Sunday, April 28, 2013

Google Earth resolution

xkcd by Randall Munroe. The "title-text" at the actual webcomic has an additional GPS-related joke in it:

2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying the 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'.

I think the flaw here is that humans can't actually look at the Earth at Plank Length resolution.  We are actually at least a dozen orders of magnitude away from being able to detect things that small in any way as this wonderful interactive tool shows.  So we're probably much closer tot hat intersection than this graph indicates.  Professionally I've already worked with 2-inch resolution imagery and that was at least 5 years ago.



No comments:

Post a Comment