Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (33 page)

Chapter 11
FRONTIER

n.
: a line of division between two countries

Our age today
is doing things of which antiquity did not dream . . .
a new globe has been given to us by the navigators of our time.

—JEAN FERNEL, 1530

I
n Lewis Carroll’s final novel,
Sylvie and Bruno,
a mysterious traveler called “
Mein Herr
” tells the two titular children that his faraway world has advanced the science of mapmaking well beyond our puny limits. He scoffs at the idea that the most detailed map available should be six inches to the mile. On his world, he boasts, “We very soon got to six
yards
to the mile. Then we tried a
hundred
yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of
a mile to the mile
!” But, he has to admit, this ultimate map has never even been spread out, because the farmers protested that it would block their crops’ sunlight due to its amazing size.

Carroll’s notion of a map exactly the size of its territory, in perfect one-to-one detail, inspired Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science” and was further explored by Umberto Eco in a remarkably thorough
1982 essay
. Eco straight-facedly enumerated the logistical problems that such a map would entail: the armies of men required to fold it, for example. He ponders making it transparent, to address the objections of Carroll’s farmers, but realizes that any markings
on the map would have to be opaque, thereby blocking some local sunlight, which could affect the ecology of the territory beneath. And if it did, the map would then become incorrect!

Obviously, Carroll, Borges, and Eco weren’t proposing such a map as a serious cartographic innovation.
^*
Their giant maps are whimsical thought experiments on the tricky relationships between maps and the territories they describe, and affectionate send-ups of map buffs and their love of endless detail. Consider how little the maps these men knew had changed over the centuries: a map in 1870 or 1970 looked more or less like a map in 1570. It was a piece of paper with dark lines standing for coastlines, pastel borders for political divisions, and labeled dots for cities. North was probably up; a grid of thin lines probably represented latitude and longitude. Except for the sad dearth of mermaids or cannibals engraved in the corners, little had changed in five hundred years.

But
we live in
a strange, shifting time for maps. The sudden onslaught of digital cartography and location-based technologies has changed, for the first time in centuries, our fundamental idea of what a map looks like. Twentieth-century map buffs absorbed in an atlas may have envisioned the page as a window into another world, but today’s maps literally act like windows, not pictures: we peer into them. We can scroll them and rotate and zoom them. We can switch them from road maps to terrain maps and back again or overlay them onto jewel-like, cloudless photographs of our planet from space. Perhaps they even move when we do or show us nearby friends traipsing across them in real time, a children’s fantasy idea when it appeared in a Harry Potter book just a decade ago but now a commonplace reality. It will take a generational shift to complete this definitional shift—after all, my Pictionary doodle of the word “telephone” still has a twisty receiver cord and maybe even a rotary dial, to the bewilderment of my
cell phone–drawing children—but the change is well under way. For better or for worse, maps aren’t what they used to be.

And Carroll and Borges would be flabbergasted to see that the biggest game changer has been an actual implementation of their impossible life-sized map. Geobrowser globes like NASA’s World Wind and Microsoft’s Bing Maps platform may be virtual, not life-sized, but their aim is the same as “Mein Herr’s”: to represent an entire territory—the whole world, in fact—in exhaustive one-to-one detail, without any of the selective simplification of paper maps. In many ways, these globes now contain
more
data than you could glean from the actual world with just a measuring stick or a camera. (Even the paradox-loving Lewis Carroll never proposed a map twice as exhaustive as the territory it depicted!)

Google Earth wasn’t the first virtual globe, but it’s certainly the industry leader now, with more than 700 million installations worldwide. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to believe that the technology began life as a lowly video-game demo. In 1996, some Silicon Graphics engineers were looking for a way to show off the new texture-rendering abilities of their company’s quarter-million-dollar workstations. Inspired by the famous 1968 short film
Powers of Ten,
which depicts the Earth at scales from the galactic to the microscopic, they produced “Space-to-Your-Face,” a flyover demo in which the viewer zoomed down from a high Earth orbit to find a Nintendo 64 sitting on a pedestal atop the Matterhorn, with an SGI graphics chip inside. Three years later, Chris Tanner showed the video to Brian McClendon; both were part of a group of engineers who had left SGI to found their own game technology start-up, called Intrinsic Graphics. “The day I saw it,” remembers McClendon, now vice president of engineering for Google Geo, “I said, ‘We should start a separate company to do this.’ The problem was, we weren’t funded yet for the first company!”

As soon as Intrinsic had funding for its game library, the founders did spin off a new company, called Keyhole, to focus on geographic applications of their 3-D technology. The post-Internet-bubble period was a terrible time to found a start-up, so Keyhole told potential investors it was working on a tool for the real estate and travel industries, a
way to let clients preview a property before renting. In reality, though, the Keyhole team knew what was compelling about its new product, and it wasn’t beach condos. It was leaping through the stratosphere like a Mercury astronaut, like the boy with the seven-league boots from the fairy tale, and coming to rest, in one perfect fluid motion, in your own backyard. Their secret plan was to expand their little Realtor tool into an entire planet:
Earth.com
, in effect.

The watershed moment came in March 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. McClendon, as it happens, had gone to junior high with CNN’s vice president of engineering, and the news network bought rights to Keyhole’s software in order to display 3-D views of the military campaign. Home viewers had never seen anything like these animated maps and fly-throughs and began buying copies for their home PCs, even though the software still sold for seventy dollars. The servers in Keyhole’s tiny office could barely stand up to the demand, and employees were constantly running to Fry’s, the local home electronics chain, to buy more hardware. A year later, the Keyhole team showed their software to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the demo was so compelling that an acquisition offer came the very next day, even though Google was in the middle of its hectic IPO. Keyhole’s aerial imagery soon began appearing on Google’s new map page, and for a while, Google Maps became a dreamy utopia, the vast majority of its users idly browsing the globe from space, not printing out driving directions from point A to point B. Two months later, when Google finally released Keyhole’s application for free as Google Earth, demand exploded. “We nearly took down Google a couple times,” laughs McClendon. “We actually had to turn off downloads of Google Earth because it was so popular. The first six days, it was nip and tuck.”

When I met McClendon at the National Geographic Bee, he invited me to stop by his Mountain View, California, offices for “the nickel tour” if I was ever in the neighborhood. He was probably just being polite and had no way of knowing the level of my obsession with digital maps; I can spend days happily adrift over the pixelized Siberian taiga or gleefully rotating the 3-D buildings of the Manhattan skyline.
During the first couple of months of Google Earth’s release, there were probably plenty of weekends when I spent more time on Google Earth than I did on our Earth. To a map obsessive like me, this casual invite was like a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

The Google Geo building isn’t staffed by Oompa-Loompas, but it does have a few of the high-tech quirks I remember from past visits to the Google campus. When I step out of the elevator, the first thing I see is a foam-core map icon the size of a parking meter informing me that Al Gore’s favorite spot in the Bay Area is the headquarters of Current TV, a cable network founded by, well, Al Gore. (The building is littered with these overgrown versions of the little pushpins that mark destinations on Google’s online maps, remnants of a past celebrity promotion.) The oil paintings on the wall are by Bill Guffey, a rural Kentucky artist who paints cityscapes of places he’s never been, based only on Google Street View photographs. This floor of the building has an ocean theme; surfboards line the walls, and in the common area outside the conference room where McClendon and I are chatting, a few programmers are working on their laptops while lounging on a giant plaster whale.

Brian McClendon is a tall, soft-spoken man in his midforties, with a deeply creased brow that always makes him look a little more concerned than he actually is. Maybe it’s a sign of the unusual burden he carries as Google Earth’s head engineer. After all, I’ve never met anyone in charge of his own planet before. You may scoff that Google Earth isn’t a
real
planet, but consider: its architecture contains
hundreds of terabytes
of data. (A terabyte is equivalent to one thousand gigabytes; the entire text of every book in the Library of Congress could be stored in just
twenty terabytes or so
.) It’s a mammoth responsibility, surely more complex than being the person in charge of, say, some uninhabitable iceball like Uranus or Neptune. But rank does have its privileges: the center of Google Earth (that is, the exact center of the map when the application opens) is an apparently random apartment building in Lawrence, Kansas—a secret salute to McClendon, who grew up in that very building.

Overseeing his digital dominion certainly isn’t getting any easier. The library of aerial photographs that coats Google Earth—taken
from satellites, planes, hot-air balloons, even camera-equipped kites—is growing exponentially. “All the pictures that have ever been taken are less than what we’re going to have next year,” McClendon tells me.
^*
The eventual goal is centimeter-per-pixel imagery for the entire globe: every square centimeter of the (real) Earth’s surface would be its own pixel on Google Earth, not unlike Lewis Carroll’s imaginary map. That goal is still more than twenty years away, McClendon guesses, since there are still places on Google Earth where the resolution is fifteen meters per pixel, more than a thousand times chunkier. And even once all three dimensions are sorted out, engineers must still grapple with the fourth dimension: time. Google Earth has assembled a library of historical photographs, so you can watch the years advance from orbit, but there’s the future to worry about as well—the Sisyphean task of keeping the map up to date. Users can already watch real-time features like weather and traffic cross the surface of Google Earth, but, says McClendon, “The much harder truth is human truth. Does this business still exist? Is that a phone number? Is the location of the doorway here? These are the questions we have to get right if you’re going to run the Google Maps navigation in your phone and get to the right business, which is effectively what pays the bills.”

Google’s mapping arm is a big moneymaker for the Internet giant; McClendon points out that 90 percent of all retail spending still happens offline, and that’s powered by geographic technology like mapping and local search. But Google Maps and Earth have also become a lightning rod for geopolitical controversy. China might crack down
because of Google “mistakes” like not labeling Taiwan as one of its provinces, or Nicaragua might use a misdrawn border in Google Maps as a rationale for
a military incursion
into Costa Rican territory. Sometimes Google will buy third-party images that have fabricated or blurred certain sensitive areas. Most famously, after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory stayed stubbornly fuzzy long after Google had found alternate sources that unblurred other sensitive spots, like the White House and the Capitol. Google finally secured uncensored photography of Chez Cheney and pushed it onto an Earth update as soon as they could—which happened to be Obama’s inauguration day. (“I would have done it sooner had I found the pixels sooner!” McClendon still insists.) Scuffles like these have forced Google Earth to begin acting, in some ways, as an actual nation-state, negotiating with governments and even sending its own representative to meetings of the UN committee on place-names.