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Comment by nilamo | Hacker News Reader

Why must there be a NEED? Why did we ever send ships across the ocean to explore? Where was the need? People like doing science, and so we're doing science.

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That was (for the western hemisphere) mostly to steal gold and silver from other civilizations. Oh, and to grow addictive drugs for export, like in Virginia. It was never done for other than banal reasons, although I'm sure pious rationalizations were offered to make people feel better about the ongoing genocides.

Wasn't it to discover alternative trade routes and also to show physically that the world is round? I think they didn't know that there were usable land to grow tobacco when they started.

Humans have demonstrably known the world is round since at least ancient Greece.

Columbus claimed it was radically smaller in diameter than previous calculations, and was begging for funding to go around the other side of the world to get a good trade route to India and China for trade goods. He was following some bad math, and adding his own worse math to the mix.

People were sure he was going to die, because they did not bring enough provisions to actually go around the world.

Amusingly, Spain famously did set up trade to China through the New World. Silver was mined in South America and taken to China (or to the Philippines), traded for silk and other luxury goods, which were then taken back across the Pacific, over land to the Atlantic, and then on to Europe.

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

The first of those is banal, and the second is wrong -- they already knew the world was round, and had a more accurate estimate of the diameter than Columbus was claiming.

Round, they knew, but still, to do it physically, was still somehow important - even for those who paid for it.

Banal, depends on what you mean by this word.

That feels like a bit of rewriting the past. How could someone plan on stealing valuables from somewhere across the ocean... before they know there even is an "across the ocean" to get to?

It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to a means of getting one over on someone.

That wasn't the motivation for the first trip, but it was for continuing it all. It was driven by economics, as anything large scale must inevitably be.

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