramatic land loss currently occurring in coastal Louisiana and projections of a period of possibly more powerful hurricanes in the Atlantic basin warrant a closer look at New Orleans as a case study in resiliency, with broad-sweeping implications regarding risk, human lives, and the fate of a major coastal region. (…)
The area contains 1.6 million people below Lake Pontchartrain and I-10 to the west. Some 700,000 people evacuated in Ivan with normal times to destination not uncommonly 12 hours. Contra-flow (all lanes out) modifications now permit eight out-bound lanes. However, with no glitches, this number of lanes will be inadequate unless a large part of the population evacuates before the contra-flow is ordered (when the hurricane could be as far away as the Florida Keys). The roads simply cannot handle the traffic otherwise.
In addition, poverty-induced households without cars (estimated at 57,000 households) are anticipated to bear the brunt of the casualties, with statistics of a possible 60,000+ dead in a category 4 or 5 storm. Use of public and private mass transport means buses, Amtrak, cruise ships, river boats (the latter two both going up river) is being considered and negotiated with each entity. Inland shelters to house such an exodus and the required early departure that would be necessary to reduce the risk of the vehicles/vessels being trapped in the storm put incredible constraints on mass transit options.
A report of the LSU hurricane center maps the areas that would be flooded in New Orleans and Baton Rouge during a category 2 or 3 hurricane and adds that “The situation deteriorates rapidly if Category 4 and 5 storms are considered. Any single storm can easily flood broad areas of both parishes to depths over land of 10 feet or more.”
In 2003 article on Civil Engineering Magazine, Greg Brouwer summarizes why the levee system in New Orleans would fail in a category 4 or 5 hurricane:
The design of the original levees, which dates to the 1960s, was based on rudimentary storm modeling that, it is now realized, might underestimate the threat of a potential hurricane. Even if the modeling was adequate, however, the levees were designed to withstand only forces associated with a fast-moving hurricane that, according to the National Weather Service’s Saffir-Simpson scale, would be placed in category 3. If a lingering category 3 storm—or a stronger storm, say, category 4 or 5—were to hit the city, much of New Orleans could find itself under more than 20 ft (6 m) of water.
In the 40 years since the design criteria were established for New Orleans’s hurricane protection levees, southeastern Louisiana’s coastline has been subsiding—settling in on top of itself—even as the natural height of the sea rises. A century ago any hurricane heading toward New Orleans would have had to traverse a 50 mi (80 km) buffer of marshland. Today that marsh area is only half as broad and the hurricane would be striking a city that itself sinks lower every day.
In the same article, Brouwer predicts what would happen to New Orleans after the storm:
Experts say a flood of this magnitude would probably shut down the city’s power plants and water and sewage treatment plants and might even take out its drainage system. The workhorse pumps would be clogged with debris, and the levees would suddenly be working to keep water in the city. Survivors of the storm—humans and animals alike—would be sharing space on the crests of levees until the Corps could dynamite holes in the structures to drain the area. In such a scenario, the American Red Cross estimates that between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die.
The real meaning of “mandatory evacuation”
It took quite a while for me to understand that the “mandatory evacuation” orderd by New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin really meant “people who can leave should do it now, those who are too poor or sick to leave stay.” In my european naivete, I imagined hundreds of trains and buses gathering to New Orleans and other areas threatened by the storm, ready to move people to shelters already set up to support the evacuation, in an impressive demonstration of the american initiative, strength, and organization.
Nothing happened. Who had a car and money started to leave slowly and so many stayed or were left behind, hoping it wouldn’t be so bad. After all, the Superdome would have kept them safe.
Why so slow and disorganized?
Katrina was bad, but what happened afterwards was much worse. Why it is taking so long to rescue people? It is hard to watch people waiting for days on a rooftop or trapped at the Convention center. It’s unbearable to see people who survived the storm dying because of the conditions they had to live after the storm was long gone. As much as some people can be disturbed by the looters and the angry, what drills a hole in my heart is the sense of betrayal impressed on the face of the people who are waiting to be rescued.
As much as we laugh at the cliches of Hollywood’s action movies, for once I would have wanted to see a Hollywood ending: the hero arrives, just in time, and saves the city. The rescuers overcome all the dangers and are finally here to bring water, food, and comfort. Nobody dies (except the bad guys of course).
Instead, nobody arrived. People started to get sick and die, and the others had to watch helplessly. We were all watching helplessly: the bodies in the water, the corpses in wheelchairs and the daily realization that New Orleans (not Darfur, not Banda Aceh) had become hell on Earth. (read today’s New York Time’s articles on the aftermath of the hurricane: here , here, and Paul Krugman’s OpEd)
In a country that can go to war so rapidly, has dreams of martian explorations, and wants to be the most powerful superpower in the world, the inability to take care of its own citizens is startling. Our president said that the United States don’t need help to deal with this catastrophe, but I have the impression that the people of New Orleans who are dying waiting for help that does not arrive would beg to differ.
The lonely universe
About 100 billion years from now, all but the closest of galaxies will be dragged away by the swelling space at faster-than-light speed and so would be impossible for us to see, regardless of the power of telescopes used. If these ideas are right, then in the far future the universe will be a vast, empty, and lonely space.
This is Brian Green talking about the predictions of the inflationary theory on the future of the universe in The Fabric of the Cosmos
As a science fiction freak, reading the Fabric of Cosmos is a depressing experience. I really had high hopes for the universe. I believed one day we would travel all over the cosmos, meet other intelligent life forms, and expand our horizons. But scientists are discovering that we are really just a small group of living things in a universe that is too big and expanding too fast for us to go anywhere. And if you just wait 100 billion years more, we won’t even have a universe around us to enjoy.
The democratic dream of space travel for all, even in clunky starships a la StarWars is just not materializing. After we went to the moon a few times, manned space exploration went pretty much downhill. Sure, we have satellites junking up space, a international space station that is too hard to service, and we sent a bunch of probes to Mars. But space travel for humans is still too expensive and too dangerous.
Think about the Space Shuttle. Two years after the Columbia accident, the Discovery had first problems with the fuel sensors that delayed lift-off, then a piece of insulating foam hit the ship. Eileen Collins, US first female spacecraft commander, declared: “We were actually quite surprised to hear that we had some large pieces of debris fall off the external tank, it wasn’t what we had expected. Frankly, we were disappointed to hear that had happened.” So far, 4% of the people sent into space have been killed in accidents; NASA’s estimated rate of catastrophic failure for the Space Shuttle is two flights in 113, or 1 in 57.
We have not discovered how to speed faster than light into hyperspace or how to use the improbability drive. Sorry, folks, I think we are stuck on Earth. Let’s take good care of it.
Technorati tags: Brian Green, cosmology, universe, Space Shuttle
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