>had explorers not ventured across the sea just to see what was on the other side

I mean, they mostly did it to establish trade routes and exploit previously untapped natural resources, not out of a mere spirit of exploration.

And even if the explorers themselves did it out of a spirit of exploration, the ones funding their expeditions generally had other motives.

Then let's explore for the riches that could be (are) there? If that's the motivation some people need, so be it. We're undoubtably in a better place as a society now than we were in the 1200s so it stands to reason that exploring the solar system and beyond would stand to put us in a better position come 3200 or 4200 than if we simply languish here.

It's not like everything looks absolutely better today than it was for anyone anywhere in 1200s. For one thing there wasn't the anxiougenous messages broadcasted continuously h24 about massive extinction and global warming well on their road.

This is not saying all is darker, and denies the many benefits that social and technological progresses thhat can be hand picked.

North America is populated mostly by desecandants of later immigrants to the continent that had nothing to do the original "exploration". The common folk in the colonizing countries had nothing to do with it either. The original local populations were all but wiped out by disease and war. The people who actually did most of the "exploring" were probably too busy worrying about surviving scurvy and and the winter to care about such romantic ideas. And at least one country (Scotland) was effectively bankrupted and lost its independence specifically because they spent an unreasonable amount of money on packing perfectly fine people onto ships to send to their deaths.

You could say we're better off as a civilization than we were a thousand years ago. But that's true in nearly all countries, regardless of their colonial history. I suspect it has more to do with the Haber process and refrigeration than James Cook or even Ferdinand Magellan.

Focusing inwards to grow isn't "languishing". And while I'm all for the platonic idea of exploration for exploring's sake, there is also a stage of (im)maturity where trying to go somewhere new just results in bringing all your old problems with you.

The Iroquois had farms, you know. They grew corn and lived in a communal system where unused land was shared, but there was enough for everyone to have their own area as they wanted. Women had important roles in the labour force and political system. Famine was apparently quite rare, to the degree that the first Europeans across the pond were envious of their food security.

Down south, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, and had probably around as many people living in it as London, Paris, Venice, and Lisbon combined. The marketplace alone was around the size of a European capital. Tenochtitlan had aqueducts made out of terracotta, and the people bathed twice a day and drank spring water from a separate source. The palace had multiple zoos, gardens, and aquaria, and the nicer parts of the city were built entirely out of brick and masonry. The big temple in the middle was hundreds of feet tall, and only a couple meters shorter than Notre Dame in Paris.

Of course, all of that was destroyed, completely and utterly.

The myth of the romantic Age of Sail explorer is not compatible with the power structures of the time. What king would send perfectly good ships away "just to see what was on the other side", when there were political rivals to outcompete and usurp on this side? And what king would survive sending such resources away, if they did not gain a profit from doing so (through whatever tactics of exploitation were most expedient)?

Certainly the world would have been quite different if Columbus and Cortés decided to work on themselves, instead of concluding that the Earth is shaped like a tiny pear so they should raze a couple cities they just found out about, or whatever else was going on in those men's heads…