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• GreenShimada@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  No way.

  In about 1965 someone would have asked Icelanders what they do on their summer holidays, because so few of them show up in continental Europe, and they would reveal that they’ve been building a massive resort empire named Eircksonland on the coast of what we would call Florida. All Viking-themed, and packed with the absurdly sunburned blonde people.

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  0% of those geopolitical borders would exist that way without the discovery of the Americas.

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  • First_Thunder@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Wrong, Continental portugal Would be accurate

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    • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Are you sure that Franco, validated by the succes of Nazi Germany after they won the war in 1945, would not have tried to annex Portugal at some point?

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• hayvan@feddit.nl ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Imagine launching weather satellites and there is suddenly a whole new continental society living peacefully by intentionally avoiding rest of the world.

  (I know this is absurd at several levels)

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  • DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not entirely absurd.

    I mean, it wouldn’t be weather satellites, but the ancient Romans could ahve built hot air balloons.

    Check out a novel, “The Guns Above” by Robyn Bennis. Napoleonic war with air ships.

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• Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The reason the Americas were “discovered” are advances in shipping and navigation technology. It works have happened sooner or later regardless of Columbus. He was just the first to try.

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  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It was found sooner than Columbus. Vikings were here before him.

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    • Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If you disregard the people who had been living there at least ten thousand years.

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• TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The good timeline

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• anonymous111@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Source to explain? I’m lost :)

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  • Denjin@feddit.uk ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Columbus was commissioned to find a quicker and cheaper route to India to try and break the Ottoman monopoly on the Spice trade due to controlling the overland route through Asia and into Europe. The journey by sea around Africa was too long and dangerous to be profitable.

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    • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Not quite how that worked out.

      Yes, the Ottoman empire did either outright cut off the spice trade to mainland Europe or heavily tax it, which caused Portugal and Spain to seek sea routes to the Far East.

      The Portuguese claimed the route around Africa as theirs. It was long, but not too long. The route was known, and you don’t have to sail far from the coast the entire way.

      To say Columbus was “commissioned” was a bit much. Columbus went to great lengths to approach the Spanish crown to propose his “going to the East by sailing West” plan, which was based on some bad math. Like he read an Arab scholar’s work on the subject which gave the Earth’s circumference in Arabic miles, which he read as the shorter European miles, so he underestimated the size of the earth by about 1/3. The cartoon I was shown in elementary school depicted Columbus as the visionary who first thought the Earth was round, when it’s quite the opposite. It’s more like he was a crackpot small earther. But he did finally convince Isabella and Ferdinand to sponsor a voyage. Three ships departed Lisbon in 1492, sailed down the African coast to the Canaries and then did something monumentally stupid: They made a right turn and headed due West straight out to sea.

      Columbus, if not his men, deserved to sail out to sea and starve to death eight time zones East of Japan, but in the most impactful stroke of dumb luck in human history right about where he predicted Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands to be, he found Central America and the Caribbean. Columbus ended up making 3 more trips to the Caribbean, he saw the shores of Mexico, the mouth of the Orinoco river, was shipwrecked on Jamaica. He went to his death believing he had visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a New World. Credit for realizing “Look, we’ve sailed 400 miles down the coast, there’s no way this is Indonesia” goes to Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan actually achieved reaching the Spice islands by sailing west from Europe, though most of his men including Magellan himself died in the process and what few men remained completed a circumnavigation because starving on the way back across the Pacific sounded less fun than possibly dealing with the Portuguese.

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• drath@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ottoman empire still dissolved

  Seems accurate

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• PixeIOrange@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  But it would unbalance the world!

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• realitista@lemmus.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Image

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