I wonder what the long term geopolitical consequences will be when we all stop looking at projected maps. That small peninsula to the west of Asia just got a little smaller. A certain island kingdom is now more clearly the size of Uganda. Maybe Google can also flip the globe "upside-down" for all users "below" the equator.
Do we really think very much is really affected by map projections? Korea looms large in people's imaginations for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with its occupied land mass size, and a lot to do with their history and cultural and economic power.
The same can't be said about if Sudan was united again, Sudan would not be magically punching above India, Russia and Germany in international commerce.
The world where we see the world as it is, a sphere that we can interact with and with that sphere being the default view has been a long time coming. We will look back and wonder why we got the perspective wrong for so long. There are no other objects we display in Mercator Projection et al.
If we could go back in time with what the fine people at Google have achieved and give it to navigators of the past, in the days before aeroplanes got popular, then all the hacks that 'demand Mercator' would never have arisen. Maybe we would have to teleport GPS back to this fictional past too.
The none-sphere maps make as much sense as those paintings done before perspective was worked out, we have just ended up believing them out of familiarity and due to the navigation and other hacks devised for the atlas makers of the past.
As recently as twenty years ago the idea of just showing the earth as a sphere for things like weather broadcasting would have seemed a radical and controversial idea. Thanks to Google and de-facto Maps we have made a small but important evolutionary leap in understanding our world.
