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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, although given that ancient humans figured that out, maybe it wouldn’t take an advanced civilization very long. That’s probably the biggest flaw with the idea. Like, imagine a civilization at our stage, minus the stuff we learned by having a night sky (no universal gravitation; computers and radio, but no GPS; quantum physics but no general relativity, and so on). Now they manage to voyage into the cold, dark night. How quickly can they catch up? Decades maybe, but probably not centuries.

I think the other question is cultural. How much do they _care_ about space, when even the basic concept is new and alien, and studying it is very expensive?

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I’d note that navigation was most important on oceans while terrestrial navigation relied on landmarks and maps.

I wonder though how much exploration helped lead to an advanced civilization. The exchange of ideas with different cultures was crucial as was the necessity to develop the technologies for exploration beyond navigation alone. It wasn’t until we broadly navigated the planet that we advanced so rapidly after tens of thousands of years of relatively isolated stagnation.

I have a theory that Western culture developed relatively quickly because the geography is basically easily-farmable land around an inland sea with plenty of islands which is easy to navigate and explore.

The Egyptians and the Phoenicians lacked the easily farmable land. Greece was fertile but a little arid, Northern Europe was harsher and riskier, but Rome was in a perfect sweet spot.

On the other side of the world China had the farmland but not the inland sea, so there was less motivation for sea-borne trade and exploration.

So it all started with a tradition that required basic materials science, knowledge of the weather, currents, and seasons, navigation by the sky, and the politics of war and trade across large distances.

And it didn't stop until we had explored the entire planet and taken the first steps into space.

In between we had to learn about time, navigation, and planetary weather patterns, how to build and power better ships, and more complex politics.

It seems like a very natural progression.

A few notes -

Western culture didn’t develop very quickly - the geography had humans for tens of thousands of years before culture developed quickly. Other parts of the world actually developed relatively advanced civilizations long before Europe.

I think once it began to develop it developed quickly partially due to the geography, but it was also through trade with the Middle East and Asia, which were the sources of a lot of the technology bootstrap priming Europe to develop rapidly. It’s indisputable that once the ball really began rolling Europe brought us to the modern age rapidly. But I’m dubious of the geography argument personally since it was so late in developing relative to other societies, including those in the americas.

China actually was an advanced maritime society, with expeditions across most of the world including to the Americas. In fact in the 1400s China was the world’s most powerful navy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_China

China had the sea between China and Japan, and they had some nice oceangoing ships¹.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_(ship)

We navigated before compasses or any time of position system. Ships would travel well known routes from one place to another, with no care or knowledge of the actual topology. You knew you could go a straight line from point A to points B and C, and from C to D. Even if D turns out to be near by to A, all that existed were routes between points, and people would likely still travel to C to reach D.

It worked despite not really knowing where exactly anything was positioned.

> the stuff we learned by having a night sky

You are forgetting stuff like platonic modeling of the real world, testing hypothesis on the basis of their predictive values, and integrating the smart people as a community where they exchange ideas.

We learned all of those by observing the sky.

Of course, there are probably other ways to learn it. But it's not clear at all how viable they are or how long they would take.

We really didn’t even care about space, until we decided spaceflight might lead to easier control of the strings of power through use of icbms or even manned space stations. Then it became an appreciable fraction of our GDP overnight, from no polling of voters only under the pressure of our unelected military authority.

For space exploration sure, but astronomy was a pretty big deal for centuries before space flight was a remote possibility.

But I think the fact that the stars are staring you in the face on a regular basis when you look up has to have been a big influence there. For our hypothetical tidally locked culture, the stars would be, to most people, more akin to the cosmic microwave background. They’d be something scientists could take pictures of and form theories about, but totally removed from everyday experience.

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