The Untold Story of Google Earth
How a 3D mirror of our world became an accidental time machine—and what happens when it starts to predict our future. 🌎→🔮
Just launched my 33-min documentary: "The Untold Story of Google Earth."
The origin story is wilder and more impactful than most people realize. From $800/year enterprise software to a free tool that saved 4,000 lives during Hurricane Katrina, reunited lost families, and discovered entirely new ecosystems.
After two decades of breakthroughs in photogrammetry, street view, and satellite imagery, Google Earth is now evolving again. Generative AI is turning this digital twin into a planetary prediction engine — a virtual crystal ball.
I had the privilege of interviewing Rebecca Moore (Former Director) and Matt Hancher (Director of Engineering) to uncover the full 20-year journey ⤵️
Full Transcript: Video Essay + Interviews
Google Earth just turned 20, but few people know the origin story.
March 2003, a war begins. And for the first time in history, millions watch it unfold on a 3D globe, zooming into Baghdad on live television. Maps had never moved like this before.
Rebecca Moore: It was kind of stunning. It was fantastic. And second hand, I heard later from the Keyhole team that their servers almost crashed.
CNN saw revolutionary reporting, but the founders of Google saw the future of search itself. Not 10 blue links, but a living, breathing planet you could browse just like the internet. Two years later, Google put the entire world on our screens for free. Suddenly, this tech went from war rooms to living rooms. Anyone could fly from space to their streets in seconds.
Rebecca Moore: I opened it up and I was like, "Oh my God, this is the answer."
We thought we were building the ultimate map. Turns out we built a mirror instead. After four years inside Google's Geo team, I've watched this mirror evolve into something else entirely. We're not just mapping the world anymore, we're mapping ourselves. This is the 20-year journey of Google Earth and how this mirror is turning into a crystal ball.
Chapter 1: Sci-fi Spy Tech → Gift to the World
The idea came from science fiction. In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the protagonist uses a software program called Earth, a perfectly detailed rendition of planet Earth. What was fiction in 1992 became Keyhole EarthViewer in 2001.
Matt Hancher: The intelligence agencies of the world had had access to versions of this kind of technology for a long time. That's where the original capability, of course, for imaging the Earth from space had come from. But even those tools, they were designed for professionals, they were a little cumbersome. This was really the first time, even for them, that anyone with no special training could walk up to a computer, pick any place in the world, fly there, and see what it looks like and understand what's happening there, understand how it's been changing.
Rebecca Moore: It has all the satellite imagery, you can annotate it with your own data, it has all the roads. This is going to be the magic platform for us.
Keyhole was a revelation. News media and the intelligence community saw the potential immediately, but this glimpse of the future came with a hefty price tag.
Rebecca Moore: When I first experimented with Keyhole, it was $800 a year. At the start as Keyhole, it was a commercial product. They were a startup, they were selling it to the government and to real estate.
Bilawal Sidhu: Keyhole was bleeding money, burning through venture capital. They needed customers fast. But in Mountain View, the founders of a then four-year-old company called Google saw something bigger than breaking news and tools of war. They saw the future of search itself.
Rebecca Moore: Larry and Sergey had seen, Megan Smith had seen the CNN use of Earth. And at that time, they were already aware that a significant proportion of searches that people were doing on the web related to a geographic location. And they thought we should have a geo-browser that would let you search and explore information about the world in the context of a digital representation of the physical world. And that was the original idea for the acquisition, to create a geo-browser.
Bilawal Sidhu: Now with Google's resources behind them, the mission exploded in scope. This scrappy startup was about to get their first lesson in what Google scale truly meant.
Rebecca Moore: Brian McClendon and John Hanke were pitching to Larry and Sergey. At that time, Keyhole only had high-resolution imagery for the US. The rest of the world they did not. So Brian asked Larry, is it possible maybe if you acquire us, we could afford to get imagery for Europe? And Larry was like, "Well, how many square kilometers are there in the whole world?" Back of the envelope. "How much are you paying per square kilometer?" Back of the envelope. "Let's just do the whole world."
Bilawal Sidhu: Think bigger.
Rebecca Moore: Yes, that was like, think Google scale.
Bilawal Sidhu: And think bigger they did. In June 2005, Google Earth with perhaps the most extensive collection of geospatial imagery was released to the public for free, getting billions of downloads over the coming years. The first thing people did in Google Earth wasn't to go look at the pyramids or explore the Amazon, it was to zoom in and see the roof over their own head. But it didn't stop there. Earth quickly became a cultural phenomenon, both a tool and a toy. People weren't just using it to plan trips and check directions. They were hunting for mysteries, creating a crowdsourced catalog of oddities visible from space.
Matt Hancher: Occasionally when the satellite is taking a photograph, there will happen to be an airplane flying below at the exact same time. Incredible rare event that's fun to spot them.
Bilawal Sidhu: Some discoveries were quirky, like these rainbow-colored planes caught between satellite bands. But others changed lives forever.
Matt Hancher: One of the stories that is most powerful for me about how people can use Google Earth to make discoveries is a story that was powerful enough to others that they made a whole movie about it called Lion. This is about a boy who was separated in India from his family when he was a very young child, ultimately had a new life somewhere else, had always been curious about the family he left behind. And 25 years later, he learns about Google Earth and realizes that he can use these capabilities to go back and start to piece together, oh, here are landmarks that I recognize. He had to scour the entire country trying to piece together where he had come from and ultimately was able to reconnect with his biological mother in real life.
Bilawal Sidhu: Stories like Saroo showed the power of connecting personal memories to the map. But what if you could add your own data, your own stories directly on the globe for anyone to see? Earth made that possible with a simple but revolutionary tool, KML, or Keyhole Markup Language, essentially turning the globe into a canvas for anyone to paint on.
Chapter 2: Katrina – First Real-World Test
Bilawal Sidhu: And then Hurricane Katrina happened, becoming the first real-world test of what you can do when you have a shared picture of the globe.
Rebecca Moore: My first week as a Googler was when Katrina hit. And the Google Earth team was turned upside down. Eric Schmidt came down my second day and he said to the team, "Whatever your OKRs were, whatever you were planning to work on, forget that. If you can save lives in this Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, that's what you should be focused on. And I'm really proud of you." He gave the team a pep talk. Because there were so many dynamic changes going on of flooding happening and levees bursting and people stuck on roofs of stadiums and it was completely chaotic. And this aerial imagery was like a gold mine of information for the first responders. Then the team created a parallel database of imagery that was for this New Orleans imagery that was coming in every hour. They set up in New Orleans an emergency response center, and they were all using Google Earth. They would enter in Google Earth 123 Smith Street, it would fly them there, they would see the imagery that was collected an hour ago. They would have situational awareness on, okay, where could a helicopter go and pick up their grandparents? And they would then call the lat/long from Google Earth to the helicopter. The Coast Guard called us and left a message that using Google Earth, they saved the lives of more than 4,000 people.
Bilawal Sidhu: For the first time, evacuees could see the state of their homes from hundreds of miles away. Rescue teams could spot down power lines and chart new paths. Vague pleas for help suddenly turned into precise coordinates for a helicopter pilot. The geo-browser built for planning vacations had suddenly become an indispensable lifeline.
Rebecca Moore: Now it became clear that it was a profound tool with humanitarian applications and environmental applications that no one had realized.
Bilawal Sidhu: Google Earth became a mainstay, with enterprise versions going on to power everything from the Department of Defense to NASA. Even President George Bush liked to use "the Google" to fly over his ranch.
(Archival audio of George W. Bush): I'm curious, have you ever Googled anybody? Do you use Google? Uh, occasionally. And one of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. And it's very interesting to see... I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can... like I kind of like to look at the ranch. Remind me of where I want to be sometimes.
Bilawal Sidhu: Of course, it wasn't just for looking at your own ranch. World leaders began to see its powers to tell stories about entire nations.
Matt Hancher: After I had come to Google, we were working on using tools like Google Earth around issues like climate change. And so we were at a UN climate change conference. This was towards the end of President Calderón's tenure as President of Mexico. We would bring these 360 wrap-around Google Earth experiences to conferences at the time. And so we were going to use that with him. And he spent the next half an hour just holding court, much to the consternation of his entourage, telling stories about his own personal life, flying of course like everyone does, to see his own childhood home and places of interest. Watching him refuse to leave was a wonderful signal for me of the potency of this technology.
Chapter 3: Building a 3D Mirror World
Bilawal Sidhu: But draping imagery of the world on a globe wasn't enough. Google wanted to build something bigger, a 3D digital twin of the entire planet, a mirror world, if you will. And that started in an unusual way: getting the world to draw the world in 3D. In 2006, Google acquired SketchUp, allowing users to build their own 3D building models and populate this virtual globe.
Matt Hancher: Of course, the major landmarks were things that people would model first. And there were certain places in the world where there happened to be a community of very passionate creators who would spend a lot of time modeling that particular neighborhood because they were proud of it and wanted to share it with the world and they would contribute it.
Bilawal Sidhu: Street View came along in 2007, adding a much-needed ground-level perspective, but the 3D buildings were still being built by hand. This community-created world was charming and personal, but it could never scale to the entire planet. To build a true mirror world, Google needed to automate, and the solution was a technology that's very close to my heart: photogrammetry. I'd get to work on this very team years later at Google, and it was the key that unlocked our ability to map entire cities in 3D at a previously unimaginable scale.
Matt Hancher: So as we were hitting the point where that was really not scaling, that was also around the same time that the automated processing that could take multiple views of every building in a city, for example, and reconstruct the entire 3D structure in great detail, that was becoming real. And that technology just keeps getting better and better.
Bilawal Sidhu: The result was a seamless 3D rendition of the world stitched together from billions of aerial and satellite imageries. And from high on above, the system was designed to always pick the clearest, most vibrant pixels, creating a world of perpetual springtime. This massive data appetite required a fleet to match, expanding from Street View cars on the ground to airplanes in the sky, zigzagging across cities around the world to capture it in glorious 3D. And the result of all this technology wasn't just a map, it was a stage.
Rebecca Moore: The next era for Earth was it's a storytelling product. You can create beautiful narratives that play out over time, you know, in Earth.
Bilawal Sidhu: With a photorealistic 3D canvas of the planet at their fingertips, storytellers and journalists began to use Earth in amazing ways, from Hollywood blockbusters to groundbreaking investigative reports. TV shows like 24 and CSI used it. The New York Times used the 3D imagery behind Google Earth to recreate the Maui wildfires. And NBC used it for their amazing coverage of the Winter Olympics, and the results were awe-inspiring. But let me tell you, automatically reconstructing the world isn't always perfect.
Matt Hancher: One of the things people like to do is find weird things in Google Earth imagery and talk about them, you know, in internet forums and other places. So for example, there will be places where the way we built the 3D terrain has some huge spike in it. And if you're coming from a background in that sort of data processing, that's obviously just a bug, that was a mistake. But if you don't happen to have that background, it's easy to look at that and say, "Oh my goodness, I've found an incredible pyramid. What does this mean? How have archaeologists never spoken about this before?"
Bilawal Sidhu: Matt, why are you hiding the Alaska bases? Come on.
Matt Hancher: Exactly. Atlantis has got to be in the imagery somewhere.
Bilawal Sidhu: But with the 3D model of the land on Earth, the mirror was incomplete. As Sylvia Earle reminded the team, two-thirds of the planet was still unaccounted for.
Rebecca Moore: John Hanke was at an awards ceremony, and he was there with Dr. Sylvia Earle, who is a noted oceanographer. And as John was getting the award for Google Earth, she said, "You know, we really like Google Earth. I mean, it's a great product, but you're missing the ocean. You call it Google Earth, but it's really Google Land. And sometimes we call it Google Dirt. When are you going to add the ocean?" And that was very striking for John. And he came back from that and he said, "All right, we have to be able to go under the ocean now. You have to be able to dive under the ocean." So we did. We built Google Ocean.
Bilawal Sidhu: After mapping the land and sea, there was only one frontier left to cross. The same technology used to build a mirror of our world would soon be pointed towards others.
Matt Hancher: It was originally the Lunar X Prize, and then Larry got involved, and then it was the Google Lunar X Prize. He wanted Google to get involved in helping promote the announcement, and so they realized the best thing Google could do would be to take what we had been doing with Google Maps and Google Earth and bring that to the Moon and Mars as well. I had gotten tapped on the NASA side to lead that partnership to prepare the Moon and Mars imagery for use in, originally, a 2D version of Google Moon, and then we went on to build 3D versions of Google Moon and Google Mars as well.
Bilawal Sidhu: To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Google worked directly with astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, creating this guided tour that brought the lunar surface to life, complete with 3D views, panoramic photos, and historical footage.
Chapter 4: Crowdsourcing Truth: Earth as Evidence
Bilawal Sidhu: Mapping the moon and Mars was a monumental achievement, but the mirror's most profound impact wasn't in reflecting other worlds, but rather in how it forced us to see our own more clearly.
Rebecca Moore: It's like tune in to channel Earth and it's all there. And it is crowdsourced too. Google's giving the best possible 3D, 4D base map of the globe and then people are annotating it collaboratively. I remember Peter Gabriel, the world musician, came and visited us and he's like, "It's incredible, Rebecca, you've created a whole new global consciousness."
Bilawal Sidhu: And just like that, there were a billion witnesses to everything happening on the surface of the globe. The truth could no longer hide, and answers were just waiting to be found.
Rebecca Moore: What I learned subsequently is many busy politicians, policymakers, decision-makers, they don't have hours to read some deep 200-page document that you painstakingly put together that defends some point of view. In Google Earth, you can show them in seconds what's wrong. They can see it with their own eyes and they're persuaded.
Bilawal Sidhu: Rebecca Moore discovered this firsthand when a deep-pocketed logging operation threatened her community.
Rebecca Moore: A local water company and a logging company sent a notice in the mail to 2,000 residents of the Santa Cruz Mountains, including me, with a terrible, grainy, black and white, sketchy map. And the map was labeled "Notice of intent to harvest timber." So I remapped it over the weekend. People were like, "Should we be worried? What is it going to be?" And I said, "Listen, I'll show you." Flew in from outer space and then I turned on the KML I created that showed the swath of logging, you know, six miles long, everywhere it was going to go. Everyone gasped. And eventually, long story short, we actually used Google Earth to prove the plan was illegal. We stopped it, and now it's being set up for permanent protection as an open space park.
Bilawal Sidhu: Earth became a source of evidence. People were suddenly empowered to drive real change, including some unexpected allies from Hollywood.
Rebecca Moore: Then one day I'm sitting at my desk, you know, at Google, and the phone rings and it's like, "Rebecca, this is Woody." Like, the Woody? He's like, "Yeah, Woody Harrelson." I'm like, "What can I do for you, Woody?" He said, "Great job on stopping the logging of the redwoods. I love that. Could you help us on another project? We're struggling in, you know, West Virginia and Kentucky with Appalachian mountaintop removal. They're blowing up the tops of these mountains and they're destroying communities and poisoning rivers and... The only way you can appreciate the scale of all of these mountains being destroyed is from the air. And so like once a year, we fly a politician over. But could we use Google Earth to show people what's at stake and what's happening?"
Bilawal Sidhu: Earth didn't just expose environmental issues. It revolutionized investigative journalism through open-source intelligence or OSINT. When Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was shot down, it was ordinary citizens using Google Earth who traced the missile launcher's path. Bellingcat turned Google Earth into a lie detector for the internet age, cross-referencing shadows, building heights, and historical imagery to verify where photos were actually taken. The same tool that helped us find our childhood homes now helped us find the truth, exposing fake news and war crimes alike. The monopoly on truth was broken. But Earth wasn't just exposing lies, it was revealing secrets nature had hidden for millennia. You think in the 21st century everything on the planet would have been discovered? Think again.
Rebecca Moore: People were tuning in to like new imagery releases in Earth. People would just go nuts over it, Browse it. And it turned out there was a ecologist in Australia who discovered a previously unknown fringing coral reef off the coast of Western Australia. And the reason it was very significant was that area was just at that time being proposed for oil and gas development. And because of this unique, rare type of coral reef, that stopped it. And there are parts of Mozambique that at that time were somewhat war-torn. There was very little known by conservation biologists about what was there. But Julian Bayliss was using Google Earth virtually to explore Mozambique and see if there was anything that might be of conservation interest. And he discovered this mountain, and on this mountain was a beautiful forest that had never been studied before, had never had explorers go there. And so they went and they discovered new species of chameleon, snake, butterflies, you know, that had never been known before. And now they call it the Google Forest.
Bilawal Sidhu: This newfound superpower wasn't just for scientists or activists in the developed world. It was a tool that could be placed directly in the hands of those on the front lines of deforestation, like the Suruí tribe in the Amazon. They didn't just see a map, they saw a shield.
Rebecca Moore: In 2007, I was just doing my job and someone said, "Hey, there's an Amazon Indian chief that wants to come meet with you." And it turned out it was Chief Almir Suruí, who was the young chief of a tribe. He had stumbled on Google Earth. Now, the thing about his people's territory was it was being invaded by illegal loggers. They were defending those places, but in Google Earth, he could see other places of remote parts of the territory that he had not even realized were being invaded. His father had been a famous chief before him and had driven off loggers, illegal loggers with a bow and arrow. Chief Almir, his son, came back to him and said, "I think the time has come to put down the bow and arrow and pick up the laptop."
Chapter 5: Living Dashboard for the Planet
Bilawal Sidhu: The mirror Google had built was getting clearer and more detailed every year. But by constantly updating it, they had accidentally built something else entirely: a time machine, a literal Wayback Machine for the physical world.
Matt Hancher: When we were first making Google Maps and Earth, we began collecting satellite imagery in order to help us make that map of the world. And you would go to Google Earth and you would see the freshest version. But over time, we would have the version that we had last year and the version we had the year before that. And so suddenly we realized we were sitting on this incredible archive of historical imagery that wasn't accessible to anyone but us because we were always just showing the freshest. That really was a big part of the impetus behind building the historical imagery feature. Once it was there, we started thinking about how can we also build out the back catalog in interesting ways, even bringing in World War II era reconnaissance photography where it's available and things like that.
Bilawal Sidhu: And that's actually wild because in places like London, Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris, you can even explore imagery from as far back as the 1930s. But to truly bring this time machine to life, Google built a literal time-lapse of the entire planet: 20 petabytes of imagery compiled into a single 4.4-terapixel video, a resolution equivalent of playing over half a million 4K videos at once. This unprecedented god-like view revealed patterns that had been invisible to the human eye.
Rebecca Moore: Timelapse, I think is a cool example of a project that's both technologically really innovative, first of its kind, and also missionary, it has a purpose. The very neat thing about it is while as a user you're sort of zooming in and flying around, the earth is animating under you from 1984 to 2020. And it's landscape-level change. You're going to see phenomena that people could never appreciate really before, like the Columbia Glacier retreating 12 miles during that period, ice caps melting, Las Vegas growing while Lake Mead was shrinking. There was a sustainability story right there that like as it was growing, the water source was shrinking and that's an issue of sustainability for urban areas in many parts of the world. There was a lot of climate change that you could see with your own eyes. One reason that's interesting is the Yale School of Climate Communication did a study on climate change deniers. If you show them a place they know and how it has changed over time from the past, that can be persuasive.
Bilawal Sidhu: But wait, that's not the only treasure trove Google has at its disposal. The same time-travel capability is now happening at street level.
Matt Hancher: We began driving Street View to map the world. But then over time, we would drive again and again to keep the map up to date, and we have an incredible historical record from ground level of how cities have changed. That capability will also be available in Google Earth. So you'll be able to see both the aerial and the ground-level imagery over time all in the same place.
Bilawal Sidhu: Google had built a time machine for the entire planet. Anyone could watch the world change, but watching isn't the same as understanding. For scientists and policymakers, the next question was obvious. Could this time machine be used not just to see the past, but to quantify it, and maybe even predict the future? For that, they would need a new kind of engine.
Rebecca Moore: So Google Earth itself is incredible for visualization, but historically it hasn't been for doing analysis. We developed a sister product called Google Earth Engine that is designed to do high-resolution planetary-scale analysis on satellite data as it's coming in.
Bilawal Sidhu: And Rebecca isn't exaggerating. Just like you get a weather forecast, SC Johnson uses Google Earth to create a local mosquito forecast, turning planetary data into a tool for public health. Earth Engine did more than just democratize data; it began to unlock solutions to problems that had stumped policymakers for decades.
Matt Hancher: We started, first and foremost, in forestry. That was what got us into the business of Earth Engine in the first place. So, we picked the scientists who were at the forefront of that capability, and we started by empowering them in particular to demonstrate, "Hey, yes, we can monitor and audit deforestation globally. We can monitor it in near real-time, fast enough for you to take action." The first major publication to come out of Earth Engine was a paper in Science by our colleague, Professor Matt Hansen. That was the first time that anybody had been able to take satellite data from the entirety of the 21st century up to that point, about 20 years worth of data, and produce a complete, coherent, global map of what was actually happening in the world's forests. So that just fundamentally unlocked a conversation about what you could now do from a policy perspective.
Bilawal Sidhu: Earth let you see the change. Earth Engine let you measure it, analyze it, and build policy on top of it.
Matt Hancher: One of the biggest impacts Earth Engine has had is making UN Sustainable Development Goals quantifiable, allowing nations to measure promises, not just make them. A great example that came early after forestry was water resources. As the climate warms, fresh water becomes an increasingly significant global concern. Mapping the availability of fresh water on the earth's surface globally, it's in some ways a similar problem to mapping what's happening with the world's forests.
Rebecca Moore: But while the analysis was happening in the cloud, the Google Earth most people knew and loved was still stuck in the past. Earth, until a few years ago, was still a Windows binary that you would download. I mean, how 1990s or early 2000s is that? And it was never going to last, right, from a tech perspective. So we did get permission to completely reinvent Earth. It's the Google Doc of geospatial, in a way.
Chapter 6: The Mirror Becomes a Crystal Ball
Bilawal Sidhu: Now, in the AI age, this entire mirror of the world becomes more like a crystal ball. If you can wind the clock backwards in Earth, you can use AI to look forward into the future.
Matt Hancher: Today, we're at a moment where professionals can tap into certain types of data, certain types of capabilities, but that's a relatively small community. Thanks to AI bringing those capabilities into Earth, you're now going to have a similar moment where the entire planet can ask questions about itself, about its people, its places, and you'll be able to do all of that within this really visual environment.
Bilawal Sidhu: This next era is conversational. The power to analyze the planet is no longer limited to data scientists.
Rebecca Moore: What I'm most excited about is really helping people that are struggling with important decisions that affect the fate of, you know, millions or billions of people. Can we let them talk to Earth and give them the AI models, the absolute best models and data?
Bilawal Sidhu: It's about being smarter, using technology not as this blunt instrument, but as a scalpel to make precise, intelligent decisions about our planet.
Matt Hancher: You could be like, "Where is the greatest threat of future deforestation in this province? What are my options for addressing that?" We're getting very involved in nature conservation because a million species are at risk of extinction in the next few decades, and it's all because of habitat loss. And if we're just smart about how we source resources from forests and so on, we could protect those species while still meeting the needs of people.
Bilawal Sidhu: And by making these tools accessible to actual decision-makers, communities can be better prepared before the next disaster strikes, turning month-long research studies into a series of text prompts.
Matt Hancher: What's the impact of natural disasters when they occur in different places in the world? So there's a range of information that's relevant there. There's the imagery itself, are you seeing imagery of damage? There's the background information about who's where, what was there to begin with, where do people live, where do they work, what kinds of services are going to be affected? Of course, the weather information so you can understand if it was say, a tropical storm, exactly where was the worst of the wind and the rain. You want to be able to overlay all these things.
Bilawal Sidhu: We're going from this world where Earth isn't just crucial in responding to disasters. Google is already using AI to predict earthquakes and flooding, sending alerts to affected users before disaster strikes. Meanwhile, urban planners access deeper, city-level insights and significantly reduce the time spent analyzing data from days to minutes.
Matt Hancher: What AI is giving us now is an ability to pack incredible amounts of information and power into a tool like Earth while keeping it an approachable, easy-to-use, friendly tool. We are just at the beginning of that journey. We have a set of capabilities powered by Gemini in Earth that are in the hands of a community of early testers right now for early feedback. You can see that in historical imagery, and we also work with people all over the world who are using Google Earth as a tool to decide how to do that, to decide where you can put the next industrial-scale solar facility, where you can place the next wind farms.
Bilawal Sidhu: And this power to plan on a massive scale also works on the most personal level imaginable. It can answer the surprisingly complex question: how much solar energy could my own house actually harness? So, in many ways, mapping the world is a timeless mission. And with AI infusing almost every part of the Google Earth stack, we've gone from war rooms to living rooms and now to every pocket. With each iteration, Earth keeps widening the aperture on who gets to see, measure, and decide. And this is a responsibility Google takes lightly, especially when it comes to generative AI.
Matt Hancher: We are treading very carefully because the people who are using a tool like Google Earth to make decisions, they're making decisions that have real-world consequences. You want to have the right answer. You want to make the right decision based on actual data and not an LLM's hallucination or some other misunderstanding on the part of the AI.
Bilawal Sidhu: Gosh, there is so much more to cover. There could be several more videos about how Earth is turning into a 3D canvas for the next generation of AI creation, virtual reality, and augmented reality. But the core remains the same. We thought we were mapping the world, but we ended up mapping ourselves, creating a mirror that's now becoming a crystal ball. For 20 years, Earth showed us our planet as it was and as it is. Now, it shows us as we might be. But with that power comes a profound question: if we can see the future, will we change it?
Happy birthday, Google Earth. Here's to another decade. A big thank you to the Google team for reaching out and asking me to make this video. Consider this my love letter to Earth. If you enjoyed this video, please be sure to drop a like. Comment with the wildest, coolest thing you've seen or done in Earth, and I'll see y'all in the next one. Cheers.
Great job!👏🏻