Talk:3173: Satellite Imagery

This is another comic in the My Hobby series, and is also about pranking conspiracy theorists. 2001:4C4E:1C08:2800:DC6F:548F:9B29:AAE1 21:43, 26 November 2025 (UTC)

Not pranking conspiracy theorists... Pranking the kind of people that conspiracy theorists theorise about. There's clear indication that they are working for one or other "three letter agency" (or else they'd be directly blaming No Such Agency/whoever, over and above the other explanations they're considering) and are trained and salaried analysts, rather than armchair hobbyists of the more nebulously self-organised and self-motivating kind. 82.132.245.70 00:12, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

I know there are places (like parts of Oregon) that look pixelated due to checkerboarded land ownership. But something like this would be next-level! --Aaron of Mpls (talk) 03:32, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

imagine how much more terrifying it'd be if you did that with the sky :P 176.126.228.189 08:41, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

If that (original, pre 'censorship tiles') image is not cleverly composited from multiple sources (including perhaps decorated by perlin-noise and/or hue-shifted), it might just be possible to chase down the actual shot used, with a little dedication. The particular colour of the landscape (being wary of seasonal variation) might tie it down to a subset of semi-arid regions through which rivers are flowing, with a bit of cultural guessing on top.
I'm guessing, from the limited cues (the 'track' footprints, and the natural evolution of the junction curves through continued use of a turnoff) that the 'pixel' tiles are 100-200 yds on-the-ground. There's limited topological information (except for in analysing the fluvial and alluvial vicinities of the riverine cutbanks) but no immediate sign of extreme gradients — only hints that some adjacent dirt-tracks don't connect due to it being less flat/level in places.
A practiced jigsaw-doer should be able to scroll across a Google Maps (or other vendor's) photo-overheads and twig when the right sort of features pass by. We're even good at handling orientation differences (the trickiest thing Randall might have done is to rotate his 'piece' arbitrarily, but we've all had to deal with bits of fuzzy cloud/undergrowth/stonework that could be any way round, when trying to match against the box image — which is additionally faded or otherwise not really properly colour-matched). The difference being that there's no 'giving up on this piece' (maybe no more than a couple of miles square, 'on the ground'), after five or ten minutes, to pass onto the next awkward 'middle of the difficult patch' one to see if you might have slightly better luck in whittling down the unmatched spaces. 82.132.245.70 16:55, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Well, if we are assuming that this image is of a real location, I would suggest analyzing datasets containing all the water features of a region (lakes, rivers, etc.) to help narrow down general regions to look at. However, looking closely at the image, I am fairly certain that it's a digital painting and not a photo. 199.247.247.123 22:36, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

If totally drawn, there's a lot of unnecessary and fiddly pixel-level detail (sandbars in the river, bankside tracks, the nature of the track-ends around whatever nature of outpost they lead to) that really needn't have been contrived from all the necessary digital-pen strokes needed to implement.

And you'd be referencing real overhead images, at the very least, to even think you'd need those. And to not try to represent the water as much bluer (there are several reasons it wouldn't be, which also persuades me that it's a satellite ground-survey rather than a mere aerial one), because "reality is unrealistic". 82.132.244.49 00:54, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

The title text reminds me of the Map Men episode in which the existence of the watermark was presented as proof that Google was trying to claim Bir Tawil. 209.188.63.98 17:11, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

WHERE IS THIS? Can anyone figure out from the map where this is? 154.47.27.37 22:47, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

According to ChatGPT it's most likely somewhere in Namibia (assuming it's showing a real place at all). The explanation is quite long (and plausible, imo), this is its concusion: "Based purely on visual features — terrain color, river shape, road type, isolation, and the dark depression — the image most plausibly resembles: An area in Namibia shaped by an ephemeral river system (especially in the Kuiseb–Ugab–Huab region, or nearby gravel plains)" Other, less likely options it mentioned were: Nevada/Arizona, Australia and (Saudi) Arabia Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 10:14, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

The explanation jumps to conclusions that are not stated in the comic. Satellite images are used by various professions, intelligence officers are only one of them. Other professions are stock analysts, environmental investigators, or data journalists. The comic itself only speaks of remote sensing. --2001:638:807:507:D4BF:ABF3:E094:D532 09:27, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Feel free to add/expand the other possibilities. My take, though, is:

• Contractors mentioned. Excludes tertiary information-gathering (opensource analysis), and probably primary intel (IMINT, possibly real-time, direct from NRO-sponsored 'asset' or equivalent national effort, at the top level of strategic importance; private corporate entities operating their own ground-imaging satellites for commercial reasons)... Rules in lower-level IntAls doing basic regional groundwork, rules out "citizen science" and probably the original explanation of a conspiracy-theory collective working with whatever crumbs of available info they can seize upon.
• The possible "one of [their own] people" doesn't narrow who 'us' is, but implies a more sprawling hierarchy (passing along the images) in their organisation(/collective set of mostly' collaborative organisations) than most corporate setups, or NGOs (e.g. 'tree counters'/'desert measurers' for UN climate change-assessors), and certainly not a close-knit group of enthusiasts (a 'conspracy clique' or academic department where the blame options are limited ("Damnit Steve!").
• "Foreign actors" (assuming they don't mean the likes of Ryan Gosling/Ryan Reynolds, or Gerard Butler/Gérard Depardieu) sets up a direct 'us/them' contrast with the prior choice. Heavily implies these guys we see qualify as "domestic actors" working at a multinational level. If they were corporate, you'd expect business rivals mentioned (foreign and/or domestic). If mere 'interested citizens', they might blame "the[ir] government"/its TLAs for thwarting their investigations. You might even expect a particular foreign government/agency in most circumstances, especially that of the territory being observed or the obvious main external competitor in regional dominance. But here it's a general 'one or other foreign' parties with a shared stake in that part of the world. Also rules out 'us' being an internationalised collective, with the talents of multiple nations contributing (academically, in business, UN NGO, something like Bellingcat or some world-wide web of conspiracy-theorism). Or even a "Five Eyes" intelligence collaboration.
• Then there's the expectation that they should and ought to have some idea who has posession of this site. Investigative journalism might be open to discovering something new (to their particular dossier of knowledge), but it suggests that there's an expectation of access to comprehensive (shared-)intelligence covering everywhere and everything, no matter how vague the rumour or papertrail. That's more a major Intelligence Agency mindset, than any of the other options.

The confluence of these clues (assuming Randall wasn't being deliberately careless/contrary to his internal imagination, which seems unlikely given the not-too-confusing conclusion, and unlike him in general) leads to something along the lines of some Pentagon/Langley/Fort Meade-type team with a responsibility for grinding out general background info in some theatre such as Syria or parts of Africa, where multiple (competing-but-'not-competing') non-local nations and unsanctioned militias may well have set up bases of operations, as well as local civilians residing there. Which agrees with my guess that this (if the grabbed image is chosen specifically to match the written-in scenario) is supposed to be an area with currently flowing (as of the image) ephemerally-wet wadi, rather than featuring a Utah creek or an Australian-outback (that kind of thing being looked at by locally-interested business interests, rather than by military-type folks/etc, unless there's some more prominent concern about foreign-sponsored off-grid militias than is publically acknowledgable).

So it's admitedly a bit of a Sherlock Scan, holistically putting the clues together, rather than as obvious as a bold name-plate attached to the wall above the projection-screen that explicitly namechecks the agency/department they're working in. But multiple small and explainable steps that lead to (a high probability of) one particular scenario, rather than a leapt-to presumption without justification. Takes more words than I'd like, to pad out into a full explanation of the more symbolic thought processes, but seems to have survived a self-skeptical analysis and reconsideration of the various alternatives mentioned (and others not yet mentioned).

Except, perhaps, for sloppy (but coincidentally self-consistent) writing on Randall's part. Except that that doesn't sound like him at all! But I'm of course happy to see alternative interpretations mentioned here/above if you can mesh suitable reinterpretaions together via credible replacement insights. I've no monopoly on knowing the mind of the author, by any means. And apologies to anyone who found this to be too long a reply! 82.132.244.49 16:43, 28 November 2025 (UTC)