Is Google Earth good or bad?

Answer 1

If you think about your question more clearly, you will realize that you are asking for a judgment. A judgment, by definition, is a thought process that entails, (among the other definitions), a discernment. So, in a round about way, you are asking whether or not Google Earth is good or bad for SOMEBODY in particular.

You haven't specified WHO you are interested in Google Earth being good or bad FOR.

If you were a drug dealer, and grew fields of opium, you might not like Google Earth very much when your fields were "discovered" by somebody browsing the internet, and reporting your crop to the legal authorities, who then came and destroyed your crop and arrested you and put you in jail. The impact of Google Earth on your life would be something that YOU might consider to be very "bad".

Your next door neighbor, however, noting the severe impact that illegal drugs has on the quality of life for most citizens in that society, would quite likely look at EXACTLY the same set of facts, and conclude that Google Earth had done more to bring good into their life, (by getting you put in prison and getting the source of drugs that THEIR kid was using cut off), than any other single factor!

Technology in itself is probably morally neutral. Arguably, even highly destructive weapons could result in SOME benefit to society, if they produce jobs for workers, AND if the weapons themselves are never used and never kill anybody. Thus, it is probably not very skillful to ask whether or not something is good or bad, in the same way that asking if a person is good or bad isn't really all that helpful.

People do things. Some of those things are not very skillful, and some are moderately skillful. Some things produce more useful benefits to society (and the individual performing them) than the amount of damage that they do. All actions have benefits and collateral damage. We don't even always KNOW for sure all the damage that we do when we do something that we THINK is helpful or useful.

To call someone good or bad because of the amount of damage that they do or the amount of good that we THINK they do, is not a very helpful way of looking at the situation. Nobody wants to think of themselves as bad. Al Capone, who was a notorious criminal in Chicago, thought of himself as a public benefactor, because he supplied people with what they wanted, and just because what they wanted was illegal, he got paid a lot of money to provide it, since there wasn't any other way for people to obtain the things he was selling. He refused to look at the damaging aspects of his "services" and concentrated only upon the fact that his services were in fact in great demand. By calling a person good or bad, you blind them to the fact that there are always TWO components to their actions, and they become defensive about what they are doing.

No matter what, any action, even one taken for positive reasons, has a negative part to it. It is impossible to state accurately WHAT the level of value to you or to society as a whole is, unless you can accurately MEASURE the benefits and the damage that your chosen action has upon the person or group that you are affecting.

Let's look at a simple example. You have a friend who is considered "fat". You are concerned that their health will deteriorate as a result of their "fat" condition, and you wish to "help" your friend decide to lose weight, which might improve their life enough to be able to live longer.

How do you go about doing this? Is there a way to inform your friend that you are concerned, and have it do any "good"? If you taunt your friend, by calling them names, and laughing at how fat they are, you are acting in an unskillful manner. It doesn't matter that you ACTUALLY MEANT to be helpful to your friend, because the damage you are doing to your friend's thoughts is far greater than any "help" you might be bringing to their consciousness that they are overweight. Your friend will likely wind up eating EVEN MORE as a direct result of your unskillful actions, and your "assistance" will backfire and actually produce the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you had originally hoped for. You might think that this is a stupid example, but my experience tells me that most people will nag an overweight person, IN SPITE of the fact that nagging never seems to do any "good", and this means ADULTS, not just kids, by the way!

Let's look at another simple example. Suppose you decide to increase your fitness by starting an exercise program. Is this new practice ONLY good, or does it have some BAD parts to it? How can exercise be considered BAD?

If you exercise, or move your body around, you are asking various muscle groups to perform the job that they were created for. However, doing this job, causes damage to the cells, and as a result, some number of them are worn out in the process. The weakest ones are more prone to dying and being discarded by the body. Each night, when you sleep, your body undertakes a massive reconstruction program when you aren't in charge any longer, and fixes all the damage that you have caused to your body during the day. If you were to SUDDENLY start demanding a very great deal of work from your muscles, then you would likely find that more cells were dying than could be replaced that night. Your muscles would be sore the next day, and you would feel some pain.

Pain is simply the body's way of communicating to you that you are damaging it at a greater rate than it can repair itself. The more the pain, generally speaking, the more the damage that you've done. Now, eventually, almost all the damage that you do to your body can be repaired fairly successfully. The usual effect of feeling pain, is that you don't move around as much. Not moving around as much, allows the body to keep the cells alive that it already has, and each night, it can add more cells to begin replacing the ones that have been damaged or killed by the sudden overload.

Slowly, the pain lessens, as the body can begin to function at higher and higher levels of activity without any danger of disruption of functionality. If you then begin to exercise at a rate that is careful to balance between TOO much damage, and TOO little damage, your body will adjust its repair capacity to allow you to perform MUCH greater levels of activity, and you will become what is known as "fit", or in good physical condition. Nobody would argue that being in good physical condition is "bad", but clearly, your ATTEMPTS to get in good physical condition can be unskillful to the point of incapacitating you. This effect is commonly laughed at in what are called "weekend warriors". They sit around all week, at a desk job, or in front of a TV, and then when the weekend comes, they play a vigorous sport, such as American football, and then spend the next week groaning and moaning about their injuries and bruises. The exercise they engage in is both skillful and unskillful. The activity needs to be engaged in before the body can replace damaged cells, because if there aren't any damaged cells, the body won't need to replace any (which is what happens during the week). The fact that they failed to moderate the LEVEL of activity on the weekend, until their body could adjust properly was because they were unskillful in their choice. The body became overloaded with repair requests, and it can't perform them all in a single night.

So, in this way, you can see that answering questions about good and bad aren't as simple as you might have thought. If you produce too much damage by using a thing, such as Google Earth, and if society can't adapt to it, then for some people, it would have a negative impact on their lives that is not compensated sufficiently by the helpful things that it accomplishes.

Google Earth facilitates more information being distributed about our planet to people in greater numbers than ever before. If people that wish to exploit the Earth without also taking care of it, (like our weekend warriors and how they treat their own bodies), and if these exploiters then use Google Earth to find ways to damage the Earth for some profit to themselves, then Google Earth will be a setback for all living creatures.

If the people that are ready to practice skillful stewardship activities, (perhaps those that take good care of their bodies are in this group), for the Earth and they use Google Earth to monitor events around the globe, and act to slow down the rate of damage being done to the Earth to a sustainable rate (the Earth also heals its biosphere, in a similar way that bodies heal torn tissues and other injuries), then Google Earth will be hailed as a major benefactor to humankind, and indeed, to all living creatures.

You can help make a difference in this outcome, by deciding to investigate ways to be helpful, and to use the technological tools at your disposal to accomplish these ends. Whenever you realize that something that you've been doing in the past, either because you were simply thoughtless, or because you didn't realize at the time all the consequences of it, and that activity isn't helpful to the Earth, compared to the benefit that you or others get by performing it, then simply stop doing it. Dropping litter on the streets when you walk about or ride around in a car is a small, but significant activity that far too many people still engage in. The "benefit" of littering is that you get rid of the garbage from YOUR hand or your car without having to wait very long after you make the decision that you don't want it any longer, but at the cost of spreading garbage around where it will be seen by hundreds or thousands of OTHER people, and thus teaching them that it is a quick and easy way to solve their problem of having a piece of garbage whenever they don't want it any longer. Garbage can be useful, if it is brought to a place where the resources that it contains can be reused and if not reused, then recycled. The resources that are recovered in this way can reduce the damage that humans do to acquire MORE of those same resources from the planet in other ways. Remember, ALL human activity results in SOME damage, so you want to consider whether or not YOUR action is more skillful, or LESS skillful than another choice that you might have.

Look for ways to use Google Earth and the other tools that we now have to make the world a better place to live OVERALL, for all beings!