We can now quickly and easily comprehend how humanity's perception of the universe has changed over the past two millennia thanks to Reddit user PisseGuri82.
Humanity has been aware of the appearance of the globe for around 190 years.
Or, more precisely, humanity has been aware of the dimensions and shapes of the land masses that rise above the waters, as well as how they relate to one another.
We have all grown up seeing visual representations of this knowledge in the form of the common world map, which is obviously deformed and typically created using the Mercator projection because it is impossible to accurately transform a three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional image.
The global map used by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, Egypt, "the first to employ positions of latitude and longitude based on astronomical observations," in 150 AD, serves as the starting point for this Shape of the World infographic.
Although those findings didn't instantly result in anything approximating the map we remember from our elementary school walls, they must have been an advance over the pure speculation and guesswork utilized in earlier periods.
Medieval world maps, like the one seen on the diagram made by an unidentified French monk in 1050, were intended "not to explain the world but the Bible."
As a result, it concentrates on locations from the Bible like Jerusalem, the Red Sea, and even the Garden of Eden.
A little more than a century later, Muhammed al-Idrisi of Italy used a map that calculated distances using information from travelers and merchants on how long it took them to go to the far-off places they visited.
Although it includes "recognizable and detailed Eurasia and Northern Africa," the rest of the planet is only a rough approximation (and, needless to add, scarcely full).
We only reach a world map that would resemble the ones we use today in 1529, with the empire-minded Spanish Crown's official and secret "master map," updated "by Spanish explorers on pain of death."
Advances like the Mercator projection, which was created in the Netherlands in 1569 and improved in England 30 years later, as well as the marine chronometer, which was created in 1778, led to further innovations.
The last map in the graph, an Adolf Stieler creation from 1832 in which "only the unknown Polar areas are missing or shown erroneously," may resemble modern globe maps nearly identically.
Our ability to view the Earth is still evolving every day thanks to the increasingly precise digital maps and satellite imagery that are now included in our globe maps. Yet progress has undoubtedly not ceased.
In 2000 years, our descendants might find themselves in a setting we would hardly recognize.
