Mapping What You Cannot See, Cannot Know, Cannot Visit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo When I was a boy I had a globe. I could take it in my hands, rest it on my lap, give it a spin and look down on Africa, Europe, North America and Asia spinning by. In 1961 (I was 13), cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin left the planet and got high enough to look down on the real Earth spinning beneath him. He was the first (followed by Alan Shepard and later John Glenn ) to gaze with his own eyes on what we had over the centuries so carefully mapped, drawn and imagined. From 160 miles up, you can take in the whole boot of Italy, the Red Sea narrowing to Suez, North America tapering down to the isthmus at Panama, and the amazing thing — amazing to me, anyway — is that what we'd spent 2,000 years drawing in our heads was actually there. We'd gotten it pretty much right! Of course, you say. Cartography is a science. What it describes should be there. And yet, I find myself a little surprised by our ability to measure, to extrapolate, to conjoin, to build a