Except early ocean explorers didn’t have to worry about being obliterated by a tiny speck of dust going too fast.
e.g. If a random speck of dust hitting their raft could have done the same, there likely would have been a very different paradigm…
e.g. If a random speck of dust hitting their raft could have done the same, there likely would have been a very different paradigm…
He set out with 170 men and 4 ships. 55 men and 2 ships returned. And that was not particularly remarkable - scurvy, inclement weather, rogue waves, supplies going bad, and countless other issues meant death at sea was a regular part of traveling at sea. Magellan is another one. We all learn in school that he was the first man to cross the globe. What we don't necessarily learn is that he didn't survive the voyage. He set out with 5 ships and 270 men - 18 men, not including Magellan, and 1 ship returned.
Exploration and ultimately colonization has never been something for those unwilling to risk it all, and it may very likely never be. The entire point of such things is that you're setting out to do and discover what has not been done, and what has not been discovered. In this context it's essentially impossible to have any assurance of safety.
We're almost certainly much more technically prepared for space flight than the early explorers were for these great sea voyages. And we're certainly vastly more economically prepared. The only difference is the risk tolerance and funding. Those sailors and captains setting out always understood there was a very real chance that they would never return, and that was simply accepted. And funding was never easy back in the day, but the costs were also much greater relatively speaking. The fantasy this article speaks of about multi-century ships setting out into the stars is something we could achieve for a tiny fraction of what we spend on random wars, yet we don't.
The BBC had a series called ‘who do you think you are’ where they analysed people’s DNA and some of the best episodes were right wing figures finding out they were 25% polynesian or whatever, I always wondered if this was partly due to the press-gang on-the-hoof practices of the Navy.
(He had been enslaved by Magellan 10 years earlier on a voyage which had reached Malacca going east, and then returned on the later more famous voyage of Magellan which had gone west.)
It doesn’t matter if ‘sea travel’ included people juggling flaming chainsaws, it’s still not even in the same league.
Sailing from Britain to Australia on a wooden ship took approximately the same time as flying from the Earth to Mars. I bet that the sailors met a lot more dangerous weather conditions on the way to Australia than the spacecraft on their way to Mars.
"Hull losses" due to cosmic dust are basically zero, the only recorded instances are on low Earth orbit due to space debris.
"Hull losses" due to storms or navigational mistakes were absolutely normal during the Age of Exploration, and long after.
You're not wrong about that, but…
> with some dangerous shoals/rocks thrown in for good measure.
Pretty much describes the landing phase and why so many mars and moon probes failed, while
> mostly water and wind
describes many launch failures, and also the initial failures to land on Venus (modulo that the Venusian atmosphere at ground level is past the critical point and no longer distinguishably either liquid or gas, but it's CO2 not H2O).
Anyway, no vessel that ever left the low Earth orbit was ever lost to cosmic dust. How am I expected to provide examples of something that never happened?
As for losses of old wooden ships en route to Australia, there were plenty. Being a sailor was the most dangerous profession in the Age of Sail, and the very reason why sailors got tattos was a chance to be recognized as a drowned corpse.
Like how long it takes to fly humans to mars. It hasn't happened yet, we can only estimate and try to project it, so the case that it might take as long as it took to sail across some particular ocean for some particular group of people with the technology they had at the time is not only kind of irrelevant, but also not a claim that can be supported. This is what's typically referred to as "fudging the numbers"
The things you said and the point you are trying to be make by saying them is pretty ridiculous. You may choose to take that personally, but perfectly reasonable people say a lot of crazy shit. It may well be that the fact that internet fora make this a matter of somewhat durable record makes people view their arguments in this context as more tightly coupled with them as a person, but that's still ultimately for you to decide for yourself
OTOH, we have sent robots and we know the underlying physics very well indeed. We have also sent an electric car with a test dummy wearing a flight-suit into a Mars-crossing orbit. If Musk had actually wanted to continue with the Red Dragon concept (which IIRC wasn't planned to be crewed), it could've already landed by now.
We also know what it would take to go substantially faster, and that we either don't have the tech (e.g. fusion), or don't want to risk it (e.g. fission), or we can't afford it (e.g. non-rocket launch systems). Even if we had more advanced propulsion, significantly faster trips are more likely to be exceptions than the rule until we have enough infrastructure in space that Mars itself stops being an interesting destination.
Rogue waves continue to be very deadly even to very large ships, and extremely unpredictable despite much better weather monitoring and communications.