Wow. I can't believe my perspective of the world is that distorted. It makes me want to only look at it in 3D. If we've all mainly looked at Mercator projections our whole lives our sense of where everything is relative to everything else and what direction is completely off.

People complain about the proportional sizing of Mercator but the sense of direction it gives us is completely broken. I think the average person knows it's off and people think there is an error factor to consider that a really straight like might be a little squiggly. But nope. This made me realize the Mercator gives pretty much zero accurate sense of direction if real distance is involved.

So would there be turning involved still orrrrr?

Can we have a map projection/grid system where this uh, great circle, is the prime meridian, defines the new 'poles' via another 90 degree orthogonal great circle that touches both actual poles?

[PROCEEDS INTO HURRICANE]

Yeah, it's going through the most dangerous water passage in the world IIRC, between South America and Antarctica. We do go through it fairly regularly at this point, but it's still not "safe."

Sorry, can't hear you down here in my submarine

The only place you can't sail is directly into the wind. You can go all the other places eventually but it's a lot of back and forth.

"sail"

Especially going the wrong direction!

It'd be less bad on the return trip, but then you're fighting the trade winds and the Canary current instead.

Just rename it as Pacific Ocean and voila, no storm hence the name!

Can you, though? You'd have to squeeze through the narrow English Channel first, and that would probably require some turns.

Nah. I've come to believe it's shaped like Dick Cheney's black, twisted heart.

The earth is obviously a sac of 1 dimensional space.

Done!

https://rakonczay.com/en/szolo-transzatlanti-kenuzas/

I volunteer— not like you go through most dangerous sea passage in the world or anything…

I went down a rabbit hole about globes and maps recently

Basically, to find the shortest distant between two places on a globe (a 'straight' line), imagine a hoop or circle round the earth that cuts it exactly in half, and rotate it until it passes through both places (still cutting it exactly in half)

That's a great circle.

There are 2d map projections that are built around this, but they only work when one of the locations is at the center of the map. So it could show the shortest distance from, say, London to anywhere with a straight line, but it wouldn't work for a route not including London

"Locally straight" is just a mathsy way of saying "it's straight if you zoom in a bunch".

Another fun one is to ask someone if they were to take off in an airplane from Miami and fly due south, which South American countries would they fly over?

The answer is none of them. You end up missing the entire continent because you are too far west.

I looked at that on Google Earth, now I'm uncomfortable in two directions...

I tried replicating this with Google Earth, but once you get past the halfway mark it tries to flip around and draw a line in the other direction. Guestimating it by drawing two lines seems to work ok, but I can't find a way to avoid Australia, while shifting the start and end points between northern and southern NS and BC, and keeping the midpoint either just missing Africa or just missing Antarctica.

That'd be awesome. That probably wouldn't work because it would take 100 years for California to build their first high speed rail

If it doesn't look right, change the way the data is presented and projected.

A great circle. It only works on a globe.

It’s a geodesic; a straight line in spherical geometry.

30% wouldn't be a lot if the land were all even-sized islands, but it's all in big chunks; most of which is in a pair of unbroken masses that runs from more or less the North Pole to the Drake Passage. There aren't any straight lines from the British Isles to Hawaii or to Indonesia, or even to Australia if I'm doing the geography correctly; nor are there any straight lines from Madagascar to Greenland, or from Iceland to anywhere in the Pacific, at least by liquid water.

Add in the fact that we're not used to seeing the roundness of the Earth from any perspective other than along the equator and split on the date line, and it's really just something that puts two things into a category together that don't seem like they should be connected.

It's like the fact that Mercury is (on average) the closest planet to Venus, but also to Earth, Jupiter, even Neptune. Ok, yes, that shouldn't be a surprise, because it's the closest to the sun and the sun is always in the middle; but it's not the way we usually look at the Solar System, and also we know that Neptune is so far away from Mercury that it's mind-boggling that Mercury could ever be the closest planet to it. It's very unintuitive based on our usual perspective and existing understanding.

Well, yeah..if you want a line that is straight in 3 dimensions then any point on earth at sea level to any other point earth at sea level will require you to go below the surface of the planet.

Y'all, I found the Flat Earther!

It's not cursed, it's bussin frfr