Graphics are inside of us. There's this visual bias plague. See it? The image has been sculpted and it is not going to disappear. Lacking the intuitive communication skills of apes and alligators, we built an overly complex system of gears and signs and gestures. Survival and progress beat each other up over control of communication. Intriguingly, progress has made survival irrelevant.

It’s not that progress defeated survival. Quite the opposite in fact. Survival defeated progress by sacrificing itself. And here we are. Profligation and survival are no longer a biological concern. Societal constructions have made these ancient concerns automatic. Technology, particularly, has given us the resources to concentrate on progress rather than instinct, rather than intuition, rather than survival.

Semiotics is the study of signs. Semiotics concerns itself with the interpretation, meaning and evolution of signs. Language is a sign. The BMW is a sign. The map is a sign. Since we have forsaken the survival impulse and created the atomic bomb and the iPod, our minds have tended to wander. Of course the problem predates the atomic bomb. It was conceived at the same time as the silver bullet that struck the first bi-pedal homo-excavation.

Men and women have set out on a mission to control the universe. The answer to why we’ve done this is as unattainable as the mildew conspiracy in your bathroom. Perhaps the answer is traceable. First we did a little hunting, and then we did a little gathering. I think the gathering was more the problem than the hunting. With accumulation comes the human malfunction. Possession and the concern over possessions may have kicked off the entire human endeavor.

Regardless, the impulse to push forward and claim new possessions, of both material and intellectual nature, has collided at full-speed with right now. As our drive to master the territorial and terrestrial has evolved we’ve developed a number of tools to aid us in the pursuit. The telescope and the power drill have been very effective, and should be applauded, but I put forth that no tool has been as decisive in helping men and women conquer their curiosities as the map.

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The map is the concise embodiment of human struggle. It is equal parts art, science and war. It is without equivalent in our world of the sign. The map is our struggle to force nature to conform to our understanding. This struggle is expressed in the map. By naming geography we make it our possession, we have mastered it.

Maps inherently breed many of humanity’s nastier attributes. Division, status, nationalism, alienation, poverty and greed, among other suspects, are byproducts of the deconstruction of the material world into atomic regions of influence. However, it is not the map that is sinister, it is the hand that draws it and the forces that divide it. The map remains a perfect, scalable interpretation of ambition. The ambitious streak that runs through our white blood cells and other organs unique to us, is not a strictly malevolent force, it just tends to get us in trouble. Like curiosity’s abuse of the cat, ambition has not been too kind to the Homo-sapean. But for all the wars of ambition, we now have a complete conception of nearly every inch of our planet. Enterprising souls have quelled their ambitions by figuring out what every centimeter of the globe should look like.

I remain ambivalent to the nature of this modern phenomenon of blitzkrieg discovery. It eradicates the romance of travel and the idea that our world hides a little bit of imagination somewhere off the coast of Australia.

Maps are a history of placement. They are an extension of our unending quest to find our place in this universe. Like the discipline of science, which is bottomless, the map should never be finished. Once comfort and consensus sneak up on us, it is time to begin a new search. All of planet Earth is on the verge of being charted. Once we agree on the map - geographic not political, political maps will never be agreed upon - our search faces extinguishment.

Anyone with an imagination must question what purpose there is to living on a conquered planet. I derive greater fear from the prospect of a completely chartered territory than an unchartered counterpart. Complacency, redundancy and other words of death and attrition will fill up the vacuum left by our vanishing adventure.

A question is looming. The question is being begged. The question is multi-dimensional. The map is a metaphor for the question. The question cannot exist without the map. The question is. What will we do when the map is complete?