Have you done any Google Sightseeing lately? Are you a Google Globe-trotter? I’m talking about that funky new function on Google that allows you to type in most any phone number or address and pop up a satellite photograph or the area with incredible zoom-in capabilities. A few taps on the keyboard and voilá– you can see your world as the birdies do. Or the astronauts. Or the CIA ... There is something simultaneously glorious and completely creepy about the ease with which we can now peer down on our lives, like God or the government, lifting the lid on our earth-bound environments to see with a new perspective where we’ve been and where we are.
Now, as soon as Google set up this satellite photo function a few weeks ago, folks began forwarding hyperventilating emails with anonymous, apocryphal stories about Bad People who could use this Google function to see whether or not your Toyota was in your driveway so they could know when to break in and steal your wide-screen TV. Most of the images, though, are 6-12 months old, so unless you’re an incredibly slow-mover, that’s not really a concern. I will admit that it’s worth pondering why Google’s Keyhole satellite map site has more images listed for Iraq than any other country besides the U.S. on their homepage. (To be fair, though, images of the state of Texas outnumber those of all of Iraq… so something must be going down on Bush’s ranch beyond brush-clearing.)
For those of you who still peer out airplane windows in wonder, rather than flipping through the Sky Mall catalogue for nose-hair clippers and _Lord of the Rings_ paraphernalia, these satellite photographs are the closest equivalent to flying like a super-hero over your own life – you can practically feel your cape snapping in the wind! Depending on where in the world you’re Googling, you can get either a pretty decent aerial shot of the location, or, if you’re lucky, the ability to zoom in amazingly close, with enough detail that my beloved and I were able to see, for example, not only the crisp, square roof of his boyhood home in St. Louis, but that the neighbor’s zoysia grass had finally overtaken the adjoining yards. Hm! You may be amazed by how many memories surface just from seeing your stomping grounds from the sky.
For example, I could Google up my parents’ house in the West and see clearly the tree they replanted in their yard a few years ago – the one that replaced the gigantic elm that long ago shaded my summer afternoons of reading stacks of Nancy Drews. I was able to drag the direction arrow on a bird’s-eye tour of the winding paths of an open-space park in the Colorado foothills where, on a visit home in my twenties, I got caught in a surprise hailstorm that left an unearthly and painful helmet of heavy ice pellets solidifying at the roots of my hair. And I was amazed to find that with the Google Map zoom function, I not only found the very bench at Red Rocks Amphitheater where I saw my first rock concert (Elton John, pre-knighthood), but also the ruddy outcropping of rocks nearby where I sunbathed with high school friends on Senior Ditch day and had my first sip – and last – of strawberry Boone’s Farm. Ewww.
My past locations are much clearer on these satellite maps than my present – and I like to chalk this up to metaphysics, as well as technology. I’m amused that I while I can hover over my Indiana home from far, far above, when I try to focus, close up, on my current life, the satellite photo disintegrates, and an apologetic message appears: “We’re sorry, but we don’t have imagery at this zoom level for your region. Try zooming out for a broader look.” It seems right, somehow, that even the best technology cannot offer me clarifying perspective on my present life – I’m still stumbling tree-by-tree through the daily challenges of matching my socks, remembering to tuck fruit into lunch boxes, keeping toilet paper in the house. I’m not ready to see the forest, much less the divinely removed perspective that will allow me to stamp meaning on this time and place. Where am I exactly? I’m still figuring that out.
The virtual travel through space and time that Google’s satellites offer isn’t exactly The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but in the spirit of Douglas Adams’ classically lunatic novel, adapted for film out in theaters today, perhaps it’s time to fix yourself a tasty and refreshing Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, settle back at your computer, and see what you can discover about your own life through the vantage points of outer space. This new perspective just might allow you to answer for yourself the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.”