Looking past the horizon
Exploration. How; Why; Where?
muizz and
Looking past the horizon
So there are fundamentally two mindsets about the future. A pessimistic one where we see the Earth as finite in resources and conclude that we must limit ourselves. And an optimistic one where we see the Earth as finite in time and conclude that we must grow our knowledge towards infinity. The former mindset is not only uninspiring but will ultimat... See more
Albert Wenger • To Infinity and Beyond
The maps of the world drawn by the medieval cartographers were so hopelessly inaccurate, so filled with factual error, that they elicit condescending smiles today when almost the entire surface of the earth has been charted. Yet the great explorers could never have discovered the New World without them. Nor could the better, more accurate maps of t
... See moreAlvin Toffler • Future Shock
muizz and
If the polynesian wayfinding tradition had died out just a couple centuries earlier, so that we didn't have living practitioners as a matter of record,
they'd tell us that navigating the pacific like that was impossible and those stories were just legends and allegories
More on Polynesian navigation
Howard Aiken—the inventor of the earliest general purpose computer—was never worried about people stealing his ideas. “If your ideas are any good” he’s quoted as saying, “you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” And yet, we think that the moment that we hit the dance floor, all eyes will be on us. The moment we hit publish, the world will ta... See more
Zac Solomon • Freedom in Obscurity
These aren’t sculptures, they’re maps of water. Navigators from the Marshall Islands made ‘stick charts’ to record wave patterns in the sea, treating the ocean as terrain—the shells indicate islands. Their methods and skills are the most advanced of any known for ‘reading’ water
It seems obvious in hindsight…
Island chains in the middle of the Pacific cause predictable disturbances in ocean currents. If you listen carefully, you can find the source of the perturbations.
The first, and most obvious thing, is that they are visual. If I was going to move a piece on a map then I could point to where it was and where it needed to go. Navigation was visual but that was normal. Except, I realised it wasn’t. When people stopped me in their cars to find their way to the nearest petrol station — this was 2004 and GPS was st... See more
Simon Wardley • Highlights From medium.com
Apart from a very limited amount of state sponsorship, it was usually the prospect of commercial gain or of new lands for settlement which funded exploration – a misleading term, which usually signified the ‘mapping’ of existing trade paths through local informants. But the propulsion of economic or demographic need was spasmodic at best.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
A map, in other words, is an arrangement of symbols into a system of meaning — and we use maps because we understand the language of signs that undergirds them. If the mapping of space was a human invention, she explained, one could also invent a means of mapping time.