General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsImagine for a moment that Bezos, with the whole world watching...
bumps into something that isn't supposed to be there -- a previously unknown Earth that somehow escaped our detection for centuries. It's full of happy, healthy non-white people with advanced agriculture, almost no hierarchies, no plagues and no environmental destruction.
The encounter would force us to question everything we think we know about physics, optics, science and spirituality. It would challenge Eurocentrism at a fundamental level. It would set off years of re-examining our beliefs while new and better crops increase yields 400% as the potato did when it was brought to Europe.
It would shake our belief in science for having failed to detect a population of humans equal to that which we know now. And it would cause an equal reaction in religion for having no revealed knowledge of its existence -- a "garden of Eden" from which we seem expelled.
A big dose of humility and cause for self-re-evaluation.
All of that is what happened in the wake of 1492/93 !
This Heinrich Bunting map of 1580 shows how great the denial was; how inconvenient the truth could be. The balance of the world so upset by new information that it was still banished to the lower left corner almost 90 years later:
..and then Bezos coughs on them...
Budi
(15,325 posts)Did Branson cough too? Or just Bezos?
How bout 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old physics student,? Did they cough too?
Go on....
Omnipresent
(5,613 posts)Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)respects at least. I wouldn't for a moment downplay the accomplishments of those in the Americas of that period, but to describe everyone there as having been "happy" seems quite the overstatement, given that therewas war, ritualized human sacrifice, and plenty of interpersonal violence.
Regarding having almost no hierarchies, the Incan and Aztec Empires would like to have a word with you.
As for the Bunting map, it's figurative, and not meant to represent the actual geography of the Earth. The shape is a symbolisation of the Christian Trinity and a component at the symbolisation of the German city Hanover, where Bünting was born.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCnting_Clover_Leaf_Map
Here's a more typical map from 1580:
No one was trying to "banish" knowledge of the New World.
MFGsunny
(2,356 posts)Apollo Zeus
(251 posts)but it clearly shows a religious view that struggles against facts. It imposes balance and symmetry on a reality that had little.
>No one was trying to "banish" knowledge of the New World.<
Galileo (1564-1642) and Copernicus would likely disagree with you there. Religion and science are incompatible ways of looking at reality.
What is Communion if not "ritualized human sacrifice"? (and cannibalism)
As for "happy":
"They are so unsuspicious and so generous with what they possess, that no one who had not seen it would believe it. They never refuse anything that is asked for. They even offer it themselves, and show so much love that they would give their very hearts. " C. Colombo 1492
Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)geography. It wasn't meant to minimize the existence of the Americas. In point of fact a number of European powers were eagerly recruiting people to be colonists.
Galileo (1564-1642) and Copernicus would likely disagree with you there. Religion and science are incompatible ways of looking at reality.
I'm going to have to ask you at this point to cite examples of European authorities attempting to keep knowledge of the New World from the public. Galileo's and Copernicus' struggles with the Church over astronomy don't qualify as such.
Communion is eating a wafer. Oh, there's plenty of symbolism, sure....but no one is harmed. Whereas in the case of the Aztecs, ritualized human sacrifice was an actual human being who was actually killed. A rather large difference, that.
Chris was something of an unreliable narrator on such matters. In any case, in the case of the Aztecs we have people who had their actual hearts ripped out of their still-living bodies.
Apollo Zeus
(251 posts)the mindset of European Christians.
The distortions of Mercatur map of 1569 are still used today -- they minimize the size of countries on the equator while greatly exaggerating the size of Canada, Greenland, etc. We have the technology to make accurate scale maps yet we cling to Mercatur so perhaps ideological resistance is not limited to the the devout.
Until 1815 the people of North and South America were called "Americans" but when whites adopted that name for themselves they went back to the disenfranchising term "Indians" for those who had been here for thousands of years. And they hyphenated the non-whites who immigrated with them.
I'm not arguing that Aztecs didn't have rituals -- only that Europeans got here at least 9000 years after Asians did. And what they found blew their minds, set off Descarte, the Reformation, Deism and an agricultural revolution.
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)I would be rather less charitable in my characterization of the first European to enslave and mass murder people in the "New" World.
Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)JHB
(37,128 posts)...passes his assets on to his next of kin the hard way. Space flight isn't very forgiving when things go wrong.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)were essentially Utopians, happy, healthy, no conflict, lots of nonsense like that.
The reason the Europeans saw mostly young people, was that the life span wasn't that long. Not many of them lived into old age. And I believe I read something about how on the East Coast the forest was mostly second growth because of cutting down of old trees for their agriculture.
At least some tribes perfected torture. Yeah, they did. And long before they started using that torture on Europeans.
Warfare between tribes was extremely common.
They were also known for driving herds of buffalo over cliffs in hunts, killing hundreds, maybe thousands more than they could possibly make use of.
What they didn't have was European technology, and European herd diseases.
I wish I were a better writer, because I'd love to write a book, maybe a series, that envisions the original inhabitants as having a technological culture close to that of Europe by the time the latter got here. And their own diseases that the Europeans had no immunity to.
Apollo Zeus
(251 posts)I think it is still hard for us to imagine how unexpected "the new World" was so I tried to use a routine space flight as an analogy.
Americans' biological defenses were better against parasites than viruses since they didn't live amongst livestock or with roads full of horse poop.
Where do you get your data on life expectancy? The largest city in the world in 1492 is the one that is today known as "Mexico City" and Cortez wrote an incredible description of it -- the massive markets, the trading, the justice system. You don't get to be the biggest city if everyone is dying at 30 as you suggest.
"Buffalo jumps" were exceedingly rare. And impossible before the introduction of the horse so that is a post-1492 phenomenon. Not sure what your point is there.
As for technology, we still aren't sure how they hybridized corn. Only through recent genomics have we confirmed that the plant they used to create corn still exists. It is so different in appearance as to be unrecognizable as related to corn. Of course they selectively bred for certain traits but how they isolated the hybrids from teosinte generation after generation is not known. Corn can pollinate plants miles away and yet they were able to isolate the hybrids in 9000 BCE.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)I read something that talked about what the first Europeans encountered when they started colonizing this continent. It noted that various observers commented about the youth of the natives they came across. No old people. That absolutely says something about relative life spans. Did Cortez talk at any length about old people? He certainly doesn't in that link, although he does vividly describe the market.
I'm not trying to suggest they were uncivilized primitives. I'm just pointing out that they weren't the paragons of virtue that's too often claimed. I'll take human sacrifice for 200, Alex.
Apollo Zeus
(251 posts)Famously the NY town of "Kinderhook" is so-named because only children came to see the boat Henry Hudson was in. That may be what they were referring to but that is by no means a census. If anything, it suggests that such an event was the exception rather than a region-wide phenomenon.
Europeans tried repeatedly to settle in North America after the east coast was charted. They were unable to establish settlements in areas where native populations were high but small pox and other plagues eventually killed most of the population. So for example, Roanoke in 1585 disappears without a trace but 22 years later Jamestown barely makes it through. Per National Geographic, they turned to cannibalism and most died but the colony was resupplied and makes a decent claim to being the first successful English settlement in North America.
Verazzano brought a plague that depopulated and destabilized the New Jersey and Hudson Valley regions so whatever Europeans saw after that was not the conditions of pre-Columbian contact. Pre-Colombian cultures are preserved in oral histories and artwork. There is also a lot of new research into the pre-Columbian Americas. Genomics and ground penetrating radar have found large settlements and links to Polynesian, Japanese and Central Russian ancestors.
We know that the Mahicans considered a lifetime to be 112 years, which fits with scientific conceptions of the longest possible life for humans:
"The prophets also taught of a life walk cycle, of 56 years, 14 years per each of the four directions, which each of us walks in our own way. I was taught by Wabanaki elders (the late Irvin Polchis among others) that this wheel or hoop took 56 years to complete...It was said that in the time of Creation, we were each granted two cycles, which I assume to be 112 years, but as an approximation, as the universe is constantly in flux. Those who reach the age of 56 today are often considered elders by native people..." - Dr Evan Pritchard, Marist College
Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)It's not quite the story you envision, but it's darned close.
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791450/9781625791450___3.htm
Enjoy!
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)The Apotheosis of Martin Padway".
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)I'll have to ask Steve if he has a copy of it floating around.
Yeah, I know S.M. Stirling. Actually, I know a reasonable number of s-f writers, lucky me.
Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)the Tales from the Black Chamber series. It's kind of "meh" compared to his other work.
Er...in the nicest way, of course.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)I know he has another series in mind, because I was at lunch recently with him and Walter Jon Williams and they were talking about upcoming projects. Can't quite recall what Steve talked about.
I have only read a few of his books, because some f them I just can't get into. But I will tell you Steve is a nice guy.
Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)I've interacted with him a couple of times online (quite some time ago, back in the days of the Usenet). Ah, memories....
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,746 posts)but his lovely wife Jan died in April. They'd been married for maybe 40 years, no kids, very close. He's devastated. I've helped, along with several other s-f friends, with some things surrounding her passing, such as helping clear out some of her things.
Dial H For Hero
(2,971 posts)My condolences to him.
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)About 50 miles.
Unlikely he'd bump into any startling new worlds.