Ray Fortna and I were discussing potential applications of satellite photos for everyday users, as enabled by applications such as Google Earth.  It’s especially powerful to be able to see how the satellite photos change over time.  There are obvious applications for real estate agents, house shoppers, tourists, and so forth. 

 

Another equally compelling application is to give people a better understanding of the world and some of the bad things happening in it.  Satellites can go places where journalists can’t a give a better sense of scale and impact.  The following BBC photos were blogged in One Man’s Trash » from the salmon  showing the destruction caused by Zimbabwe’s slum “cleanup” project.

 

 

“One month ago, Zimbabwe’s brutal leader Robert Mugabe began Operation Murambatsvina, which literally translates to “Operation Drive Out Trash.” The “trash”? 250,000 to 1.5 million of Zimbabwe’s urban poor who have had their homes bulldozed or burnt down by Mugabe’s police. The newly homeless are left to sleep outside in the freezing winter nights or are being pushed into rural areas, where they face dangerous food shortages and likely starvation. “