The Universe just keeps getting bigger. Literally.

The edge of the observable universe is expanding away from us at the ultra-relativistic speed of nearly a million kilometers every second. And as it gets bigger we wallow, as humans have since learning earth isn’t our solar system’s center, in feeling smaller. Gluttons for existential humiliation, we live on one of eight dimly lit planets in orbit around the flaming Sun, which is just one of hundreds of billions of mostly bigger, hotter stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is just one of trillions of galaxies in superclusters of clusters of galaxies. There is a thrill in the fleeting visceral terror of the incomprehensible magnitude of our insignificance, before we return to the unshakable perception that we are solidly at the epicenter of our own lives.

These were some of our thoughts when we learned, earlier this year, about a new 3D map of the universe built from data of millions of galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood. But even this map deceptively depicts us at the center. Because we can only see what we can see from here.

The only universe we’re at the center of is our observable universe, the patch that we can see of what may be an infinite (maybe not) spacetime. And eAnd even in that cosmic map of what’s known, we are forced to confess that an unknown form of energy dominates the darkness and drives the literal expansion of a universe already so big that its contemplation is responsible for scores of heart palpitations. And too, for engendering what Annie Dillard described, in her mighty essay on witnessing a celestial event like the one that brought 9000 people to our eclipse-viewing party last spring, as a sense of “the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.”

We found this new 3D map of the cosmos an apt metaphor for the second issue of Broadcast in is print, and not just because we have a penchant for cartography (Josh) and astronomy (Janna). To geographers, it’s not news that maps have the power not merely to depict reality but to shape our understanding of it. Maps are assertions of knowledge and of power, objects of authority and models of the world that their makers see: there’s a reason that nation-states use them to revise borders and assert new ones. But as postulates and proposals of truth, maps have other uses for those of us who aren’t nation-states but people. They can help us better navigate and understand our hometowns, our planet, our universe.

And they can, whether conjured in three digital dimensions, or committed to two dimensions on paper, give us new ways to see. We like to think of Broadcast as a kind of 3D map of the world, as it looks from our old iron works in Brooklyn—a chart of convergences, across the spheres of arts and science, that living maps yield. This time around, our print edition contains dark matter and dark fungi; Swamp Dogg’s beans and bass-less music in the Caribbean; Landback in St. Louis and the art and science of the Periodic Table, among other riches. We hope you will enjoy, as we do, the challenge of grasping at an eyeful of the universe on its grandest scale, even if we can each only do so from a center that’s ours alone. ♦