[ExI] Gender-Neutral Side Note

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat


>...Here's an alternate wrinkle for you: what if he had heard, from a Bristol merchant visiting a Spanish port, that there were good fishing grounds far to the west (which the Bristol fishermen had learned of from Viking tales of their former expedition), and thus knew that there was some sort of land over there (that, given the real circumference of the Earth and the distance eastward to the Chinese coast, couldn't be China), but kept that secret because "better fishing grounds" was, he thought, worth less to the royalty than "Asia with all its spices and trade"?

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Ja, cool wrinkle.

I like to think of everything in terms of technology.  In the late 1400s they had instruments which would measure the latitude very precisely.  The sailor needed an accurate calendar and an astrolabe.  But they didn't have clocks accurate enough to measure longitude.  If the old-timers theorized that the earth is spherical (pretty reasonable assumption) then they could estimate how far it is to India, but they wouldn't know how far India spanned to the east.  They knew how to sail around to the west side of India, but what was out there to the east?  They didn't know.

Columbus made a reasonable assumption when he reached land in the Caribbean to assume it was India, and that India was a really big hunk of land.

spike