Imagine thinking you're gonna reach India faster but instead you bring chili peppers, tomatoes and potatoes back, thus revolutionizing global cuisine forever.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Was he even trying for "faster?"
It is my youtube-based understanding that either the Arabs or Ottomans had stopped the overland spice trade into western Europe, Portugal laid exclusive claim to the route around Africa, and Columbus' whole idea was that, given the earth is a globe, you can get there by going the other way and not have to war with Portugal over it.
This is from that new production of Shogun that I don't have the streaming service for?
If as in new you mean the 21st century one, then yes. (I'm saying that because they're also planning a season two, despite already having used up the books material. Didn't work so well for DnD though.)
Also, remember the times and practice a little.. privateering, if you catch my drift.
My understanding of Shogun is, in order:
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My father's hilariously thick paperback with several cracks in the spine
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A movie(?) made decades ago
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A miniseries that the Youtube algorithm started showing me 30 seconds of at a time.
Yeah, they're probably pushing it now since there's gonna be a season 2 and the season 1 did so well. This 2024 version that is. That is based on the book, I believe. Or at least a remake of the movie made that was based on the book.
The new show was very enjoyable. NerdWriter1 did a nice breakdown on why it seems to work better with translations than the older movie. In the book you can do things which you can't do on screen, or at least not with very good, intentional subtitling, given so that your interpretation of the world is much in line with the protagonist.
But yeah YT shorts at least have started pushing shows which are coming up in like half a year. Pushing 3-body proble a lot now, it's coming out in early 2026 I think.
On hearing they're making a sequel to a completed miniseries based on a book, my immediate reaction was "Oh fuck no. Not this shit." Looking at the last season of Game of Thrones, when a high budget TV series based on a book ran out of source material and the production team went off on their own.
Today I learned that Shogun is one of a loose series of six books written by the author. It was written third, but it's the earliest in-setting by a bit over 200 years. I'd be on board with adapting the other books, I would be thoroughly uninterested in the production team just making up Shogun 2: Samurai Boogaloo because corporate wants to further monetize this property.
"Oh fuck no. Not this shit." Looking at the last season of Game of Thrones, when a high budget TV series based on a book ran out of source material and the production team went off on their own.
Samesies, but we'll see.
At least it's not D&B this time so
That’s why you hire Portuguese navigators.
Fuck those papists, we'll do it live
Also you are about 30% sure the world is a sphere, probably, maybe
Nobody at that time thought the world was flat. It wouldn't even make sense to try to reach India by going the other way if it wasn't a globe. The whole "Columbus thought the world is flat" thing is completely bunk.
It is my youtube-based understanding that, at the time, any literate person understood the world was round, and even had a reasonable idea of its size, but Europeans weren't aware that the Americas existed, and sailing out into open ocean months away from land was preposterously dangerous.
Iirc Columbus believed that the world was smaller than what his contemporaries believed, so he believed he could make the trip
There was a video that showed him arriving to america but the view of the map was inclined and rotated in such a way that made Cuba look like Japan and Florida like southeast Asia.
That made me realize how easily you could be confused at the time, especially when the maps weren’t as perfectly drawn as they are today
I kind of wonder how accurate that depiction would be as I don't think Columbus ever actually saw or mapped the American mainland, he ended up in the Caribbean landing on Cuba, Hispaniola and San Salvador, briefly mistaking these lands for the Philippines or, I've seen a depiction of Columbus sailing the length of the South coast of Cuba, stopping just short of the island's tip before declaring it the Indian mainland, though let's also take that with a grain of salt.
It's not like he had a god's eye view of the area around his ships. Mind you, Columbus' voyages predate the invention of the sextant. He had a quadrant and an astrolabe for determining latitude, an hourglass rather than a chronometer, and a plank of wood tied to a knotty rope as a speedometer. He had a magnetic compass for determining heading, and was the first known European to document the phenomenon of magnetic declination. And that's kind of it; he was wacky enough to attempt a transatlantic voyage navigating by dead reckoning with an incomplete chart, and got monumentally lucky there was an archipelago about where he thought he was going.
And today's are still distorted
Calm down, just saying it wasnt 'confirmed' until then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth that was the time we finally managed to circumnavigate the earth for the first time
I believe they knew it was round long before the voyage because the curve of the shadow of the earth on the moon(during lunar eclipse) proved it.
Yeah, and Erastothenes was measuring light angles and stuff way back in 200 BC to get an approximate size of the Earth's circumference. The old folks were pretty dang smart.
He was a pretty smart dude. Came up with the sieve technique for finding primes as well. Or is credited with it anyways....
I know, but that was the time they first proved it by circumnavigating (and not the other means), that why I wrote 'confirmed'.
Seeing a curved shadow on the moon was 100% confirmation as it would be impossible with a flat earth.
Tell that to your average sailor in the 1400s
How about your average Hellenian polymath from a few thousand years ago?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
He is best known for being the first person known to calculate the Earth's circumference, which he did by using the extensive survey results he could access in his role at the Library. His calculation was remarkably accurate (his error margin turned out to be less than 1%). He was the first to calculate Earth's axial tilt, which similarly proved to have remarkable accuracy.[4][5] He created the first global projection of the world, incorporating parallels and meridians based on the available geographic knowledge of his era.
If we only hadn't picked monotheism at any point, the world would be rather different, we'd have actual hoverboards now, and like prolly starships with actual warp engines.
He is not who the meme is about but yeah, religion has dragged down humanity's progress in pretty much very single way over the ages
Eh, I hate to use the blanket term "religion" as if it was the opposite of someone trying to explain the world. Not all of them clearly are.
Dogmatic religion, eg monotheism, is what is bad for society.
But like even the random European sailors in 1400's would've been using Greek wisdom surely. They probably didn't know what it was but still some lessons...
Or not. We've been an ocean going species for like 100k+ years lol.
And the hobbits we found on Flores needed to get there somehow so they had at least like bamboo rafts like 800 000 years ago.
I'm sure they did. That's why the sailors were okay with trying to sail around the world despite having no "proof".
The people in the 1400s weren't idiots. The average person knew the earth was round for basically the same reasons you do. Ships get lower as they sail away. Earths shadow is round. The moon is round. Someone told them it's round, and it's been common knowledge for 1000 years.
The evidence for the world being flat isn't so compelling that you're going to go to great lengths to argue the point in most cases, and if you're convinced it is then being told that someone went around it isn't going to actually convince you if someone telling you it's round isn't enough.
Didn’t we know this since the time of the ancient Greeks?
I believe the church made sure we forgot it and I think we had never 'tested' if the world is truly a sphere until trying to circumnavigate the world (though there are other ways to test it). Could be wrong, been a while, lets see if someone more informed can help
Pretty sure ancient Greeks also calculated the size of it as well. I can see the church wanting to spin their own narrative. But I suspect the educated knew better. (Though that would be an extremely small percentage of the population.) though I would imagine someone like Columbus would know. Or at least talked with people who would know. Maybe his sailors not so much?
Oh they knew, but the church monopolized knowledge for a while, preached geocentrism and stuff. The great navigations were a culmination of science progress and trade pushing for new routes to be found
preached geocentrism
To be fair it was logical back then, the idea how big the universe really is is too much even for today people.
Pliny has some interesting observations in his writings, things about how the shadows cast on sundials get longer the farther North you go, that there was a village in central Africa with a well that, on midday in late June, is perfectly lit straight to the bottom, because around the solstice in the tropics the sun is DIRECTLY overhead.