2026-05-27
I wish someone created google maps for historical cities
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - friends, acquaintances, etc
Main
- Google maps is extremely impressive if you want to travel some place without literally travelling to that place.
- For instance, I have never visited Rio de Janeiro, but if I search Rio de Janiero on google maps, search different power plants, apartments, and ofcourse sightseeing places, and click on photos of each, I can get a not-too-bad view of it.
- Same way I can go online and check which social media is popular in Brazil, what do people comment there, which movies are famous, what topics do these movies talk about, what do people gossip about and so on.
- I wish this was also possible to do with historical cities. Like what did Delhi look like before independence. Or what did England look like at the time of the enlightenment and so on.
Main 2
- I also wish someone did this for historical inventions.
- For instance this has a lot of good photos, but the UX is awful. Once upon a try - google arts and culture
- [Menel.art 3D gallery] has way better UX, you can literally copy images from the link above to Menel and it looks way better.
- I think the most important part is contextualisation.
- Like, these are the faces of the people, and these are the clothes they wore, and these are factories they worked in, and these are the cities in which those factories resided. You can see everything all at once and fit everything in your head at the same time.
- Otherwise too many encyclopedias and photograph series and so on feel decontextualised. For instance, here is smithsonian visual timeline of inventions but these are too decontextualised from like, who made these and why and what did they look like and what else did they do in life besides inventing stuff and so on.
I don't think I can currently devote enough time to create this, but I see value in someone doing it. (Note to self - maybe I should? Ugh)
Why work on this?
- There is an immediate motivation for me, which is to remind all the idiots at the AI companies how many cities they are going to obliterate.
- It is not just all the cities of the present but all the cities of the past.
- That being said, I can see value in making this even for others, not just for them. You don't have to buy the case for ASI risk to work on this project.
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