Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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You're dramatically underestimating how dangerous sea travel was. Millions of people lost their lives at sea, up to and including during the Age of Sail where we had been doing it for millennia. For instance Vasco de Gamma was the first person to discover a route from Europe to India. And that's relatively easy since you can get there by simply following the coast from Africa onward to India.

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.

To be fair, many of them were killed while engaged in colonialist island warfare rather than the voyage itself so even setting foot on an island to replenish had its dangers, same for Cook. I'd say space travel has many more dangers in the voyage than warrior aliens.

Magellan notwithstanding, relatively few of his crew were lost to natives. Most of it came from starvation and scurvy. The latter of which, alone, took millions of lives. Both were greatly compounded because of how unpredictable the seas can be. For instance when crossing the Indian Ocean the first time, Vasco da Gamma initially took about 3 weeks. On his way back he ran into foul weather, and the exact same journey ended up taking more than 4 months. He ended up losing about half his crew just during that crossing.

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.

Notwithstanding battles, a napoleonic era British Royal Navy Man-o-war with ~750 sailors would expect to lose something like 1 man a fortnight to accidents and disease for the duration of the voyage. To make up the numbers they would press-gang fishermen wherever they happened to be around the globe. As a result the Royal Navy was surprisingly multi racial in that era.

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.

Well actually it’s more likely that Enrique of Malacca was the first person to circumnavigate the globe.

(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.)

You are underestimating the dangers of long distance space travel.

It doesn’t matter if ‘sea travel’ included people juggling flaming chainsaws, it’s still not even in the same league.

No, I don't believe I am. If you have any mind, I do love discussing these topics. In particular I'd posit that the great sea explorers were setting out with far less information, far less knowledge of the dangers that awaited them, and with far less capability for reconciling those dangers. Something like scurvy, whose cure/cause wouldn't be completely understood until the early 20th century (!!!), was just an absolutely devastating issue. It could kill within months and nobody had any clue of what or why it was happening. It's just that you go to sea, your body starts rotting in some of the most painful ways imaginable, and you die relatively shortly thereafter. And that was just a part of life at sea!

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