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Google Earth makes it drastically easier to locate maps and images of the planet and jump between different scales. One of the silly pastimes it allows is to spin the globe wildly and pick some random spot to zoom in to. Obviously, most of the time it is a boring, unfocused bit of water. Whenever you hit land, there is one thing curious about it. Almost wherever you focus on, you would see signs of people: Patches of fields like a pale Mondrian painting, roads dividing the landscape, or just vast stretches of inhabitation. When no signs of humans were visible, one usually doesn’t have to let the program slide for long in some aimless direction to come across them.

This is, to me, a tangible and concrete display of the sheer size of human influence over the globe. For a playful demonstration of the same principle, the images above display the landscape from 9 randomly chosen places within Europe. It shows in just a glance the monotony of human-built environments in our continent. I experimented also with taking the pictures from North African deserts. Somewhat surprisingly they often produced more variant shades of colour and appealing shapes.

The places are chosen by your browser and will be changed by refreshing the page. For simplicity’s sake, the spots are selected from within a rectangle that has Dunkerque and Odessa as its opposite corners.

For a similar type of argument see the Google Maps application for anthropogenic biomes.

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