Imagine what you'll know, tomorrow... (Maps)

I start today with a quote from the 1997 movie, "Men in Black". At this point in the movie, Will Smith's character has just learned about the aliens that are living on earth and deciding whether to join the ranks of managing them.

Jay (Will Smith): Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it.

Kay(Tommy Lee Jones):  A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew... the Earth was the center of the universe.

Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat.

And fifteen minutes ago, you knew that people were alone on this planet.

Imagine what you'll know... tomorrow.

I thought of this part of the movie while at the German Historical Museum with Jason and Sara.  The German Historical Museum is probably the most comprehensive history museums in Berlin.  Here is a rough outline of the past 2500 years in the area that is Germany and on the European Continent as described with text and artifacts in this museum: 

•  Celtic people existed in Germany in BC times
•  Romans (including the emporors like Claudius, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, etc) have a complex and tight history of the first 200 or so years after the birth of Jesus
•  Around 500, Christianity was no longer a crime (though many other religions then became crimes - sigh...) and Constantinople (Istanbul) was the center of the Greek/Roman culture that dominated the continent. 
•  Around 800 AD, it was the heyday of the French, with Charlemagne as their leader.
• 1050-1400s was the Middle ages, characteristics include feudal society, religious crusades, the black plague, and aristocracy
•  1400-1500s saw a Renaissance of science, questioning religion, exploration of the world - which is my favorite part (and tie to the movie script above) because at this point the maps of the world seem to begin to be filled in, see below:   

Globe (1492) with no American continent on it: 

1537 Painting of Christ with a Globe (I guess now globes are Ok):

Map with the first corner of the American continent on it (date?)

After much exploring the continent is much better represented:

These maps are SO intriguing to me because they show a progression of our understanding of our world.  Certainly, we take for granted our google maps now - thanks to the space program and satellite imagery - and you can wistfully dream about going to Hawaii without having to go to the trouble of discovering it.  However, for quite a long time, people only had maps for where they had been, and "hearsay" in the form of the descriptions and drawings (not digital cameras) from the people who had been anywhere else.  We are more willing to take a 5 week voyage to Hawaii if we knew it was there in the first place - and that tripadvisor could recommend a cheap but comfortable hotel and restaurant.   

Take this relative enthusiasm for exploring and mapping our planet and apply it to the 2010s and you get our cosmology and astrophysics fields of science.  These bright people are mapping well beyond our solar system, pondering how it works in an effort to get to new places more quickly.  Instead of figuring out how to tack against trade winds amidst a gigantic and unforgiving ocean, they are contemplating how to bend space-time against the nothingness that is space itself.  

Looking deep into space, going to the moon or to mars may seem like a stupid, expensive idea now... but what if the Monarchs of Catholic Spain had told that to Christopher Columbus or to Amerigo Vespucci?  We Americans simply wouldn't exist.  The world as we know it now would be wholly different, and likely more primitive.  The whole Middle ages was (to quote Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1) "a huge setback for Earth's civilization".  As advanced as we humans consider ourselves now, people even 200 years from now will think us to be stupid and ignorant.  

I'm slowly reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson on my [graduation present from Brian] Kindle, and I really like this quote: 

• "We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago.
• So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs—people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick.
• Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us."

In the short period of 200 years, the society that would be presented is so foreign to anyone living now, to the point of being ridiculous and embarrassing.  I'm pretty sure being complimented on my primary mode of transportation, horses, (bicycles? cars?) and my "mastery of whale oil" (helloooo, electricity?) would embarrass me and my belonging to the civilization.  Heck, I'm embarrassed for the human race when they think that bulldozing forests for suburbs won't have any effect on our drinking water... but that's a problem of today; and a behavior to be scoffed at by people in 2200.

A person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.
Imagine what you'll know, tomorrow...