At some point in the relatively near future, with the proliferation of Earth monitoring from space, it'll be possible to 'see' the impact of every person on our planet, even if they're just a few people living hundreds of miles away from everyone else. We're getting to the stage where every square metre is photographed on a regular basis, we're getting space-based streaming video platforms (eg urthecast.com), and presumably commercial IR spectrum monitoring is either already there or coming soon.
It's actually heartening that this sort of story, eventually, won't really be able to happen any more.
