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by devnull255
1404 days ago
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I really loved this episode.
Especially when someone pointed out the fallacy of believing north = up and south = down, which is that way only because we live in a world where most map projections on a wall show north as up and south as down.
It doesn't look like that at all from outer space. |
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Which side is up really depends on how you imagine the earth going around the sun. If you look at the earth from its side as it revolves around the sun and you choose to depict the earth moving counter clockwise, the north is up. If you consider the earth revolving around the sun clockwise, south is up. The earth is at an angle, of course, but that angle isn't enough to really change the definitions of up and down.
North being up makes logical sense when you consider that around 87% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere. We generally read top to bottom and the populated parts of the earth are often what we're really interested in.
There's also the choice of "north" that matters. There are many definitions for what constitutes as the north since the magnetic poles don't stay in a single place on the surface and the top/bottom of the spinning planet isn't anywhere near the magnetic poles. Then there's the north star moving as we move through the galaxy, making any north determined by celestial navigation questionable over time; currently Polaris is commonly used as the pole star, but on humanity's time scale that's a relatively recent (±1300 years) development.