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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Those opposed to exploring the new world were basing it on ignorance and rumors. Dragons! Sea monsters! The edge of the earth! None of which was true, you just need to have enough supplies, keep the crew from mutiny, and hope there's decent weather.

In contrast, what we know from facts about space travel: even real sea monsters might leave you alone once in a while, but space is actively trying to kill you at every moment. There are real problems to be solved, like rocket equation, radiation, having enough bandwidth once you get there to stream Netflix. The monsters out there are quite real and quite deadly.

Luddites were just worried about job security.

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In contrast, what we know from facts about sea travel: even real land monsters might leave you alone once in a while but the sea is actively trying to kill you at every moment. There are real problems to be solved, like fresh water generation, bad weather and having enough food supplies to last until landfall. The monsters out there are quite real and quite deadly.

Did you know that the sea is still deadly? Not all of these are fatalities, but some are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_2018

Perhaps even more than all of these issues was scurvy. It killed absolutely ridiculous numbers of sailors all the way to the 19th century. Funny thing about it too. We now take it for granted that it is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, so it can be prevented by access to fresh citrus fruits. And some had caught onto this, but at the time it was largely considered superstition since it was thought that scurvy was simply a disease, and so trying to prevent it by eating lemons was treated with extreme skepticism.

Even once people began to realize that it somehow really worked, the benefit was attributed to the acid somehow interacting with the disease and not to vitamin deficiency. It's interesting how we, now the benefit of hindsight, can take things that took hundreds of years and literally millions of deaths to discover as being practically self evident.

It's worth pointing out that nobody has 'colonized' the sea yet. Not once in the history of the world. Sure there are ships and large platforms but nothing as self-supporting as a colony.

As has been said before by others: I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars or space after we've colonized the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, and the bottom of the ocean - all of which are vastly easier.

I don't think the difficulty of the entreprise is what matters, but rather the ROI. Not to mention that no one has a claim on space (yes, there are treaties, but should one nation / group of nation leave others in the dust, I doubt they would pay much attention to those treaties).

Sailing across the ocean is not as easy as 'make sure you have supplies and your crew doesn't mutiny.'

Yes, many of the real problems were solved by 1490 AD, but some were not. Longitude, for example, was insanely difficult.

Many, many people have died at sea. Well-trained, prepared and determined people.

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