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One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most civilizations tend to put themselves at
by r3trohack3r 3y ago
One of my favorite talks by Carl Sagan talks about the geocentric conceit, and how one manifestation of that is how most civilizations tend to put themselves at the center of the map.
There are certainly some good reasons to put yourself there. Most planning for your civilization that calls for a map is going to use “home” as a starting point and you’ll go “out” from there.
But it’s still a fun observation.
I liked the talk so much I set it to music and listen to it at the gym:
https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html
- retrac 3y agoThat reminds me of this contemporary Chinese world map: https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_5360.jpg https://priorprobability.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/img_536... It's meant for shipping lanes, mostly. So it puts China in the centre. The shortest route to European and American markets are approximately straight lines. And the Panama canal is at the edge of the world.
- yorwba 3y agoIf you look closely, it's actually putting the Maldives in the center. And the description in the bottom right doesn't mention shipping lanes at all (which anyways would go overland if you were to simply draw straight lines on this map) but instead mentions that a latitudinally equal-differential polyconic projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differential_polyconic_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitudinally_equal-differenti... is used to prevent the distortion near the poles that appears in commonly-used maps.
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- geraldwhen 3y agoI saw a Japanese map recently and it took me a full minute to understand what I was looking at. Japan was at the center, and North America was on the right.
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- jlawson 3y agoThe 'geocentric conceit' thing is just a moralized overinterpretation of people trying to be practical. Obviously if you're traveling out from and back to one place over and over, the most sensible thing to do is to put that place near map center. It makes it easy to see all the other places in relation to your home, because how they relate to your home is what's relevant to you. Those are the distances and routes you want to be the most clear. When taking a sphere and mapping it to a rectangle there is no way to not do this - somewhere has to be the middle so you might as well choose somewhere practical. Sagan like many others often sells morality porn - the feeling of "I know better than those ignorant less moral ones". A lot of entertainment is like this these days.
- Kye 3y agoHe doesn't often do anything. He died in 1996. I've read a few of his books and I don't get this impression at all.
- thanatos519 3y agoThat's why I put this map on my kid's wall: https://www.natgeomaps.com/re-world-classic-pacific-centered https://www.natgeomaps.com/re-world-classic-pacific-centered We live in Europe where the default map is Atlantic-centric so I wanted to make sure he got a different perspective.
- bazoom42 3y agoGive him a globe! I remember playing with a globe as kid and trying to position it so I could see only water. But that is just one option.
- bazoom42 3y agoThe geocentric model does not put humans in the center though. At best you could argue it puts humans relatively close to the center, but the geocentric model also operates with a smaller solar system. And the implied “closer to the center is better” is not justified. E.g. Dante literally puts the devil in the middle of the universe.