Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner – review
The desire of human beings to know where exactly they are on the planet, and more to the point how they might get home, has a vivid history. In the opening chapter of his suitably precise and fascinating account of the modern evolution of this desire, Greg Milner goes back to the extraordinary feats of the aboriginal Polynesians, who somehow explored and dispersed across the vast Pacific in outrigger canoes with sails made from woven leaves.
The islanders apparently learned how to navigate thousands of miles eastward, against prevailing wind and current, using mind maps of stars triangulated in relation to known specks of islands; as they neared land they utilised a close knowledge of cloud formations and the patterns of birds in flight and bioluminescence in the sea. They factored all these observations hour by hour against speed and wind resistance, and somehow found their way in the world. Pretty much all that knowledge, the ways of seeing that allowed them to do that, has disappeared.
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