Since then we've all come to own maps on our smartphones and can explore most of the planet through Google Earth. Of course, there was no way for even the imaginative Borges to predict the great leaps technology would take when he wrote On Exactitude of Science more than 70 years ago. How much detail should be on a map? You would think that a more detailed map would be preferable, until you start thinking of its practical consequences.
The story was a thought exercise on cartography. In Borges’s 1946 story, future generations came to regard its maps as useless and cumbersome, mostly due to how large they were and how much space they took. Every tree, mountain, streetlight and house had its exact true-to-scale representation on the empire’s maps. Large paper maps that didn’t leave out any detail. A one-paragraph short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire that created maps so precise that they were the size of the empire itself.
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