The Imaginary Lines That Govern Us All: Stunning Photos Of The World’s Borders

Published October 8, 2015
Updated February 27, 2018

Humans have interacted with the planet in a number of bizarre ways, and the national border is definitely one of them.

The human race has come up with some odd ideas over the millennia, and national borders are one of them. Sometime during the early Renaissance, rulers essentially decided that the best way to strengthen the state and preserve its wealth was to define it spatially, carving up chunks of land into blocks of varying sizes, where everything from the rules of the road to which government officials are allowed to shoot you changes the second you cross an imaginary line. Many national frontiers hew close to natural boundaries, such as mountains and rivers, but in places where nature doesn’t oblige, it often becomes necessary to express these divides by building the barriers ourselves.

This act isn’t a small undertaking. Some of their scars can be seen from space, and they’ll probably call for a lot of explaining when the aliens do finally arrive to conquer us:

author
Richard Stockton
author
Richard Stockton is a freelance science and technology writer from Sacramento, California.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
Based in Brooklyn, New York, John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of expertise include modern American history and the ancient Near East. In an editing career spanning 17 years, he previously served as managing editor of Elmore Magazine in New York City for seven years.
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Stockton, Richard. "The Imaginary Lines That Govern Us All: Stunning Photos Of The World’s Borders." AllThatsInteresting.com, October 8, 2015, https://allthatsinteresting.com/aerial-borders. Accessed September 4, 2025.