In medieval Europe, spices from outside the world known to Europeans made it there through chains of traders and were luxury items. (IIRC, a spice from what is now Indonesia is recorded as having been a gift at a wedding in what is now Poland in the 13th century.) I’m guessing the definition of “known to” in this post is similar: Romans had access (at a price) to goods from these places, though nobody from the Roman world had actually been there, or even met anyone from there.
As far as the ancient European world goes, I think the furthest east they actually got were some sort-lived Greek-speaking states in the vicinity of India.
People would follow the silk road sometimes. Rome actually had limited diplomatic contact with China, even. That’s not on the map, maybe because they didn’t really understand where it was, besides somewhere far to the east. I’m surprised SE Asia is on it, I’ll have to do some reading about that, but India was known even to the Greeks.
Quality of information would drop off really rapidly with distance, though, since it was easy to make up a fish tale about what you saw in far-off lands, and so you find a lot of crazy BS mixed in with helpful nuggets in things like Herodotus’s Histories.
I’m not so sure this is accurate, the Romans certainly knew of China at least, to them it was called Serica, and they believed in a Manifest Destiny myth that they would one day conquer it.
Which would have been fukkin’ wild if it did play out, I think by that point the capital would have moved to Samarkand or somewhere else in Central Asia just to be able to maintain regulation over the silk road.
And Tacitus described a people he called Fenni in northeastern Europe, and it’s been conjectured that he could have meant one of the Finnic peoples around the continental side of the Baltic.
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.
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”
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.
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.
I doubt we’ll get that far before running out of resources (especially oil, which is necessary for pretty much everything even though not necessarily directly for space travel) and/or climate change ends mass-scale industrial society. Long term space travel is incredibly hard and it has a ton of effects on the human body, and solving those problems will be pretty low on our priority list when shit really hits the fan
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.
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.
Most Roman thermae featured a caldarium, which was like a hot steam sauna and the really fancy ones even had a laconicum which was kinda like a hot, dry sauna.
If you flipped it upside down you’d have the orientation most common on medieval maps. In fact, the reason why we call it “orientation” (“orient” of course meaning “East”) is because you used to put a map upright by putting east on the top. This is because Jerusalem was seen as the rightful top of the map as it’s the city of God.
It’s basically to make it clear and avoid confusion which can arise, e.g. by including only the European part of russia, as the Europe-Asia border is not uniquely defined.
map_enthusiasts
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.