It's a Small World After All

Sometimes the world can seem like a gigantic place and can make you feel insignificant. Growing up as a child, parents may make you feel insignificant by not getting you the toy you wanted for the holidays. Maybe the fact that you're number 1,164,825,186 on Facebook makes you feel like a dot on a Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Hopefully on the monkey at least). Maybe you feel like Dilbert, a lonely low-level engineer in a big corporation. 

Today, I felt like a fish in an ocean of sharks when I saw this:

It's amazing how many humans live in clusters (cough **East coast of America** cough) and how much "empty" areas there are (Especially in South America and Africa). I think I was most amazed on how the Niles River is lit up so brightly.  Raytheon's Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) (with its day-night band) with the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite made these images possible after many passes over the Earth. Of course VIIRS has many useful purposes too, including improving meteorologists with their weather forecast (like they need it...), measuring climate change and other Earth's characteristics, and much more. 

It would be awesome to track how the Earth develops over time with these images; it would show growth of civilizations, movement of populations, and how the Earth itself changes.