As an addendum to my note on the influence of cosmology on cartography, a quote from Peter Schwartz:
Cosmology actually matters in the long run. In the geocentric universe, you did one set of things. Suddenly when the sun is at the centre and you’re going around the sun, you start answering those questions differently, you imagine different possibilities, the future looks very different. And of course, once you discover that the sun is only one of many suns, and that it’s part of a galaxy, and [the galaxy is one of] many galaxies… and now you’re into a real universe, it’s a really big thing. Your sense of who you are is now very different. Now we’re even at maybe multiverses, right? We’ve thought about stellar travel, intergalactic travel, interuniversal travel, woah.
He’s talking about generating ideas, but imagine if you can this scale of thinking applied to mapping and our conception of location. Woah, indeed. From his really great The Art of the Really Long View lecture (available to download here).