Wanderlust World Wanderlust World The earth is a sphere and maps are flat. This is a problem for anyone trying to make a map of any large part of the earth. The standard map of the entire earth works somewhat because there is no land at the North Pole, and the land at the South Pole shows up as a strip of land at the bottom of the map. Only a few thousand researchers live at the South Pole and they are not protesting the odd distortion. There is a version of the world map that is a series of curved triangles that could be pasted onto a curved globe. This representation is also unsatisfying because the earth just doesn't seem like a set of curved triangles. The best world map is the "Cloudless Earth," which is a globe several meters in diameter assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (at a total cost of millions). It was made by pasting thousands of satellite pictures of the earth taken on cloudless days. It is a good solution--except for the price.
Maps that are small enough can treat the earth as flat. Small enough local neighborhoods certainly seem flat. Even with this assumption, there are mountains and valleys. All maps share the same problem: you are reducing a three- dimensional object (a piece of the earth) to a two-dimensional representational picture (a map). When you do this you can lose a lot of information. If you reduced a two-dimensional object (a photograph, for example) to a one-dimensional representational (a line) you would certainly lose a lot of detail. Dimension reduction always involves loss of detail.
Even with maps or areas small enough to contain no earth curvature or troublesome topological features, there is the problem of time. The earth changes in the time it takes to do the research and then draw the map. The American scientist David Gelernter has proposed a concept called "mirror worlds" where millions of sensors are planted in an area of interest and all the sensors feed into an electronic map that is constantly updated to show the area at the present moment. This solution comes with a hefty price tag.
Even without the problems of dimensional projection, topological irregularities and time, there would be another problem: granularity. Granularity has to do with the extent to which something is broken down into smaller parts (like granules). There is a Borges story where a king orders a map made that is exactly as big as his kingdom. Of course, such a map would be useless, but the point is that if the map is smaller than the territory--and it is always a lot smaller--some detail is going to be left out. The real skill of the map maker is in knowing what to leave out. The difficulties of cartography will always exist as long as maps are smaller than the territories they represent.