take the 30,000 foot (+) view

One of my daily stops on the internet is NASA's Earth Observatory offering often stunning images ( to me anyway ) of the planet upon which we reside.

Which reminds me of a project I would love to assemble -- putting together animations of our planet as time goes on: watch cities expand, collapse; farmland change into suburbs; rivers choked off; lakes grow; glaciers retreat. Would be a damn cool thing.