For some reason, the googleearth Manifest file was changed on July 13 such that GoogleEarthLinux.bin is only 16984110 bytes long. Maybe you had an incomplete download, or google uses internally different servers which have different versions of the file? At least, when I try to download, I still always get the previous version of GoogleEarthLinux.bin which was in the manifest of ~May 23 which was 23852601 bytes long.
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/x11-misc/googleearth/Manifest?r1=1.33&r2=1.34
*** Bug 185633 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***