Though we await the promised jetpacks and hoverboards, you would have thought that by now no place would be out of reach for the intrepid traveller.
Armed with only a passport, a cash card and a pair of flight socks, you can make the heroic voyages of Captain Robert Falcon Scott or Sir Edmund Hillary look trivial. This is the era of budget air travel, covering vast distances from the discomfort of a cabin seat.
Nowhere is further than and a couple of connection flights and a rickshaw taxi, right?
Wrong!
Though there are no blank spaces left on the map, it doesn't mean that it's any easier to get to them.
There are still places where no one has ever set foot.
In 1914, British cartographers and explorers already thought they had mastered the art of traversing the world. The rather grandly titled Map of Isochronic Distances shows this delusion neatly. It is illustrated with coloured bands, spreading along the web of railways and trade routes — flowing from the industrialised hubs into the developing world like a giant, condescending, colonial spider. Each concentric ring illustrates the places reachable in a similar journey time.
Starting in London, it would take you five days to comfortably reach the edges of Europe, North Africa or the eastern seaboard of America. Though it would still take the best part of 40 days and seasickness remedies to visit London from Aotearoa, the map was about making a statement: nowhere was out of reach.
One hundred years and the invention of passenger airlines later, the distance between Europe and New Zealand has been shrunk to a day.
Although the map does nothing to shift the Eurocentric version of the world, it serves as an excellent illustration of how the planet has shrunk.
It also shows that if there is one thing that Londoners do best it's "get a shift on". They go bloody everywhere.
However, there are still some black spots on the map that even the most determinedly wayward Londoner would struggle to reach.
Splodges of blue ink still cover the peaks of the Himalaya, the innards of Greenland, the northern extremities of Siberia. No matter how airlines try, they can't be erased. These are the last really remote places.
The tiny, isolated Pitcairn slands: Too small for an airport, three weeks away by ship. Probably lovely.
Or the Kerguelen islands: Tucked away at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, crowned by the summit of Mt Desolation.
Somehow, I can't picture it featuring in travel brochures.
There are even parts of New Zealand's own territory that are virtually impossible to reach.
Take Mt Sidley, for example. It is the highest mountain in Antarctica, right next to the Ross Dependency. Those smug cartographers in 1914 didn't even know it existed. It was first summited only in 1990, by Kiwi explorer Bill Atkinson.
The average holidaymaker doesn't have a month's leave to spend getting to the expeditionary basecamp, especially when in today's terms, the previously exotic destinations of Bali, Vietnam and the Philippines are pretty much just next door.
Over the past 100 years the planet has shrunk — but not equally. There will always be the view that, if these places were worth visiting it would have been made easier by now.
It is a question I am often posed and one for which I have little time. Why choose to hike to a pitiable Department of Conservation campsite in a remote corner of Southland, when a return ticket to a deckchair on the Gold Coast would be quicker, if not cheaper?
To them I reply with the words of Hillary's predecessor in Himalayan exploration. When asked why he wanted to summit Everest, George Mallory uttered the immortal lines, now etched in every former Boy Scout's memory: "Because it's there."
