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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them.

It's 600BC. The idea that the world is a sphere isn't accepted yet. Herodotus explicitly says he doesn't believe what these sailors said- that the sun was to the north. Yet we know that if a sailor had done what is being described, this unbelievable fact would have been seen (and is regularly seen today by those living in the southern hemisphere).

If they didn't do it, where would this odd fact have even come from?

To me, that leads a lot of credence to the tale. Lots of challenges in the doing, but with the right experienced sailors not impossible at all.

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The Greek intelligentia believed in a spherical earth at least starting in the 5th century BC, Herodotus died 430/420 BC according to Wikipedia.

"After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round." -Wikipedia [0]

Indeed the idea of a "flat earth" is a very recent idea [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Pythagoras

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

The idea of a flat earth is not a recent idea; that's not what the "myth of the flat earth" is. The myth of the flat earth refers to the false idea that (educated) Europeans during the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth, or that the ancient Greeks did, etc.

But plenty of other people believed in a flat earth, both back then and in more recent times. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model. More astonishingly, Chinese astronomers used a flat earth model until the 16th century.

> Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model.

I mean, we do too, we just call them 2D projections, but they are "flat earth models" :^)

Exactly this. A flat earth model can be extremely useful and convenient, and highly accurate depending on the use.

What is causing the most recent flat earth theory outbreaks all over the world? Could it be some environmental factor like pollutants, IQ is declining, bs online is increasing. Somehow it has to be the ultimate conspiracy theory measured by outlandishness.

> Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model. More astonishingly, Chinese astronomers used a flat earth model until the 16th century.

This is hardly a proof these astronomers did believe their model pictured the shape of the Earth correctly. In fact, a kind of flat Earth model and a (horizontal coordinate system)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_coordinate_system) is used to this day in astronomy to demonstrate how the sky and the celestial bodies appear to an observer on the ground. This was exactly the purpose of earlier astronomers because from this knowledge they could deduce predictions about the seasons and eclipses (and, ok, lucky and unlucky days and so on). If you're ready to deal with a modicum of epicycles and are only interested in purely local ephemerides, the model is actually not so bad as a framework for calculations and the real improvement only comes with a heliocentric model with elliptical orbits, not so much from a spherical Earth.

Yes I know I gave talks on the topic for some time.

The article itself says they traded with Yemen and even that is south of the tropic of cancer. Also doesn't take the world being a certain shape for this to occur.

Agreed. The sailors' claim is strong evidence that the voyage really happened. The fact that Herodotus doubts the claim shows that people were likely to doubt it, and so it's not the kind of thing someone would have made up. The only reason for the sailors to make such a potentially-discrediting claim is that it is true.

> Another voyage was necessary to vindicate the Phoenician claims. This trip was made in 1488, when Bartolomeus Diaz reached the Cape of Good Hope.

That’s a full 2,000 years between the Egyptian circumnavigation and the European one.

The ancient world had far more capabilities than we often credit it with. The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit. Almost two and a half millennia between the first and the second.

History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wright Brothers' first flight and then impending moon landings and conclude -- very reasonably! -- that there would be cities on the moon in 2001. And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years.

I'd love to see an alternate history which diverges at 600 BC. What if somebody had managed to connect an aeolipile to a drivetrain to a dialkos bogey, and kicked off the industrial revolution in Greece, at the same time as the circumnavigation of Africa had started the era of Phonecio-Egyptian colonialism? How different would the world look today?

> The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos

"And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years."

These seem predictably rare events to me. There are very fiew individuals that afford to engage in such endeavors and the odds of succeeding are acting both as deterrent and physical limiting factor to any attempt. The fact that happened is an exception. Not until the odds improve and a strong enough incentive changes things. The incentive for Moon landing has been political. Once achieved, it dissipated, and there isn't much sense for it to be repeated until a new motivating factor will appear.

Addition: Diolkos, considering the cost and efficiency of how it could have been operated and maintained back in the antiquity, was clearly an artifact that could work only for short distances, where the gains were significant enough to justify it, and there was little sense for it to be constructed on the scale that rails were later constructed.

There's a decent answer to the Fermi paradox in there somewhere.

Sailing around Africa is actually quite easy to do. If you're a qualified sailor and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft single sailed sailboat - no navigation equipment needed.

I read a story of a 16 year old girl sailing around the entire planet - totally solo. Sailing is easy.

Perhaps a HN comment circa year 04000 CE will read: “Circumnavigating the moon is actually quite easy to do. If you’re a qualified astronaut and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft spacecraft — no navigation equipment needed.”

No it’s not! And the Cape of Good Hope had a terrible, terrible reputation for storms.

The potential of a large gap between lunar expeditions is an interesting thought experiment. What course of future events could make it so we don’t return to the Moon for another 1,000+ years?

Never forget the Antikythera mechanism!

Or a technology at the peak of its influence. Railroads were a huge thing, but peaked in terms of geopolitical influence in about 100 years. Same with modern highways, telephones, telegraph machines, etc.

Maybe bioengineering is the next big thing. That will probably peak in 100 years too.

Edit: which civilization are you attributing the voyage to? The Phoenicians were past their peak. The Egyptians were at their peak, but they basically were cutting a check.

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