"To teach way-finding, the Marshallese use stick charts, wood frames crosshatched like dream catchers to represent swells coming from four cardinal directions, with shells woven in to symbolize the position of the atolls. These meant nothing to the first European explorers to see them, just as Mercator projections meant nothing to the Marshallese. Even today, local schoolchildren visiting the historical museum in Majuro are sometimes baffled when they’re told that the blue and green pictures on the walls are pictures of where they are.

If ‘‘where’’ is both subjective and physical, what do you need to know, precisely, to figure out where you are? From the moment our nomad ancestors wandered out of Africa until a few decades ago, locating yourself required interacting in some way with the environment: following the stars or a migrating herd of wildebeests, even reading a compass or a street sign. Then, in the time it took to transition from rotary phones to smartphones, we became the first unnatural long-distance migrants, followers of step-by-step instructions that obviated the need to look around at all. Over the last several years, organizations like the United States military and the Federal Aviation Administration have expressed concern about their overwhelming reliance on GPS and the possibility that the network’s satellite signals could be sabotaged by an enemy or disabled by a strong solar flare. The United States Naval Academy has once again begun training midshipmen how to take their position from the stars with a sextant."

                 Joel Kovarsky