

Shanghai: 1990 vs. 2010, one picture says it all - iwwr
http://i.imgur.com/AqNdG.jpg

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anigbrowl
Words fail me. Although this provokes wonder about everything from
sustainability to the forms of social and artistic evolution that are taking
place in the midst of such rapid change, as soon as I look back at the photo
_any_ observation I could possibly make looks laughably trivial. _20 years_.

I know we have had spy satellites operating for that long and more, and
presume several of them have been tasked with watching China almost as closely
as we observed the former USSR. I hope the digital data has been properly
archived and can be declassified sooner rather than later; think what we could
learn about economics and human development by assimilating all that
information into a temporal model. Information that we in the developed world
didn't think to collect or organize properly during our own economic expansion
is hard to estimate, but with even moderate-quality photographic and thermal
data we could make far more educated assessments of energy costs, trade flows,
micro-climates and so many other things by studying our records of this
experiment.

Great, great link OP. How did you come across it?

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pbhjpbhj
><http://i.imgur.com/AqNdG.jpg>

At first I thought it was strange that they'd removed the high-rise buildings
that were already there. But then I noticed that the two images don't show the
same area. If you look in the night image the left-most 2 towers are the left-
most towers in the day image; the clock tower is just left of centre.

