Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".
If magic and mystery is the good thing, then simply feeling like there's no place you can get to which hasn't been mapped might be enough to choke off that feeling, regardless of the resolution of the map.
Absolutely. It's self-fulfilling belief. If you believe yourself to be trapped in an exhausted world, then you are. It's usually better to choose an abundance mentality.
The idea that the world has been mapped to the point of killing all mystery is ludicrous. The Map Is Not The Territory[1].
There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood that you won't notice until you traverse it in a new way. Go for a walk with a child or dog. Take a bike instead of a car. Use a wheelchair. Volunteer with local advocacy groups.
> There are mysteries lurking in your own neighborhood
> Take a bike
I do this... and then I map my discoveries in OpenStreetMap. I recently discovered OpenInfraMap [0] and that inspired me to go find infrastructure that wasn't mapped and add it too.
It works a little in reverse for me; I find a random thing that isn't mapped well and use it as a motivator to go explore it on bike or foot and then map it. I did this for a bunch of local creeks... ran along it, fixed up the errors, and then added all the individual ways to a relation. A lot of places that are accessible by foot only often aren't mapped, so I'll go explore a suburb and find the unmapped paths that shorten foot routes. Making the map better match the territory.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Albert Einstein
With a little creativity we should never get bored.
Imagine a world with so much mapped data that it too needs explorers. Data recorded generations ago that has never been observed by anyone to study it.
There are also mysteries that we can map, but still can't figure out. The weather is one of those - we can map the entire world, but we've yet to be able to create a model at a scale that allows us to make accurate predictions of more than a few weeks.
Additionally, the increase in space access is increasing the scope of humanity to well beyond the Earth. It may seem ludicrous now, but the same tech that makes cheap satellites possible will open up other worlds, in particular the Moon and Mars.
It’s not black or white. OP’s point is still true regardless - as time progresses, things do become more and more mapped. Be it a scientific field, a territory, etc.
I was just reading about the future space missions [0] to the outer solar system already planned within the next couple of decades.
"Whether it’s Dragonfly going to Titan, Clipper going to Europa, hopefully a lander going to Europa, hopefully a mission that’ll fly through the plumes of Enceladus, exo-planets going gangbusters, SETI hopefully taking on a broader and broader search and surveying those exo-planets. Within the next few decades we could potentially answer this primordial, age old question of, “Are we alone?” And that’s gonna revolutionize biology. It’s gonna revolutionize how we think about our place in the universe. And so for all of the pains and agony of trying to operate on these time scales, we do live in a beautiful time where we might transform the universe in which we live into a biological universe."
Along with the commercialization of space travel, I'd say there is a sufficiently large part of this universe we are yet to "touch" but soon will be able to.
I for one am tremendously excited about the future.
More than 90 percent of all galactic systems are moving away from us faster than speed of light. There is no way we can ever reach them. The unreachable horizon is capturing more and more of what we currently observe. https://youtu.be/4iC9Qi3y9q8
Right. To be specific, the whole of the Local Group is available to humanity for exploration. That still has a trillion stars, with at least as many planets.
> Consider the impact that simply believing the relevant portions of the world has been modeled "well enough".
That is dangerous belief to those caught-out by the edge-cases, especially seeing how actual humans lazily defer to, and others defend "the (application) system": see any HN thread on AI bias and/or Tesla Autopilots deficiencies.
If magic and mystery is the good thing, then simply feeling like there's no place you can get to which hasn't been mapped might be enough to choke off that feeling, regardless of the resolution of the map.