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There’s not much that Google can do about how its maps are used, but at least their very popularity provides a safeguard against the map-maker itself, whether it’s Google or Microsoft or Yahoo!, trying to promote any sinister agenda with its maps. After all, every change they make to their data happens in front of millions of eyeballs. When mistakes are introduced (or even, if you prefer, when shady cartographic kowtowing takes place), locals notice and bloggers squawk and problems get fixed. In 2009, towns in the Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh were briefly given Chinese names on Google Maps; when horrified Indians reacted, Google admitted its mistake the same day and reverted to the Hindi names.

Brian McClendon calls Google’s Borgesian dream of a centimeter-per-pixel real-time world map “the end of resolution,” and the phrase shocks me a little with its finality, because to me it implies the end of all mapmaking, the end of all discovery. It’s one of the central paradoxes of maps: they make the world larger by showing us new vistas, but then they order and bean-count those new vistas into submission, and the world gets a little smaller as well. If Google Earth becomes the perfect map, the map of everything, why ever draw another one?

McClendon disagrees; he argues that virtual globes have actually led to a renaissance of discovery. After all, much of the aerial imagery that Google posts, old and new, has never been seen by human eyeballs before, and he’s putting it in front of millions of curious armchair travelers. “There was so much of it that it was never visually inspected down to the bottom pixels. And sometimes there are things there at the bottom that were never known before.”

In 1868, the element helium was discovered, revolutionizing children’s birthday parties forever. Though Earth has large reserves of helium underground—some U.S. natural gas deposits are as much as 7 percent helium—the scientists who first discovered evidence of helium found it not under their feet but through spectroscopic analysis from one hundred million miles away. Helium was discovered on the Sun fifteen years before we found it here on Earth.* In much the same way, scientists and amateurs alike are nowadays discovering Earth’s hidden secrets on Google Earth before they turn up on our real home planet. Meteor-impact craters in Western Australia, a Roman villa in Parma, the ruins of a lost Amazonian city that may have inspired the legends of El Dorado, a remote forest in Mozambique where hundreds of new species of plants and animals live—all these things were never on any map until they were spotted from space by Google Earth surfers.† In 2008, a team of German scientists studied Google images of more than eight thousand grazing cattle and three thousand wild deer in pastures all over the world. The vast majority, they were surprised to see, graze standing north to south, aligned to the Earth’s poles. It was the first evidence that large mammals can sense and use the Earth’s magnetic fields the way that migrating birds and turtles do, and it had been right under our noses all the time. People have watched livestock graze for millennia, but before Google Earth, nobody had ever noticed that they were all facing the same way. “I think you’ll end up with both scientific and amateur studies solving problems that were intractable ten years ago,” says McClendon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we discover more in the next twenty years than we ever did.”

But the Google Earth team believes its software has changed maps in a more fundamental way than just adding detail. Because its globe looks like a real place, it blurs the distinction between map and territory in a way that would make Borges or Eco dizzy. When you see something on Google Earth, says McClendon, “You don’t debate it. You don’t say, ‘Is this somebody’s representation? Did they draw this picture?’ It’s not somebody’s version of reality. It is reality.”

Map deconstructionists would have a field day with that claim! The trend in geography over the last thirty years