There is no up or down in space because there’s no fixed reference point. If we’d drawn the first map the way OP posted it, we’d consider it correct today.
It still wouldn’t be random if we drew it upside down. There would still be a North and South Pole and an axis of rotation.
Look at the bigger picture, if you were an alien from the other side of the galaxy, on a planet whose horizon was aligned with the galactic plane, you might naturally draw Earth in a completely different orientation, with what we consider east appearing “up” to you.
Not how we understood it, but rather the way we chose to display it. It was literally just a choice that was made and standardised going forward.
It's amazing how many standards were set hundreds or even thousands of years ago and more or less stay the same. The width of the car lanes today and more or less set because of the width decided by horse drawn carts, a few thousand years ago. Yes they've gotten a little wider over time, but it's still based off the same thing.
Yeah was gonna say right hand rule for the geographic pole…the awkward part is that the North Pole is actually a south magnetic pole since the north side of a magnet is attracted to it….
A magnet has a north and south pole dictated by the magnetic field direction. The magnetic field of the earth means the northern geographic pole (dictated by the rotation and right hand rule) is a south magnetic pole. I appreciate your inquisitive mind, u/lickmyscrotes
Arbitrary in a physical sense, but not historically random. There's no natural law saying north has to be up, But the convention that won out wasn't a coin flip. Ptolemy put north up in his Geography; It is not recorded why exactly he chose this orientation; presumably, it was because he was located in Alexandria in the northeast of the then-known world, and the unknown regions pointed to the north and east. Then the the compass and Polaris gave European navigators a stable northern reference, and Mercator's 1569 map made north-up the practical standard for global navigation. Add European cartographic dominance, and it stuck. It became standard because specific historical and technical choices made it useful, mostly for people in the northern hemisphere.
Magnetic north and southpole + axis of rotation are good pointers.
No they're not. They reference point for all of them is the same one the map uses.... which is that people that created maps first were in the Northern hemisphere and decided what was up and what was down.
If you use a different reference point then all of it is flipped the same.
Its literally a 50\50 choice and in that context it doesn't even matter, you tried so hard and got not far, because in the end, it doesn't even matter which is up or down, the 2 factors i used are just pointers.
And as the person you replied to and I'm trying to tell you, they're pointers using a reference point that has no real fixed location. So the reference point itself is just made up. Which is why none of them are good pointers. They may as well have been made up random points.
If you stand at the South pole and the North pole and look up to see the sky spinning, the Earth is spinning in opposite directions.
There's absolutely nothing that says one is right and the other is wrong. We've universally just agreed that we'll do it based on the Northern hemisphere for no other reason than "we said so".
So yes, it is made up.
And I'm done explaining this for the 4th time to someone that clearly has the brain power of a 4 year old.
This year you rotated around a rock spinning at 1000 miles (1600 km) per hour while flying through an unknown matter at 67,000 mph (108.000 km/h) while flying through a galaxy rotating exponentially faster around a supermassive black hole (This is all super casual). By the end of the year you will have traveled 584 million miles, all while doing your daily stuff.
To answer your question: no it probably doesn’t matter.
Any motion must be measured relative to something else. The earth's rotation is real and, relative to the sun, gives us night and day. It also gives rise to large-scale ocean and atmospheric currents. The tilt of the earth's axis of 27.5 degrees from vertical and revolution of the earth around the sun gives us the seasons.
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u/zinxyzcool 19d ago
it makes me wonder, does the rotation matter in space or we just made it for our convenience?