New worlds – tomorrow

Ship, sextant, and compass...

Ship, sextant, and compass…

What islands, peoples, and continents might have gone undiscovered until today without technical equipment? Presumably quite a few. Even though the settlement of our planet began on foot from Africa about 125,000 years ago, the pieces of the Earth’s puzzle were put together only thousands of years later – with the help of ships. Ships made it possible to explore the world. Thanks to their longships the Vikings traveled far eastward via the Volga River all the way to the Caspian Sea as early as in the 9th century. From Iceland via Greenland, Leif Eriksson explored the coastal regions of today’s Canada and has come to be regarded as the true discoverer of North America – some 500 years before Christopher Columbus. To navigate the high seas, all seafarers would use the stars and the position of the Sun for orientation. Thanks to a technical tool the Vikings, including Leif Eriksson, were able to reliably navigate even at dusk and dawn, and in fog. They used a crystal they called a sunstone.

First seafarers 62,000 years ago

Even much earlier – around 60,000 BC – the first humans ventured out onto the high seas. To settle Australia, they must have crossed an ocean with a width of about 100 kilometers (62 miles) near today’s Makassar Strait. That the settlement of Polynesia took place from South America, as Thor Heyerdahl in 1947 aimed to demonstrate on his expedition with the legendary “Kon-Tiki,” today is deemed to have been refuted. At least, though, the Polynesians are regarded as the discoverers of astronavigation. It was the ship, the sextant, and the compass that made the discoveries of the world possible.

11,000 meters deep, 384,400 kilometers high

With their help, James Cook, the great explorer and cartographer of the 18th century, on his three voyages around the globe, filled nearly all uncharted areas on the world’s map. In 1960, Jacques Piccard in the deep-diving submersible “Trieste” dove nearly 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) deep into the ocean and Neil Armstrong, in 1969, was the first human to set foot on the Moon. By the way, the vehicle that took him there – and fortunately back again – was a ship as well, a spaceship.

95 percent of the oceans still unexplored

Terra incognita, unexplored territory, still exists. Humanity’s great urge to explore and discover notwithstanding, we hardly know anything about our own planet – in spite of the most advanced technology. Only five percent of the oceans is deemed to have been explored. Experts estimate that despite our state-of-the-art tools and equipment we haven’t discovered even ten percent of all living organisms yet. Large parts of Africa, the cradle of humanity, the Arctic and the Antarctic have so far only been photographed from satellites. Even today, researchers are still discovering previously unknown areas in South America’s jungles and peoples that have never had any contact with the outside world before.