Projecting Our Dreams

If there were ever an apt analogy for the human habit of perceiving the world as we wish rather than as it is, it can be found in the mystery of cartographic map projections.

Things are not as they seem. The Earth, its neighboring planets, and our sun are careening through space at thousands of miles per hour in a spiraling race towards the end of time.

Back here on solid ground, we see that which immediately surrounds us and we leave the rest to mysterious scientists, presumably buried under a mountain somewhere analyzing satellite imagery and generating the maps we trust.

In fact, should we trust them at all? Is one map of the world more accurate than another and why do they all look slightly different? Why, for example, on one map, is Greenland the size of Africa and on another, it’s closer to the size of the United States? Surely something’s wrong.

Mercator’s projection on the left – Miller’s projection on the right

The problem is this: We live on a round(ish), three-dimensional planet but we like to view our world in a flat, two-dimensional way. We don’t feel round. We feel flat. So we want to imagine our world as flat. It’s where the Flat Earth Society gets its name and its unique raison d’être.

The challenge for the mapmaker is to figure out how to express accurately on paper what look like “stretched” land masses on the globe. As you might imagine if you were a mathematician, there are many ways to turn a spherical shape into a two-dimensional plane. The map’s “projection”, as it is called, is the method used to transfer the points on the round planet to the flat map. There are many ways to do this and you can learn more about how it’s done here.

To be clear, there is no perfect projection. Despite our desire to be in control of our surroundings, to trust our perceptions, and to live in certitude, deep down, we know that it never works out that way. Every aspect of our journey through the universe is subjective and made of compromises and choices. But we’ll keep trying to get it perfect, just the same.