Shanghai: 1990 vs. 2010, one picture says it all

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?

>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.