in case there are others like me who have to see what it looks like on a Mercator projection map:
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Wow. I can't believe my perspective of the world is that distorted. It makes me want to only look at it in 3D. If we've all mainly looked at Mercator projections our whole lives our sense of where everything is relative to everything else and what direction is completely off.
People complain about the proportional sizing of Mercator but the sense of direction it gives us is completely broken. I think the average person knows it's off and people think there is an error factor to consider that a really straight like might be a little squiggly. But nope. This made me realize the Mercator gives pretty much zero accurate sense of direction if real distance is involved.
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The word "can" Is doing some heavy lifting here. I mean, there is a difference between theoretically possible and actually being done.
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Don’t the circumpolar winds essentially prevent this, or at least make it really impractical?
Sorry, can't hear you down here in my submarine
DON'T THE CURCUMPOLAR WINDS ESSENTIALLY PREVENT THIS, OR AT LEAST MAKE IT REALLY IMPRACTICAL?
Ping.
Sailing near the south pole is not advisable, you might die. But thats also true for many other things, so whatever.
No diesel sub is going to have the range to make that trip. And NZ doesn't allow nuclear subs in its waters.
nuclear subs are all over the place and could even be in their waters with out them realising
It's true I've got all the locations of the nuclear subs right here and this conjecture is totally correct.
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Submarines don't sail, they steam.
The only place you can't sail is directly into the wind. You can go all the other places eventually but it's a lot of back and forth.
Tacking back and forth is kinda the opposite of a straight line though, isn't it?
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That southern ocean is brutal tho
Especially going the wrong direction!
It'd be less bad on the return trip, but then you're fighting the trade winds and the Canary current instead.
Just rename it as Pacific Ocean and voila, no storm hence the name!
Even better, imho, you can sail in a direct line from OG Zeeland (Netherlands) to New Zealand.
Can you, though? You'd have to squeeze through the narrow English Channel first, and that would probably require some turns.
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Now all we need is some insane person with a kayak.
I volunteer— not like you go through most dangerous sea passage in the world or anything…
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If it makes you feel better, the line is actually curved along the surface of the earth, you know, if you believe in a spherical earth.
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There is also a route that can be drawn from Halifax, Nova Scotia on the Canadian east coast on the Atlantic ... head a bit south east and without touching land and only going over the ocean, you can end up on the west coast of British Columbia, in Canada on the Pacific coast.
I used to reference a website that showed that ... but now I can't seem to find it. :(
Another fun one is to ask someone if they were to take off in an airplane from Miami and fly due south, which South American countries would they fly over?
The answer is none of them. You end up missing the entire continent because you are too far west.
You hit Panama first, but small portions of Ecuador and Peru are west of Miami (80.2 degrees west). The broader point that South America is much farther east than many Americans think is definitely true, though.
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I got this far on the Wikipedia and gave up:
On a curved surface, the concept of straight lines is replaced by a more general concept of geodesics, curves which are locally straight with respect to the surface. Geodesics on the sphere are great circles, circles whose center coincides with the center of the sphere.
I went down a rabbit hole about globes and maps recently
Basically, to find the shortest distant between two places on a globe (a 'straight' line), imagine a hoop or circle round the earth that cuts it exactly in half, and rotate it until it passes through both places (still cutting it exactly in half)
That's a great circle.
There are 2d map projections that are built around this, but they only work when one of the locations is at the center of the map. So it could show the shortest distance from, say, London to anywhere with a straight line, but it wouldn't work for a route not including London
In case anyone else finds visual guides to be helpful for this sort of thing, I made a graphic to accompany your words:
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Hopefully someone shares this with Geowizard, ultimate straight line challenge.
You can also build a nearly straight railway going from California through Canada and Alaska all the way to China.
That'd be awesome. That probably wouldn't work because it would take 100 years for California to build their first high speed rail
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You can plot a course in a straight line. Unfortunately, weather.
Straight line? That looks hella curved, innit? Can't fool us with a globe. A flat map, maybe. But not a globe. Despite it being a 2D representation of a globe
If it doesn't look right, change the way the data is presented and projected.
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Comms Officer: Sirs, we still have quite a bit of time to change course.
Red: But we're going straight.
Purple: Yeah. Turning's no fun. Why is this happening? Make it not happen.
One of the few world maps with New Zealand on it.
Only with an icebreaker
Hum, so it's a straight line, but it's curved, and the compas turns half way.
Y'all, I found the Flat Earther!
Don't make fun of flat earthers, their ideology is spreading all over the globe!
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Well, yeah..if you want a line that is straight in 3 dimensions then any point on earth at sea level to any other point earth at sea level will require you to go below the surface of the planet.
This is my new favorite globe trivia.
straight line
So the azimut you set to your compass would be a constant, right??
/s/j
It’s a geodesic; a straight line in spherical geometry.
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