Exclusive timelapse: See climate change, deforestation and urban sprawl unfold as Earth evolves over 30 years.

This is one of the most influential projects and articles I have seen in my time on the internet. TIME uses satellite images gathered by the USGS and compiled by Google to tell the story of where are society has been moving in the past 30 years and there are a lot of lessons to take from these images.

I once heard a description of life as “The Innate Desire for Every Living Thing to Perfect Itself.” That will be the jumping off point for the lessons that I think need to be drawn from this project.

In the years of development since the earliest humans, we have take part in the desire of perfecting ourselves through our development. We have expanded our habitat to almost every corner of this planet and have found ways to use the rest of creation in building beautiful, yet devastatingly far reaching societies. Our reach for perfection has been exactly that… a reach. We have pushed outward in search of our perfection instead of identifying and perfecting the flaws within. The timelapse videos show a society perpetually reaching outward to create new branches of society to redeem to misgivings of the past ones. Cities begin to fall into poverty as those with money build nicer, communities on the urban edges and energy companies use unspoiled land outside of our own society as a sacrifice to fund these new endeavors. There is, however, a law of conservation of mass that is working against us in this fashion. New mass cannot be created, nor old mass destroyed. We cannot push outward indefinitely, and the land we are disrupting and poisoning now will be the only frontier left for the pioneers of the future to settle. For this reason, the biggest challenge of our race will be to redefine the concepts of perfection and of more.

The want of more and of perfection have, as I stated earlier, driven us to the far reaches of our own society and into the heart of the previously unspoilt areas of creation outside of our society. We have left millions of miles of dilapidated infrastructure and poisoned land in our pursuit of the next, perfect exhibition of our own creation. By redefining more, from a greater volume to a greater use, we can begin to realize perfection from the scars of our past mistakes. By looking back into the heart of where we originally went wrong and fixing our mistakes from the inside out, we can reverse the trends shown in the timelapse which have been to expand outward with new development leaving the un-perfect trials and errors of yesterday rotting in plain sight. We can use our existing infrastructure to increase the quality of living for all of those left behind in the booming urban areas of yesterday. We can cut energy waste by perfecting that existing infrastructure and power this new wave of rebuilding and cut our reliance on destruction for creation. We can turn our story from one of giving up on flawed development, to one of perfecting all aspects of our own societies before poisoning and killing the beautiful world that exists outside of ourselves.

Let us create a legacy for our race that does not show a series of abandoned attempts at perfection, but a few realizations of it. Even if we don’t ever reach it, we can at least be proud of everything that we have reached instead of just the outer most fringes of what we have achieved.