Redefining Blank Spaces

...At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth...

But not so much anymore. I remember as a child my fascination with looking at the world. I'd xerox maps from books at the library and take them home to a box full of binders, the binders in turn full of articles from National Geographic and grainy photocopies of topographical maps and the (still grainy) color copies of temples and deep-sea fish.

Yesterday an article came out about the sharpest ever satellite imagery of the Earth, compiling 40 terabytes of data: every square foot of the planet.

I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this.

Part of me embraces the conquering of the unknown, which is, after all, what drove Ferdinand Magellan and Rene Caille to go into the blank spaces. Why Abraham Ortelius compiled the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

The other side of me, the romantic, the poet, looks upon the loss of blank spaces with remorse. Adventurers went into the empty spots on maps, thereby making them known. This was what I wanted to do; at eight, I did not predict Google Earth. And so, now, with all the world mapped, with aerial shots of the entire planet, what now is the place for an adventurer? Is just "being there" all we have to settle for?

It seems that half the allure of pointing to a spot on a map and just going, is the thought that, climbing into a canyon, happening upon a glacial lake, standing between two lines of contour in the middle of nowhere, is knowing that, just maybe, no one had ever been to that place before. I could stumble upon the ruins of a temple in Laos that nobody had seen in... centuries, perhaps, but if some schmuck is staring at a computer screen, looking at the same place I'm at through Google Earth, is some of the pleasure lost?

I'm not sure.

That's not to say that my heart doesn't race with excitement every time a rickety prop plane drops me in the middle of nowhere and then flies off, leaving me with no line of communication to the outside world. But my childhood was full of searching for a map to a place, and reveling in the occasion that there just wasn't one, that there were some places whose secrets were still held in the, if not blank, then, blurry spaces.

But we live in the Information Age. So, then, if we've Flickr'd every square inch, if you can follow my trip through The Congos on Twittervision, if we've got nifty little Flash apps like Earth Guide to fill in every last blank pixel remaining and then finish it off with a chart of human emotion, what's left? Space, it would seem, is the next logical step, but not for me. Sadly, what William S. Burroughs said in the late 1960s still seems to be very true today:


"It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live." These words inspired early navigators when the vast frontier of unknown seas opened to their sails in the fifteenth century. Space is the new frontier. Is this frontier open to youth? I quote from the London Express, Dec 30, 1968: "If you are a fit young man under twenty-five with lightning reflexes who fears nothing in heaven or on the earth and has a keen appetite for adventure don't bother to apply for the job of astronaut." They want "cool dads" trailing wires to the "better half" from an aqualung. Doctor Paine of the Space Center in Houston says: "This flight was a triumph for the squares of this world who work with slide rules and aren't ashamed to say a prayer now and then." Is this the great adventure of space? Are these men going to take the step into regions literally unthinkable in verbal terms? To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behnd: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.


In the end, all this means is simply the need to redefine the notion of Blank Spaces. No longer do our maps have blank spaces in the traditional sense, no inscription of Here Be Dragons. Instead, technology and our visual conquering of the world necessitates that Blank Spaces exist on a personal level. My blank spaces may differ from yours:   I have never seen this island, or watched the sunrise from atop that mountain, and as such, they are blank spaces to me.

Google Earth, GlobCover, et al. is Ptolemy's Atlas - reliable only as far as one's known universe - speculation and second-hand accounts are meaningless and serve only as a vague guide to one's own adventures towards those places and beyond. All the better if there's no reference at all.

Chances are, I'll never discover a lost city, or find myself stranded on an uncharted island, or stumble upon Shangri La. Where my childhood dreams have been dashed, I have found in their place the knowledge that, while some armchair traveler (much like touristas) may see the place, it takes a certain amount of dedication to experience it. A cruise ship through the Kenai Fjord is not the same as kayaking it, and no amount of maps, be they paper or pixel, will replace the sense of accomplishment felt by long nights in airports, hassles at the border, the chill of thin mountain air, and feet on the ground.