

Er, not really… for instance:
“…back in the day?”
Which ‘day’? Before digital mapping? Before cartography as a formal practice? Before the invention of the compass? Before the standardization of the meter? Before the printing press? Before Galileo? Before Eratosthenes?
The time period of the question is potentially the entirety of human history. That’s quite broad.
What methods were used to scale down in world, to paper distances?
In which part of the world? In which culture? For what purpose? (e.g. navigation? coastal, inland, international? crop planting? city planning? determining property lines? etc)
This is not a straightforward question in any way. A complete answer would be an undergraduate degree with a double major in history and geography.















Oh yeah, that’s a good reason to aid the expansion of global surveillance. Let’s all be complicit with the police state because we can’t acknowledge our social anxieties with a bit of honesty.