The BBC is reporting that NASA and the Japanese Trade ministry has completed topographically mapping 99% of the earths surface.

The awesome thing? The sample rate is 30m! Let’s do some math.

Surface area of earth: 5.10072 × 10^14 m^2

99% of earths surface area: 5.0497128 × 10^14 m^2

If there is a sample taken every 30 meters, than there should be approx 1.6832376 × 10^15 samples.

That’s a pretty huge database! Granted, you can make some assumptions. For example, that the majority of the earth is covered in water and thus has an elevation …