Milky Way Transit Authority
Urban transit maps are wonderful tools: they are guides to traveling, they serve as mechanisms for distilling and abstracting a city down to a set of linkages and interconnections, and they are beautiful. The first 'modern' subway map is London's Tube Map, designed by Harry Beck. Since then, many cities have based their transit system map designs on its spare and elegant layout, such as Boston, New York, and Amsterdam.
In addition, these maps have been used to understand other, more idea-based, inter-relationships, such as modern music, creative and important people in history, web trends,and even the locations of all the subways in the world.
Here, I have attempted to do the same thing for our galaxy, the Milky Way. Our galaxy is unimaginably vast, and we really have no idea what is out there. We are discovering new planets in other star systems all the time, learning new facts about the galactic core, and even learning about whole new portions of the galaxy. This map is an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual and get people thinking about long-term possibilities in outer space. Hopefully it can provide as a useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, the 'important' sights, and make inconceivable distances a bit less daunting. And while convenient interstellar travel is nothing more than a murky dream, and might always be that way, there is power in creating tools for beginning to wrap our minds around the interconnections of our galactic neighborhood.
I have attempted to actually make this map as accurate as possible, where each line corresponds to an arm of our galaxy, and the stations are actual places in their proper locations. However, I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist, so there are certainly inaccuracies, gaps, and room for improvement. If you have a suggestion, comment, or criticism, please to do not hesitate to contact me by emailing arbesman at gmail dot com.
The Map: click to download as a PDF
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Who am I?
I'm Samuel Arbesman, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard where I study computational sociology, creating mathematical and computational models of social interaction. Please go to my website, arbesman.net, for more information.
How/Why did I think of this?
I was re-reading Carl Sagan's novel Contact recently, essentially a series of arguments about SETI wrapped into a story, and he alludes to some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station. That, coupled with my longtime interest in transit maps, got me thinking about all of this.
Where can I learn more about the Milky Way?
Here are a number of online resources that I have looked at in creating this map:
• Wikipedia entry on The Milky Way
• A schematic map from Wikipedia
Contact Me
Have questions, comments, criticisms, or suggestions about the Milky Way Transit Authority Map? Please email me at arbesman at gmail dot com.