My memories of math classes involving the Cartesian coordinate system are probably much fonder than they need to be. The first time I grasped the concept of coordinates, playing with single-digit pairs of numbers to change to location of a dot, made me feel for a naive minute that the world would always make this much sense. Drawing my first hyperbola, as the teacher said "don't worry, the first one always comes out ugly", and jotting down coordinates of places I wanted to go to from an atlas -I figured that knowing their latitude would come in handy someday- were simple activities that, though limited, allowed me to really savor the crispness and the lucidity of an idea.
Last month I came across an article in the Atlantic, one of my favorite periodicals, titled "The Places You'll Go". It discussed the marvelous advances that technology, and more specifically a user-friendly interface approach to GPS applications, has brought to mapping in general. People are interested in locations, distances, alternate routes, and changes in landscape. Geography has succeeded in going mainstream, and is now, much to the envy of Geology, almost as cool as Gastronomy. Why? Because it's no longer about the geography of somewhere else, an obscure mountain or acres of sand that extend on and on sometimes without even so much as a whisper. Now it's about the geography of your life.
I want to imagine the conversation with Rene Descartes as someone breaks the news of what GPS does for us in the 21st century. I can imagine the curious, eloquent, morning-hating mathematician asking why would we need a head count of all the places within a two mile radius that serve lattes. I can almost see him cringing at the flat voice that dictates every single turn like a neurotic drone and lets out something suspiciously similar to frustration when you ignore its command, but I can also see him marveling at how his two intersecting axes made zooming into a Brazilian neighborhood possible.
There is much that could be said of the genius of Google, of the service that cartographers throughout history did for a world that once upon a time could not fathom the other edge of an ocean. As a scientist, I applaud and encourage everything and everyone that seeks to responsibly stretch a good idea beyond its obvious means. As a user, I'm glad I was not left to depend on my own sense of orientation as I drove across the deep South looking for a Hilton- and yes, at some point I was even grateful for the neurotic drone.
But here is a confession. I worry, quite unreasonably maybe, about this very possible, almost imminent future, in which we, the human race, will cease to experience the feeling of being lost. And feeling lost can be a terrible thing. We are confronted with fear and uncertainty. But feeling lost, both physically and metaphorically, led us to finding things and places we were not looking for and drove us to try harder to understand the vastness that surrounds us. More than just being nostalgic about the notion of being a nomadic wanderer, I wonder about the future humans, those individuals that will perhaps have a facebook account created upon their birth and will use MapQuest to find the principal's office on their first day of kindergarten. I wonder if they will forget where these accurate, high-definition maps came from. If they will ever imagine or experience what it is like to not know what lies in a far away land, to feel anxious about this, to gorge the answer when they find it and never take it for granted. I wonder if they will take pride in drawing their first hyperbola.
How wonderful is it going to be having a world with its doors open to the curious. I just hope that the wanderers can keep stumbling around it, to then see it for what it is, and never cease to be in awe of it.
