Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

If you’re wondering why, given these odds, ET hasn’t phoned yet, Eric Mack at the CNET tech site has come up with the best analogy I’ve found so far. Try imagining that all the grains of sand on the world’s beaches are on one single beach, but each grain (planet) is separated from its nearest neighbour by several trillion kilometres. That’s the universe, so, as the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says about our current extent of exploration: ‘Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup, and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.’