What if in the future people could go onto google earth and choose a time period to view the world in?

It could be done

But for Looking only into the past

Not possible for the future

Well, sure they would have to keep an archive of memorable Earth events, like the volcano in the Pacific today. There would be a lot of popular events, and large scale changes in short order, would bring up a whole picture of certain trends of human interest

It will probably happen, possibly quite soon. But the images of those periods will have been artificially created, there is no possibility of "time travel" if that is what you were asking about.

It exists (or existed) for certain cities.

Rome (Italy) is -- or was -- one of them.

It went back to earlier satellite photos (with less resolution, unfortunately), and further back to air photos and, eventually to some very early black & white (and grainy), that covered much less area.

There exists (or existed) one version with a computer generated areal view from the days of the Empire (almost 2000 years ago).

Other world cities also had some possibility to go back (but not as much as with Rome).

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PS: found it.

I went to the central portion of Rome.

Under "View" I clicked in the box for "Historical Imagery"

There appears a tiny slider (on my screen, it is in the upper left corner) and you can slide it back to December 1943 (the black and white areal photos). Unfortunately, the symbols (restaurants, bars, etc.) still show the modern locations, not the restaurants that existed back then.

And, of course, no street-view.

That would be cool. But I'm guessing there are historical web sites already doing that sort of thing. I was right, just did a search.

Start with "list of historical websites" and you'll get thousands of hits. But beware, not all websites are legit; so you have to vet those sites if you intend to use them as research sources.

Yes, I agree. And I'm sure they will do it. All of Google Earth data is stored somewhere. I don't think Google will erase it.

Cool