Comment on I'll have one war please
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ll never understand the “born too late to explore Earth” line, given how much of the modern world is opaque to the average Terminally Online Person.
Its shocking to see how many people are unfamiliar with their own home cities. Relatively few people take the time to explore their states or countries to any serious degree.
Don’t believe these lies. Take a fucking road trip down I-10 or up I-35 or the 101. Go backpack through Europe for a season. Save up for a year and go bike the Great Wall. Go climb Machu Pichu before you develop Plantar fasciitis or bad knees. Find a gig that puts you on the road and spend a few years doing contract work in India or Tunisia or Johannesburg. Its not too late. It was never too late. There’s so much of the world you’ll never see until you go there yourself.
Also the “born too late to explore” also implies that people totally would’ve been explorers back then.
Chances are you were going to be stuck in a village for your entire life tending to a farm, or die at age 17 with an arrow in your face in the middle of an army.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist until I really thought about what the fact that dinosaurs are extinct means. It means that a paleontologist can only ever find the remnants of cool animals that are all already gone. Sure, the skeletons themselves are interesting but they’re still just a faint trace of the real thing, which is forever in the past.
I feel like that about traveling as a form of exploration. Seeing Machu Pichu for myself would be kind of interesting, but what’s the point of repeating something millions of people have done already? I’m not going to see anything that they haven’t seen. The experience might still have some hedonic value to me, but in that sense it wouldn’t be different in kind from staying home and playing video games.
There’s still plenty of new stuff to see and do in the world, but it’s far less straightforward than just getting on a plane. You have to do scientific research, invent something, or create truly original art.
Seeing Machu Pichu for myself would be kind of interesting, but what’s the point of repeating something millions of people have done already?
Seeing it for yourself is more than just being at the destination. Traveling to the country, meeting the people, eating the food, dabbling in the language, and learning the culture is its own reward.
What’s more, Peru has changed quite a bit since it was built in the 15th century. Your journey is going to be unique to the time you take it and the people you take it with.
There’s still plenty of new stuff to see and do in the world, but it’s far less straightforward than just getting on a plane.
To throw it back to dinosaurs, one of the novelties of the field of paleontology is in identifying new fossils and linking them into the overall fossil chain. Dinosaurs aren’t a single species but an entire spectrum of lifeforms that existed for tens of millions of years. Digging a little deeper and finding another novel variation of creature is fascinating on its own merits. And the value it brings goes beyond raw hedonism.
Similarly, travel logs of the modern world de-mystify foreign cultures and bring disparate people together. Even just dipping south of the border and realizing Mexico isn’t trapped behind a sepia filter, like all the TV Shows and movies set their insist it to be, is useful for orienting yourself within the context of the world around you. Getting your Libertarian father-in-law out of his John Bircher bubble on a trip to visit relatives in Beijing and Shenzhen is invaluable.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I think the meme is about a semantic difference between traveling and exploring.
OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 1 day ago
now is a better time to explore earth than ever before, you can actually travel to Amazon and not die, face an animal and shoot it dead instead of dying, and even document it and go back home in a matter of a day
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 day ago
The implication being exploring means discovering unknown things. (Aware of the Colonialism implications)
Traveling (especially with the safety of the modern day) is comparatively just tourism.