this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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We have that today with outer space. For all intents and purposes it is the new ocean, and so far we've only put a few skiffs in it.
Yeah, but it's a lot harder to cross. Like, I could build a shitty boat from wood myself. A spaceship? Not so much. Especially not if it's actually supposed to leave this gravity well.
Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.
Although you could travel the land. Perhaps not cross the Sahara but if you lived in the Roman world, you could quite easily take some years to walk off the edge of the map and just explore. There would of course be a good chance of death from illness, animal or person, but equally like today, you may also meet plenty of kind people who would let you stay and maybe even share their knowledge of the area and culture.
I like the idea that some people did. Just disappeared into the unknown on an adventure, found happiness and success there and never returned.
It was a lot later (1300s), but Ibn Battuta seems to have done just that. Guy leaves Morocco and just keeps going on and on, till he ends up in China. Though perhaps even more incredibly he actually does come all the way back. The historicity of his accounts is disputed and maybe only a part of it is true, but even if he only got as far as India, I still find it fascinating to imagine doing at that time.
There are viking inscriptions and stuff at the hagia sophia, that's a hell of an adventure for the time!
there is an infinite difference between "you can technically do it but you're 99% likely to die" and "you literally cannot even reach the edge of the atmosphere without a vehicle engineered and built by 5000 people"
You’re right that there are many big differences. Launching a rocket into space could be compared with building a major cathedral back in the day. People did both, but not very often, because those projects are very demanding. Ships were also super expensive, but we built those all the time, so obviously the requirements weren’t quite as high.
Also attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the recent centuries, so losing a few sailors isn’t quite the same as losing an astronaut. Nowadays, safety is taken a lot more seriously which makes the project even more expensive.
It'll eventually be more commonplace. Probably not build a raft level of simple, but eventually there will be common access.
I'm a little more optimistic about it. It's definitely insanely difficult to do, and I don't think a lot of people even get how hard it is and the crazy out of this world (literally) hazards there are with just flying to the moon and Mars.
But more than one country has sent things to the moon, and we seem to have low earth orbit cracked, so I can definitely see people normalizing moon transit and beyond in the inner solar system.
It gets even more hazardous past that though. But like the oceans before I really do believe humanities strive for exploration will endure and someday we'll go further and further.
Extra-solar system is a giant flashing question mark though. That might be the next new ocean, and might take us just as long if longer, if even ever, to conquer.
We could put people on Alpha Centauri in 88 years with 50s technology like Project Orion. The really hard part is figuring out a way to make us use the technology we do have for things like that, instead of for bombing each other back to the stone age.
I get what you're going for, but no we couldn't. The radiation and other interstellar particles and dangers would kill a crew using moon landing technology.
With that kind of propulsion politically available, I doubt finding workable combinations of mitigation strategies to interstellar medium hazards would be the showstopper. Especially not one to hold us back for time scales that oceans did. Getting humans interested in prioritizing projects like that, to me, is the real headscratcher.
Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, "we are a plant (biological plant)".
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we're gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
A large part of oil can be replaced with electricity. Please point to examples where neither solar power or renewable biomass are sufficient.
Oh no you can't. Building a ship that can cross the ocean (without you drowning first of course) is actually quite difficult. Not only does it have to be extremely durable, you also have to have a lot of knowledge to navigate. And then there's the economic problems, like who pays for it, how do you get enough food, etc..
Yet, people made the journey to Australia over 50000 years ago, long before they had developed agriculture, wheels or domesticated animals. There was no navigation or fancy ships. And they did in the hundreds. Enough genetic diversity to settle down for the next 50000 years.
We are very far from doing that in space and beyond our solar system it may even be completely impossible. But who knows what happens in the next 50000 years.