The Pleasure of Looking Down on Earth

For a short moment last November, the web was totally, completely obsessed with one unlikely thing: a series of curiously anonymous satellite images. Jesus Diaz, over at Gizmodo, broke the story — asking "Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert?". Collectively, there were eight photographs, pulled from Google Earth, which showed enormous, bizarre structures built way the hell out in western China.

You probably saw the pictures. The original post got two million page views, and in the days after it seems like everyone felt the need to repost, share, and offer an opinion. Were they giant QR codes in the desert? Secret spy satellite calibrators? Had the Chinese ripped off a secret DARPA project? An elaborate politically-charged bit of land art?

Eventually, it got sorted and people went back to making Sad Keanu macros, but for a week anyway, those images were burning up the web. When the pundicators talk about the social media, this is kind of what they're talking about. All that sharing and posting and conversation would have been impossible ten years ago.

But then again, 20 years ago those satellite images wouldn't really have existed either, at least not publicly.

Consider that before air travel was passé enough to undertake in sweatpants, looking down on a landscape was something the average person could only accomplish by climbing something really tall. Maps, with their imagined 'god's eye view,' were just that: guesses as to what our continents looked like from a raised perspective.

And even in the glorious jetsetting heyday, satellite images were still very much the territory of the military. And really, outside of amateur cartographers and conspiracy theorists, what civilians actually lamented the dearth of satellite photos?

There's a great section in Tuva or Bust!, the fantastic account of Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton's 11 year obsession with Tannu Tuva, which at that time was called the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. (Seriously, go read this book if you haven't.) The account describes what the group of friends had to go through to get pictures of Tuva, an isolated place they had very little chance of actually seeing.

This was 1983, and to get a satellite photo they had to mail a request for a listing of Landsat photos taken over the specified coordinates. The 20-page list described "location, types of filters used, percentage of cloud cover, date of acquisition, and overall quality" for each photo. Feynman and Leighton ordered one photo that had Tuvan capital Kyzyl near the center with no cloud cover. The cost for the 10 square inch photo? "Under" $100.

But that was then. Now every other news broadcast seems to feature spinning 3D renderings of Earth that swoop down to specific targets. When I need to figure out where a bar is, I just type the address into Google Maps, then drill down to Street View. Aerial views are now everywhere computers are. We're now viewing our world in 3D rendered overhead views like in your favorite video game.

And it's only getting more so. The U.S. Congress passed a bill last week that, in addition to allowing pilots to use GPS to plan their takeoffs and landings (they weren't before?), paves the way for dramatic increases in the number of drones allowed in US airspace. :

"We are looking at border security using UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) research, law enforcement, firefighting, just to name a few," Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said, as quoted by Forbes. "There are going to be more and more uses for unmanned aerial vehicles to be able to do the surveillance and photographing that have taken helicopter pilots and small general aviation and even large aircraft to do in the past."

And in 2015, commercial drones will be given the official okay. In other words, never mind the street view cars, here come the drones.

Author William Fox writes about the transformation of land into landscape — that is, how we experience and perceive our surroundings. His 2009 book Aereality deals with exactly this subject, and tries to tease out what happens when we view the Earth from above.

Much of the book deals with aerial photography. As he flies with artists over mineral extraction sites and Los Angeles, and as he retraces the route that American Airlines Flight 11 took on September 11th, there's lots to say about art created by looking down. But Google Earth, despite producing some truly beautiful images, shouldn't be considered an art project, he says. Despite the wealth of photography, and despite the obvious aesthetics of satellite photos, it's still a map.

And maps are designed to make things clearer, more understandable, and to help us find our place. It's all about viewing the landscape as an organized, meta-tagged system.

But those images over China, they're inscrutable, and that's partially what makes them so compelling. There's something about them that's just a little off: Why are those buildings arranged like a bulls-eye? Why is that grid so clearly designed to be seen from space? They might be showing us a literal view of the southwestern Gobi Desert, but they also present more questions than they do answers, and that helps to explain why they had the sharing power they did on the Internet.

We humans tend to like things that are brain-teasing, mind-expanding, and awe-inspiring. As with bizarre, bird's-eye-view images, so with the blog posts that carry them. The most shared articles on the New York Times web site, according to researchers at U Penn, are the ones that inspire awe, an "emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self." They were stories that tended to have two qualities: a large scale, and demanding "mental accommodation," by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way. As they wrote:

"Seeing the Grand Canyon, standing in front of a beautiful piece of art, hearing a grand theory or listening to a beautiful symphony may all inspire awe. So may the revelation of something profound and important in something you may have once seen as ordinary or routine, or seeing a causal connection between important things and seemingly remote causes."

In the case of the China images, it wasn't only that, but also that they seemed like they should have been secret, as big military test sites certainly would have been in the past. The area in question, generally around Lop Nur in the eastern part of the Uigher Autonomous Region, has been a military test site since the 50s, most famously as ground zero for China's first nuclear test, dubbed 596.

There's this sense of peeking over your neighbors fence and catching him in an awkward position — 'Those mid-level Chinese bureaucrats must have been furious we found their big desert military installations,' you think — but even if it seems that way, it's fairly clear that nothing in the photos is actually "sensitive."

China has successfully been censoring Google's satellite imagery for the last four years. Thanks to leaked cables we know that China approached the US government about censoring Google Maps in 2006, and according to an Open Source Center (PDF) report we know that:

In 2007, the Chinese government created an online geographical information security management and coordination group to regularly browse online map sites, including Google Earth. When problems are discovered, they are raised either with Google's China headquarters or through diplomatic channels. "Google has been very cooperative in the course of communications," a Chinese spokesman stated.

We may be eager for an uncensored Wikileaks map, but this, it appears, was just a regular old Google one. That bombing target might have been highly secret once, but chances are good that by now it's just a relic, standing out in the desert.

The grid though, shining like a latticed window in the sand, that's a different story. For one thing, it's relatively new, and for another, it seems designed to be seen from space. Theories as to its use were abundant, the most popular pointing it out as a spy satellite calibration tool. But then again, when you overlay it on a city map, it looks like it could be showing a dastardly path to the White House, or the Eiffel Tower. It has a Masonic resonance, depending upon your favorite conspiracy flavor. Of course, with the right mindset you can overlay almost anything on a city map and come out with something vaguely sinister.

Fox compares the the Chinese photos to seeing aerial photographer Michael Light's work in a gallery. Light's aerial photographs intentionally complicate the landscape — the horizon isn't where you think it should be — and looking at the photos, says Fox, people just got stuck.

If the job of aerial photography is to make the world more comprehensible by revealing its structure and how things relate to one another then when it does the opposite simply because it looks at something that you can't figure out what it is, something inscrutable, then we'll just look at it forever. You have to be really careful when you say we're hard wired to do something, but boy we sure have a penchant for looking at an aerial view and trying to make sense of the world.

When that's teased or subverted, and instead of revealing the landscape, it confuses us. We just get stuck there in a loop of confounded contemplation. And it's almost sublime.

But there is a bottom to this desert mystery. The most likely explanation, at least according to the crack public investigators on Quora, is that the grid is part of an experiment designed to map alluvial flows, with an eye toward understanding where one might find rare or otherwise valuable minerals.

The civilian mining explanation is backed up by the fact that when former CIA analyst Allen Thomson talked to Wired's Danger Room about the site he pointed out that, based on the DigitalGlobe coverage layer in Google Earth, "starting in 2004, somebody has ordered many, many satellite pictures of [the area]. [That] can't have been cheap."

This suggests, more than anything else, that the grid was built for a civilian purpose. Both the US and Chinese governments would have used their own imaging to keep tabs on the project (and I'm sure they have), so you're either looking for a wealthy individual or a company which sees the out of pocket costs as a worthwhile investment, presumably because the grid, whatever it's there for, means money down the road.

It's unclear just what kind of minerals those might be: Alluvial mining, also known as pacer mining, generally reveals heavy minerals or gems, mostly gold and diamonds. Most of Xinjiang's discovered gold is quite far away from the area in question, in Tuoli County near the Kazak border. The closest current mine is a potash operation, which should have nothing to do with an alluvial experiment. Most fitting would be rare earths, the kinds of minerals that sit at the heart of all the electronics, from the satellites that took these photos to the servers that sent them to the computer or phone that shows them to you.

So, there's still mystery and intrigue, if you're looking for it, but nothing complicated and nothing explicit.

The fascination for encompassing and bewildering views of familiar things extend to all kinds of scales. Consider the Internet's obsession with macro photography. Or extending back in the other direction, its infatuation with images of the Earth from space. Earlier this year, NASA released a new version of their Biblically popular "Blue Marble" photo, and it dominated the Internet for days.

The image, sized for the web at 8000px square, is stunning, but it's not so much the detail that made the first image, the one taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, so appealing. It was a Ptolemaic view perhaps, but still, humanity looks pretty damn tiny hanging against the velvet of space. That photo, more than any other, put us in our place. Quite literally it put things in perspective.

Google's satellite mapping project is a different animal. Sure you can zoom out, but scrolling through Google Earth is all about experiencing our mark on the planet, looking at the landscape as opposed to the land. It's how we've shaped the planet from cities sprawled out against the Pacific ocean to the four kilometer tall Marree Man in Australia, from Raoul Zarrita's "Ni Pena Ni Mideo," written across three kilometers of the Atacama Desert, to the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine in Nevada.

When Robert Smithison virtually defined Land Art in his famous essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," he wrote:

These processes of heavy construction have a devastating kind of primordial grandeur and are in many ways more astonishing than the finished project – be it a road or a building. The actual disruption of the earth's crust is at times very compelling…

Major industrial projects do have a sort of beauty to them, especially from above, and as I prepared to write this piece I got excited by the visual aesthetics of it all. So I called a bunch of people associated with land art and landscape interpretation to ask, "is Google Earth possibly the greatest art project ever conceived?"

The answer, overwhelmingly, was "no." Certain images might be beautiful, sure, but if art is about complicating our understanding, of raising questions, Google Earth is about simplifying the path to that understanding of where we are and what we're looking at. It doesn't matter if you're looking at the roof of your apartment building or decommissioned mine sites, everything is clear. You'd think that maybe Google would want to instill a bit more confusion into its maps; after all, the more time we spend on Google's maps, the more ads they can sell against them.

Perhaps a better question would have been "does Google Earth matter?" For the first time, ever, first graders can view almost any part of the planet with incredible clarity. Does that change the way we think about globalism, that we can look, and see, and keep tabs on our neighbors and on ourselves? Does it change our perspective on the Earth, that place we call home, the place we routinely tear apart or cover with all sorts of weird things, so that we can build more things, or kill each other?

It's such a large question that, really, it's hard to definitively tell. But those Chinese desert structures do provide a clue. Few other things can inspire such widespread wonder and questioning as those photos did. After all those millions of views, they may not be so mysterious any more. But even so, they raise plenty more questions than answers, and that does suggest that our unhindered ability to look down on the Earth from the air has changed the way we think about our planet. More than that, they're just awesome to look at.

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