5 hours ago
This talks about climate impacting the population, but it made me wonder if herd immunity to disease in an isolated population could cause population limiting diseases to go extinct after awhile.
5 hours ago
Food would be the biggest barrier to population growth in pre modern times
5 hours ago
Why does anyone do anything? Some people obviously just got really into the idea of sailing to the islands.
Right now there are people in the world that are super into the idea of going to Mars. There’s no reason why anyone has to do it, but they’re into the idea of it and they’ll find whatever rationale they need to explain the desire.
4 hours ago
But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
- JKF, 19622 hours ago
Okay, but you not only have the question of why they did it when they did it, but also why they didn't in the previous 1700 years. We haven't been to Mars yet because the technology isn't ready, not because nobody has the hankering.
Maybe there is no real reason, at some point the cool kids started doing it and the wanna-be's imitated the cool kids. Or maybe not.
3 hours ago
> Some people obviously just got really into the idea of sailing to the islands.
Not to be argumentative, but why would we think that the Polynesians knew that Hawaii (as one example) was out there in the middle of the vast Pacific.
Whereas we know Mars exists and we know how to find it if we want to try to go there.
Perhaps they just were willing to gamble that surely there must be other islands out there like the ones they were inhabiting.
4 hours ago
There are always going to be people whose reason is “because we can”. Going to Mars has, on the scale of a human lifetime, only recently become vaguely feasible. As someone who works in STEM, I’m generally on the side of new technologies unlocking things, though I don’t doubt that population and environmental shifts in the home territory can tip things over from a few crazy dreamers to a more coordinated expansion.
5 hours ago
We're going to Mars because of rainfall patterns. The anthropologists of the future will peice together clues and come to the same conclusion.
4 hours ago
I have been running from rainfall patterns my entire life.
5 hours ago
"Why was there a massive migration to Mars starting in 2050? More importantly why did every wave of settlers die out almost immediately"?
4 hours ago
They are probably trying but only succeeded after many failures and fix the food supply of a long sea journey, navigation and mapping of the sea.
6 hours ago
This was covered in the movie.
4 hours ago
TLDR; There was a guy who sailed west. Other people didn't like that guy, so they sailed the opposite way.
5 hours ago
An increase in the supply of boat snacks?
5 hours ago
Same reason as everything - looking for women
4 hours ago
The Pilgrims weren't looking for women. They were looking for religious freedom.
4 hours ago
They had religious freedom in the Netherlands. The idea that they were persecuted is a very stubborn myth.
They went to the Americas in search of the same thing as most immigrants: money[1].
[1] https://www.history.com/articles/why-pilgrims-came-to-americ...
2 hours ago
(Also worth noting: these people were adamantly opposed to religious freedom as a principle. Just ask any of the dead Maryland Catholics who had the audacity to live near them. The Constitution was in no small part a rebuke of these people's religious bigotry).
27 minutes ago
They were looking for the ability to shun and persecute people who didn't step to their particular religious and cultural beat.
4 hours ago
> They were looking for religious freedom.
That's a tired trope and not the real reason. If history interests you, I suggest you dig deeper with fresh eyes.