I read about the Antarctic. They keep running into walls of ice before they could find/see it.
Is this the same “discovered” as America was “discovered” in 1492?
Actually no, I don’t think there were any people living in Antarctica… but I could be wrong.
This is a very human centric definition of discovery.
Penguins has been living there for millenia beforehand.
We are humans…
I was mocking the attitude that something can’t be discovered by one group of people if a different group of people already knew about it.
Columbus discovering the Americas is commonly called a “euro-centric definition of discovery”. While conveniently ignoring that literally nobody in Europe knew the Americas existed.
But were there people living in the southern hemisphere who knew not to go further south because they’d reach the icy land of certain death?
There were probably people who knew that if they went further south they’d not come back. On maps locations like these used to be labeled “Here there be monsters” or something like that.
I don’t know about you, but I find seeing things to be much easier when there isn’t a planet obscuring it.
Well, we currently know better the moon’s surface than our oceans’ bottom, so…
It’s like it tell my kids, you have to look under and behind things…
Idk looking up is a lot easier then going to the southernmost point of earth…
I got a really bad crick in my neck once
Yeah. The only invention we needed was telescopic lenses in order to spot Uranus.
But you can see one in your backyard sometimes.
If our main sensory organs were sound-based or feel-based, we’d probably have discovered a lot of things before planets and stars.
The things that took a while to discover on earth, or that aren’t yet fully explored, are largely because it’s hard to see them without getting very close, which can be hard.
Building a good telescope might have been hard, but with a telescope you can see things that are millions of km away. But, because of the earth’s curvature, you can’t see Antarctica until you’re practically next to Antarctica. You can’t see the bottom of the ocean until you travel to the bottom of the ocean, or at least until you scan it with sound waves which are then converted into something you can see.
Imagine an alien that developed in the water on a planet with sub-surface oceans with ice on top. No real value for eyes, so they’re sound / touch based. Picture what it would be like to try to explore the solar system. There’s a boundary layer at the top of their “atmosphere” (the top of the ocean) that’s solid (ice), beyond that there’s some non-liquid extremely sparse stuff, until some point where no sound travels at all and there’s nothing to touch.
Reminds me of Rocky from Project Hail Mary (sort of, they didn’t live under ocean but under an extremely hostile-to-us atmosphere).
I assure you that Uranus has been observed many times by many people dating far back into the past, such as by Hipparchos in 2nd Century BC. They conclusively figured out exactly what it was in 1846.
Well back then, people didn’t wear many clothes, so if they bent over you’d see right up their bums.
Mars surface is studied better than Earth in 2024. Because there are no oceans or trees on Mars.
Some people today couldn’t find Uranus with both hands and a flashlight.
