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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

Hmm I thought that, but we don't really live in a 3D world (or use the altitude parameter in a very meaningful way in life) so I wondered whether there's something else I was missing.

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I wonder what makes you belittle the altitude dimension? Buildings have storys, humans can sit and stand, birds can fly, your eyes can move up and down your monitor.

Also the altitude of a given lat/long can change due to geological processes, climate processes, war, etc.

The history and geography change very little whether the bird was flying while I was sitting and looking above the monitor. This is what I meant with "meaningful way". Even though a building has storys, life on 12th floor isn't much different from life on second floor. In any case, much less different than life 20 years ago, or ten kilometers away from it. In a sci-fi story or movie we see lives really in 3D, planets wrapped in habitations and such. THERE you can and should count altitude as meaningful, but we're not really there yet.

If you lived in a high place (Denver), you will find it different from a flat lowland (Chicago).

Also in Rio, how high you live can be a marker depending on which part of town you are. Favelas are on hills, whereas wealthy people in Zona Sul live down the hill closer to the beaches.

It's not that altitude isn't important, it's that it's basically determined by latitude and longitude (and time). Cultures don't exist directly above or below each other, especially not at the national scale being discussed here, and even at the micro scale, differences within a single high rise are presumably minor compared to the same distance laterally.

Visiting Chongqing city felt quite 3D to me

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