Google's Street View Is Changing How We Understand the History of Places

Google's Street View has long offered a “time travel” feature to allow anyone to go back in time to see what a place used to look like. Of course, the service only just hit their 15 year anniversary, but new camera rigs will allow the ambitious project to go far beyond where cars can take them. Future expeditions can hike up mountains, through deserts and all sorts of other unique places.

In coming years these captured images will offer a detailed record of how places are being shaped by weather as well as how grand scale projects like The Mirror Line and Saudi Arabia's grand plans for the wildly ambitious $500B new desert city of Neom are transforming the Earth. It is a record of our planet as it is, archived for our future selves as a way to understand where we were and how it changed over time.

It's not perfect, but I would argue that it certainly deserves more attention than an addictive metaverse designed to drain our time and empty our wallets.