Satellite Photo Interpretation and You!

The Mail Online has a somewhat nifty article about Chinese ghost-towns, presumably with the shrink-wrap still on. What I find kind of funny about it is that the article seems to have been derived entirely from someone looking at some Google Maps images, without knowing when exactly the pictures were taken, and determining that the towns are entirely or mostly empty.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that simple, but the captions to the photos certainly seemed to be. A similar screengrab to the one I posted below said something about the public buildings never being used… even though you can see cars in the parking lots and a boat on the water (btw, I now have “Smoke on the Water” stuck in my head).

There’s also the question of why they expect cars on the road in cities that, while clearly built for a commuting culture, may be supporting a population that has not quite achieved the “two cars in every garage” standard of living. But, then, that’s the problem with trying to draw information out of satellite images alone, especially undated ones.

What did occur to me first, while reading the article, though, is that these towns would definitely be neat places to shoot movies. Not that I want to urge any business at all away from Michigan’s fledgling film industry (and the novelty of having streets closed for filming every day here in Grand Rapids has not yet worn off–especially for those of us who don’t regularly drive on the closed streets), but talk about having locations you can do anything you want with. Presumably, anyway. It’s even better than those creepy old abandoned base housing neighborhoods that they go to on Mythbusters every now and again.

The other thing that occurred to me is that these cities and towns look like good pressure-release-valve options for the Chinese, once their economy starts to take the next step, toward building an information economy like in the West. They can actually push folks away from the manufacturing centers to ready-made cities, where location doesn’t matter quite so much. Whether or not they could accomplish something like that is an open question, but it’s a neat thought experiment.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.