[ExI] Gender-Neutral Side Note

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 11:30 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> 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.*


*Columbus used Ptolemy to figure out how far east Asia extended, and that
turned out to be an underestimation not an overestimation, Asia actually
goes further east than Ptolemy or Columbus believed. Columbus was sailing
West so if Ptolemy had been right that would've made the journey even
longer, and given the size of his provisions Columbus would've known it was
impossibly longer, or he would've known it if his estimate of the size of
the Earth was as good as that of the ancient Greeks. But it wasn't. *

* John K Clark*



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