An OpenStreetMap view of the world

I reused the hardware for it for my lemmy instance so it’s down now, but for a while I ran an openstreetmap instance. OSM has a big map that shows all the continents. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see countries. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see provinces. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see cities. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see neighborhoods. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see individual buildings.

And this incredibly detailed map of the entire planet right down to individual buildings doesn’t know about the stories of the people in those buildings, it doesn’t know about individual trees, individual blades of grass, of the bugs in the soil, of the nematodes that are to the bugs as the bugs are to us, to the bacteria and archaea, to the viruses, to the molecules, to the atoms, to the subatomic particles. And that’s just one map of one planet in a solar system, in one galaxy, of so many it’ll break your brain seeing all the different galaxies they found out there.

And at every scale, you see what’s in front of you and think it’s the most important thing, but there’s everything you can’t see at the scale you’re at, and all the other things at all the other scales, but it’s easy to become fixated on one thing in one place at one scale and forget the universe as a whole is a lot of things all at once.