Google can't wait to usher in a future where people stay in their rooms and eat Soylent while being entertained and exercised by their VR-enabled computers.
Imagine if we had these kind of views of, say, the streets of London in 1900? This is worth doing for history's sake alone.
For one, yeah, "what if" we had these kind of views for the streets of London in 1900? I doubt many would care, same as not many care for 1900 music, 1900 books, 1900 photographs and such. Some scholars maybe.
Second, what the parent said goes beyond that. Essentially he says, the people of 2200 could have the streets of 2100 fully 3D imaged, but empty of life, with people of 2100 mostly staying at home and merely doing VR walks.
Now this might sound far-fetched and implausible, but not much more than telling 1900 people that in 100 years there would be cities were people rarely walk in public to go about their business but mostly go around with their cars.
You haven't seen the many-thousands upvoted threads of mashups of various locations in WWII and modern day? Or the sourcebooks that designers use for all the costume drama on TV and in movies?
EDIT: Here's an example Imgur thread. (http://imgur.com/a/2rNrn)
I mean, if the best you can come up as "value most people get from historical data" is photo montages of WWII/now and better designed costumes for period movies..
The same way most people don't care about archeological museums, old music and old books. How many copies do history books sell in your B&N, compared to cooking, self-help, crime novels and such?
At best, people watch some documentary on TV or visit a museum and quickly move on with their lives none the wiser.
(I, for one, do. I revel in old stuff, from Plato to the Retronaut website. And I'm doing a project with reconstructed ancient greek music. But people who care about such stuff are mostly outliers).
Judging from sales numbers, 90% of the population could not care less.
You seem unable to grasp that something might be irrelevant TO most people (as in: they could not care less about it) and still relevant IN ITSELF.
Plus, science is a bad example, because it's totally unlike history or classical music. Someone not caring about science still comes into contact every day with products of science, they shape his life in major deegree, the economy he lives in, his health, his food, etc.
With classical music or history, people can forget about them and nothing happens to them (well, apart from them being less educated, but since most other people are too hardly anyone notices).
Everything you're saying now is obvious, which is why I asked why you're bothering to make this point. It seems like you're just being argumentative for no reason.
What I need is something like a youtube of a high speed (maybe 30 mph equiv?) run down the trail.
I'm looking for stuff like hazards and issues. Like, oh, look, a swamp, either bug spray or forget it. Oh, look, a cliff, well thats very scenic but I'm not taking the kids there. Oh look, a whole field of poison ivy, best remember to corral the kids around there. Oh look, a blind corner and adjacent highway crossing, need to keep the kids under somewhat tighter control in that area. Oh look, picnic tables, guess where the kids are stopping to eat lunch?
Another obvious problem is the county I live in has at least 100 miles of trails either cross country or in parks, and the Mighty GOOG has ... the grand canyon. Well thats nice but I'm hiking a short segment of the ice age trail this saturday, not the grand canyon. Someday the streetview-like trail tech will be useful to me, but for years I suspect it'll be merely aspirational. It would be like having streetview for streets... but only in Mountain View.
On the other hand the city I live in has three separate rails-to-trails conversions within 2 miles of my house and a riverwalk. Every little county park seems to pride itself on having elaborate marked hiking trails. In a land with lots of rivers every "three taverns and a gas station" village hovel seems to have some kind of riverwalk, aside from the big one in my hometown. Just one of the state-level parks in my county has 29 miles of hiking trails. I wasn't kidding about just my little county (well, little county as in half the surface area of Rhode Island) having 100s of miles of hiking trails.
I would like to hike a national park someday, but its so much easier (and cheaper!) to visit a local trail.
I had to decide between taking a shorter trip and missing out because of being overly cautious, or taking the longer trip I planned on.
I ended up putting in downstream and paddled upstream to see them, and they turned out to be pretty big - lots of whitewater and 3 foot drop, something I would not have done alone and without a helmet.
Being able to actually see a picture would allowed me to make a much more informed decision. Pictures really are worth a thousand words.
http://www.tacx.com/en/products/trainers/i-genius-multiplaye...
http://www.cycleops.com/en/products/software/virtual-trainin...
http://www.minoura.jp/english/trainer-e/option-e/cogmon-e.ht...
Cycling on indoor trainers is boring without some sort of incentive.