But I’ve often thought a good way to bring home to climate agnostics the tenuous nature of human existence — comparable to Sagan’s ‘pale blue dot’ — would be to calculate the ‘total habitable volume’ of our galactic locale, as we know it. Even at a generous estimate — say, for vertical length, the distance from lowest to highest human habitation, and for area every square kilomere inhabited by at least one human — this is infinitesimal next to the volume of the solar system, beyond which we have no chance of travelling in centuries.

We’ve got nowhere else to go: best not fuck it up.

You could even make it 4-D. I recall a science fiction author explaining how Earth was for most of its history uninhabitable by human life.

Taking a stab at meaning it would be the black is the area (since the surface of the earth is essentially 2D) of all the inhabited places on earth and the blue is all the uninhabited areas both land and sea.

If that’s the intention I’m extremely dubious. I’m wondering what definition of uninhabited they used because to my mind there is hardly an inch on earth that isn’t connected by roads. I was just looking at a map of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky and the roads are a spiderweb. I would call that 100% inhabited. Siberia has roads all through it, There are multiple settlements on Antarctica and the Hudson bay. I can’t think of a place that isn’t caught in our web.

Here’s the Twitpic link: http://twitpic.com/m75r1.
And the original tweet: “Okay, how BIG is Antarctica? Do you have a mental picture? No? Well, here it is, courtesy NASA.”

[Thanks Alex! David]

Is it this type of “let’s make mind-mapping seem like something more than semi-structured scribbling” that you object to, or is it the entire concept itself? In either case, why?