A billion maps

Here we are on planet earth, a rock suspended in space and time, hurtling around the sun at more than sixty thousand  miles per hour, racing through the universe at God knows what speed and relative to what?  Who knows?

And on this earth there are six or seven or eight billion people, who can tell, but let’s agree on seven billion souls with different dreams and aspirations, hopes and fears, successes and failures sharing this lonely corner of the galaxy.

And every month on this connected earth there are one billion Google maps created, every one different, all specific to the individual that defined them.  One billion different trips to the pizza shop, one billion different trips to the post office or one billion trips to see a friend.

And on these maps, all one billion of them, are trapped the stories of the seven billion humans, each of us seared in to their grid points, captured in their coordinates in a moment, a defined moment that is never to be repeated again.  And on each of those maps there are a billion of us thinking about creating a map and so it goes on, ad infinitum.

Every second, each of us is captured over three hundred and eighty times on a Google map and by the end of that second there are over two and a half thousand billion possible views of how the world was and therefore could be.  And each request for the cartographer’s art spins off billions more, growing exponentially until it has constructed that infinite barrel of monkeys that will have created all worlds, all possibilities to coexist like the endless series of images captured in between parallel mirrors.

And we will exist within each of these worlds interacting with each other, getting on with our quotidian lives in blissful ignorance of all of ourselves in all of our universes.