GIVEN that we can now chat face-to-face with someone on the other side of the world, perhaps it is no surprise that most of us have a skewed notion of how big our planet is.

While Twitter, Skype, Facebook, instant messenger, email and video-chat are making the globe smaller, we are perceiving it to be far, far more vast than it really is.

A survey of 2,000 adults, carried out to mark Geography Awareness Week, found the average estimate for the distance around the equator is more than 300,000 miles – when it is actually 25,000, more than 10 times smaller.

Now, while I agree it’s important to have an understanding of the world around us, I can see how this misunderstanding happens.

A distance of 25,000 miles is pretty inconceivable to a race that rarely breaks through the 6ft barrier.

You can’t visualise it in double decker buses stacked end-to-end or in skyscrapers piled one on top of the other, because it would be too many buses/skyscrapers to imagine.

It’s like when someone tells you that a human being’s blood vessels laid out would encircle the globe twice – you may believe it, but it’s impossible to imagine.

When you’re trying to visualise a distance of 25,000 miles, without planet Earth to judge it by, it may as well be 300,000.

This is why the most terrifying invention ever considered is the Total Perspective Vortex, which features in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

Once inside, you are shown your exact spot in the vast universe – a dot so small that you have no chance of seeing it – and the realisation of your own inferiority fries your brain.

The machine was originally invented by Trin Tragula, a man from Frogstar World B, with the aim of irritating his wife, who kept nagging him for having no sense of proportion.

She died horribly in the demonstration.

As Adams so wisely stated in the book, Restaurant at the End of the Universe: “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

A real-life version of the Total Perspective Vortex can be found in every school, every library and many childrens bedrooms.

It’s more commonly known as the world map.

Think of the image you have of the world in your mind, with the United Kingdom sitting pretty much in the middle, Antarctica at the bottom and Greenland right near the top.

Okay, brace yourself for the truth – the map is all wrong.

Europe should be half the size of South America, not larger, Africa is really twice the size of Greenland, when it’s shown as roughly the same, and Alaska should be a bit smaller than Mexico, not three times as big.

And, get this for mindblowing – Germany is in completely the wrong place.

Cartographer Mercator designed this version in 1569 as a navigational tool for European sailors, distorting scale to make reading it easier.

If Europeans hadn’t been so adventurous and stuck their flags in land masses all over the world, then we could be using an entirely different map.

Not only could the UK be so tiny you would barely be able to spot it, but it could even be on the opposite side of the Earth.

Because there’s also no reason for the globe to be the way up that we always imagine it to be.

It could be upside down.

So really it’s pretty amazing we’re not far more confused when it comes to our planet’s vital statistics.

READ more of Laura’s columns at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/lauradavis

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