Propaganda

Deliberate distortion of two dimensional maps of our three dimensional earth are often used for propaganda purposes, and can be used to increase or decrease the perceived relative size and significance of a nation.

This map of Russia on the globe is from Wikipedia.

And this photo is of my own globe in my front foyer. Quite a leap in size.

Incidentally, it is interesting how different mind-sets can take very different photos of the same thing. This photo of the Earth was taken by a Russian cosmonaut in 2012, using a high-definition 121 megapixel camera.

Russian photo of the Earth, 2012

How different it is from the most famous photograph ever taken of the Earth, the so-called Blue Marble photo. It was taken by the American crew of Apollo 17 in 1972.

The famous Blue Marble, taken by an American astronaut in 1972.

There is a piece of interesting movie trivia about photos and how we picture our Earth. When film director Stanley Kubrick and his art department were trying to decide how the Earth should appear in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, they mostly relied on the speculations of NASA scientists, since no actual photograph existed yet. The NASA scientists theorized that features on the Earth's surface would be almost completely shrouded by the plant's moist atmosphere. Below are actual Earth images from the movie 2001, based on those best NASA drawings.

Earth as imagined in 1968 by the art department of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Earth as Stanley Kubrick and his crew imagined it in 1968

It is funny that today there are conspiracy theorists who believe Stanley Kubrick faked the Moon landing on a sound stage, and that it never happened. Aside from countless problems with that idea, the funniest part of it is that if it were in fact true, our Blue Marble 'photo' would look like this today: