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- Oct 20, 2009
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(I'm back to college. Taking Astronomy.)
We were just discussing the role of stars in navigation - how, in order to understand where you are in relation to the greater whole (the rest of the earth / the universe), you benefit from having a fixed-point to compare and measure your movement to/against.
Thus: the North Star, a fixed point, became a reliable point of navigation.
This allowed people who could see the North Star to navigate the globe (land and sea), using the North Star as a reference.
However, the Southern Hemisphere has no fixed point (cannot see the North Star, the only genuinely fixed point in the sky to refer to). Ergo - there is no history of global navigation in the Southern Hemisphere. Not by land, not by sea. Nothing significant. At most, Southern Hemisphere cultures navigated place-to-place (mountain to mountain, sea to sea, river to river, island to island) but were unable to go further.
-- I just thought it was interesting. A few months ago someone here posted about the reputation of the North being 'great' and the South being 'not so great' . . . This lack of a southernmost navigation point might play into why people from the Northern Hemisphere have had an advantage. It's in the stars. However, in our modern racially-charged climate this is critically studied as a matter of 'because white people'. However, the only benefit 'white people' (and not to forget Russians, Asians and others as well, not just 'whites European descendants') had was the North Star as a guide point.
Every great civilization to be seen as a power fixture in various points in History have had a strong grasp of circumnavigation via skypoint. The northern cultures that did not study the night sky and make use of it as a tool did not thrive.
We were just discussing the role of stars in navigation - how, in order to understand where you are in relation to the greater whole (the rest of the earth / the universe), you benefit from having a fixed-point to compare and measure your movement to/against.
Thus: the North Star, a fixed point, became a reliable point of navigation.
This allowed people who could see the North Star to navigate the globe (land and sea), using the North Star as a reference.
However, the Southern Hemisphere has no fixed point (cannot see the North Star, the only genuinely fixed point in the sky to refer to). Ergo - there is no history of global navigation in the Southern Hemisphere. Not by land, not by sea. Nothing significant. At most, Southern Hemisphere cultures navigated place-to-place (mountain to mountain, sea to sea, river to river, island to island) but were unable to go further.
-- I just thought it was interesting. A few months ago someone here posted about the reputation of the North being 'great' and the South being 'not so great' . . . This lack of a southernmost navigation point might play into why people from the Northern Hemisphere have had an advantage. It's in the stars. However, in our modern racially-charged climate this is critically studied as a matter of 'because white people'. However, the only benefit 'white people' (and not to forget Russians, Asians and others as well, not just 'whites European descendants') had was the North Star as a guide point.
Every great civilization to be seen as a power fixture in various points in History have had a strong grasp of circumnavigation via skypoint. The northern cultures that did not study the night sky and make use of it as a tool did not thrive.
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