mind. blown.

Look familiar? It's the world, of course, the map we've always known. Known as the Mercator map, it was designed for the specific purpose of navigation, not for portraying the world in an accurate size, shape, and distance ratio. The straight lines on the Mercator map represent lines of constant compass bearing, and distortions of size, shape, and relative distance were distorted for the ease of navigation. If a navigator in the 17th century wanted to sail from England to New England, all he'd have to do is draw a line between the two locations, and he'd know which compass direction to sail to reach his destination. Never intended as a wall map, it nevertheless grew in popularity as an accurate representation of our world. Critics pointed out the distortions, and in 1973 German historian and journalist Arno Peters came out with a new map that, he said, fixed some of these problems: although failing to be an "accurate" map in the sense that no rectangular, one-dimensional map can represent accurately a spherical object, it nonetheless brings clarity to the relative size and shapes of the different landmasses.

It looks different, doesn't it? It's almost an entirely different way of looking at the world. Although not without its flaws, this map does bring to light some of the problems with the Mercator map. Take Greenland, for example. In the Mercator projection, Greenland and China look the same size; but China is almost four times as large! Not to harp on Greenland, but again: in the Mercator map, Greenland seems to be about the same size as Africa, yet Africa's landmass is actually fourteen times larger. The Peters projection seeks to remedy this problem, and its most outspoken advocates add a political twist: the Mercator projection, they claim, is steeped in Eurocentrism, focused on bloating Europe's prominence in the world at the expense of everything else. This is a critique from hindsight, and it's inconsistent: the map distortions are there because of the purpose of the Mercator projection, that being a navigation tool, not a Euro-supremacist agenda. The Peters map, by portraying relative sizes of all the landmasses, emphasizes how small Europe and North America actually are. South America and Africa are massive, and this, they say, is a non-racist projection (though one must question this sentiment, for a projection that comes about as a reaction to an apparent political dilemma is by nature political itself).  

But for the sake of being mind-blown yet again, what would the world look like if we looked at the Peters map upside-down? Remember that the earth is spinning through our solar system without any real "up" or "down"; north and south exist only in reference to earth's poles. One can look down upon the earth from any position in space and see "what it really looks like", and looking at it "upside-down" is no less legitimate than looking at it "right-side up".