What we did not know was an accurate way to determine longitude, specifically on a ship, until 1761. [1] [2]
Consequently, any voyage before 1761 knew its latitude exactly, but dead-reckoned its longitude.
33 days of speed-estimated dead reckoning in 1492, plus having no idea of the speed or orientation of the underlying current you're in, leaves a lot of room for error.
[0] For values of "did" that include "the correct answer had been derived and was documented (Eratosthenes, within ~2.5% in ~240 BC, working at the Library of Alexandria), but it wasn't broadly accepted as the correct answer." Thus leading to Columbus believing an incorrect value instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Colu...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
[2] Except via some very complicated planetary transits that were pre-calculated and could only be used as they occured. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Satelli...
It's fascinating. We are on the same track today. We know the truth but most of us jump on the same entirely wrong band wagons.
One could argue that ignoring the truth is worse than pure ignorance.
Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to.
On the one hand, we know more than they did (stronger & longer mandatory education + post-primary + informal access). On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty.
Or, as I sum it all up: science should be a verb (aka process), not a noun (result).
No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.
I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well, not intentionally); I was picking out the times being compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of the discussion.
But really, the same applies to the whole of history from the ancient period up through and including all of the early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th century on, to avoid any problems with overspecificity on either end.
Now, we know many things. Then, we did not know many things (although we perhaps believed more).
So an every-person (I'm talking generally, not only of the most scientific), plucked from a more ignorant time of history, would have a more developed method of dealing with confusion.
I don't quite buy the counter-argument (if this is yours?) that we're a more scientific society. I would have before COVID, but not now...
Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling something science doesn't de facto make it so.
We know that our knowledge better describes the results we reliably reproduce in the world around us.
We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did not.
If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did," I'm not sure what does.
We have a tendency to assume we know more than at any other time before on the basis that we know more than our rather recent ancestors.
What does that mean, if not "we know more than they did"?
But we've also made some genuine proofs. For example, we know that Fermat's last theorem is correct. That was suspected, but not known.
Yes, this applies basically to all of maths - and even to other disciplines that produce proofs. Another example: we know that one model of gravity permits black holes, wormholes, and warp drives. Sure, the model might not accurately reflect reality. But still: this is something we know nowadays, that we didn't know 105 years ago.
Not to mention all the things we collectively have done - we know it's possible to leave Earth, to live in orbit for a while, to convert sunlight directly into electricity, that it is (barely) possible to run the 100m in under 10 sec, what the earth looks like from a distance, how to make fusion bombs, how to fly... we know a lot more than folks from even the early 1900s, let alone further back.
Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things mentioned in the media as science that really is actually science.
I guess pre-COVID I would have said "Some people are ignorant." Post-COVID experience, I'd agree more with "Some people are ignorant and refuse to admit their ignorance, to the extent of cherry picking reality."
It's like expecting some people were bad at math, but getting a stack of tests back where half have multi-page essays on why numbers don't exist.
And it isn't only half idiots promoting these ideas.
Just take a look at The Craft of Writing Effectively from the university of Chicago, social science of course. You will be even more baffled, it is a hard to believe and difficult to watch lecture. Apparently these things are university approved and now watched in the millions on YouTube.
Correct. This is key to understand most of the issues at play in these past events.
Edgar Allen Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket details a fictional account of what might be in the Antarctic, an unexplored area in his time. We now know that Poe's imagined account is a far cry from the reality of the Antarctic continent, but he could have been "right" in that there are people living there. That doesn't really imply any knowledge of such lands though. If Poe had lived several hundreds years earlier he might have written a similar story with s/Antarctic/across the Atlantic/.
Add a few hundreds years with confusion between "fiction" (or "myth" or "legend", if you will) and "science" (a concept which didn't really exist in the first place, at least not in the same form) and things get very murky fast.
I don't think that the mere existence of the concept of "Antillia" really proves any actual knowledge; there needs to be some additional evidence; reading that Wikipedia page there doesn't seem to be any. We'll likely never know for certain if the roots of Antillia were based in reality or entirely fictional.
Which people do you mean?
> Sandy Island (sometimes labelled in French Île de Sable, and in Spanish Isla Arenosa) is a non-existent island that was charted for over a century as being located near the French territory of New Caledonia between the Chesterfield Islands and Nereus Reef in the eastern Coral Sea.[1] The island was included on many maps and nautical charts from as early as the late 19th century. It was removed from French hydrographic charts in 1974. The island gained wide media and public attention in November 2012 when the R/V Southern Surveyor, an Australian research ship,[2] passed through the area and "undiscovered" it. The island was quickly removed from many maps and data sets, including those of the National Geographic Society and Google Maps.[3]
He was thinking they reached India.
Same mistake today people do with Miles and Kilometer, when you are raised in one or another it is difficult to switch.
Erastothene was speaking in stadium, Columbus in Nautic miles.
The Spanish crown was motivated by greed.
In the late 1400s people thought the Asian continent was larger than it is in reality. So when Columbus et co saw islands they thought they had hit Japan†… roughly where all the best maps of the day said it would be.
See Toscanelli's 1474 map, which is what Columbus was going by:
* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Tosc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli
† Cipangu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jipangu