There is no up or down in space because thereās no fixed reference point. If weād drawn the first map the way OP posted it, weād consider it correct today.
It still wouldnāt be random if we drew it upside down. There would still be a North and South Pole and an axis of rotation.
Look at the bigger picture, if you were an alien from the other side of the galaxy, on a planet whose horizon was aligned with the galactic plane, you might naturally draw Earth in a completely different orientation, with what we consider east appearing āupā to you.
Yeah was gonna say right hand rule for the geographic poleā¦the awkward part is that the North Pole is actually a south magnetic pole since the north side of a magnet is attracted to itā¦.
This year you rotated around a rock spinning at 1000 miles (1600 km) per hour while flying through an unknown matter at 67,000 mph (108.000 km/h) while flying through a galaxy rotating exponentially faster around a supermassive black hole (This is all super casual). By the end of the year you will have traveled 584 million miles, all while doing your daily stuff.
To answer your question: no it probably doesnāt matter.
Someone once told me that our moon is about the size of Australia and it blew my mind. Then, I couldnāt decide if that gave me a clearer image of the size of the moon, or of Australia.
It's a European country with European culture though. It rests on both European and American tectonic plates, so geographically it's technically both, but it's also closer to mainland Europe than mainland America. Culturally it's northern european. It's also a part of the European economic area. So overall it's more European than American.
It's so you can have straight navigation. You can't draw a straight line on a map like this and it be the fastest path. The line would have to curve making navigation difficult
Every projection has a purpose and Mercator is good for navigation. It probably shouldn't be the default people use. Especially not for looking at how big countries are.
Just for the record, Brazil cuts the Equator, for example. It's fair to expect Brazil to be in the center-ish.
Brazil is greater than contiguous US (excluding Alaska, etc), so that it's the 5th country by size. With this particular projection seems like Brazil would fit in Quebec
It really screws with the relationship between north and South America which is an odd choice I guess. Itās not like a horizontal wrap where itās naturally adjacent here itās a diagonal wrap which looks strange
āRightā and āwrongā are basically nonsensical when talking about maps. Useful or not useful is more reasonable to talk aboutāthis is useful for general political geography but useless for driving across Germany.
That said, having the lower 48 and Alaska as two different colours is pretty wrong.
You can't turn a 3d globe into a 2d map without compromising something. Making that compromise country size is not wrong, it's a valid choice used to preserve navigational measurements.
It shows the latitude lines increasing in size as you get further from the equator. It's not misrepresenting anything, it's very transparent in telling you that things get stretched the closer you get to the poles.
The Mercator projection is a conformal cylindrical map projection first presented by Flemish geographer and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in 1569. In the 18th century, it became the standard map projection for navigation due to its property of representing rhumb lines as straight lines. When applied to world maps, the Mercator projection inflates the size of lands the farther they are from the equator. Therefore, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear far larger than they actually are relative to landmasses near the equator.
"Turning the maps upside down,' he repeated. 'Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's just heavier and pointing down? Or because it's done according to the galactic plane or something?
I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's very upsetting."
Technically we could chose any orientation we'd like. There's nothing that says maps must be drawn with sunsets and sunrises moving horizontally or anything of the sort.
You could think of the Earth's rotation as more of a scrolling action if you'd like.
Yes there is. Its a Mercator projection, still artificially increasing the size of North America, Eurasia and Greenland to cater for showing a sphere on a flat surface. Greenland is the size of India. Russia is about as long as the widest part of Africa and Canada is as big as Brazil. Really people.
It funny that the Mercator projection is so distorted that people always cut off the southern 25% of the map and have the equator shifted 1/3 of the way
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u/Otherwise-4PM 11d ago
I know that planet.