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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

Reading some of these comments makes me wonder what it was like when explorers were trying to justify exploring the "New World".

Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?

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I think a lot of people are just pissed off seeing someone succeed so much at something that wasn't supposed to be possible (resuable rockets). Makes them feel worse about their own mediocre lives.

This wouldn't have been a problem in the past. You'd just shrug off the crazy explorers and write them off as soon to be dead. Now, evidence of their success and relentless progress is shoved in our face every day.

I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.

> In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Very few make or believe that argument. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wishing that things had gone a little better than they did at the time. We can still believe in a more humane world while still greatly appreciating the benefits that modern society has given us.

This is nonsense. I am sympathetic to even the most obnoxiously leftist descriptions of the exploration of the New World, but even then, acknowledging that the large scale conquest of the Americas involved multiple genocides is not in conflict with acknowledging that some of the explorers that found new lands (not only the Americas) were brave visionaries.

Why is it so difficult to just accept that a single person can have both inspiration qualities that we should try to emulate and also grave moral failings we should learn from? No one is perfect and hardly anyone is purely evil either.

You can explore and discover new worlds without raping, killing and exploiting the new people you find. The problem wasn't the exploration, and there's nothing inherent about exploration that forces you to murder others.

I find these 'what-ifs' to be only thought-exercises. You'll never truly know if the world is in fact a better place because there's no A/B test, no re-do.

In the end humans are naturally curious, expansionist, greedy (to varying degrees). We've always been this way and so it's only natural for us to continue.

We've been described as a virus before, feels relatively accurate esp if we start planet and system hopping.

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