The ancient world had far more capabilities than we often credit it with. The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit. Almost two and a half millennia between the first and the second.
History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wright Brothers' first flight and then impending moon landings and conclude -- very reasonably! -- that there would be cities on the moon in 2001. And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years.
I'd love to see an alternate history which diverges at 600 BC. What if somebody had managed to connect an aeolipile to a drivetrain to a dialkos bogey, and kicked off the industrial revolution in Greece, at the same time as the circumnavigation of Africa had started the era of Phonecio-Egyptian colonialism? How different would the world look today?
"And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years."
These seem predictably rare events to me. There are very fiew individuals that afford to engage in such endeavors and the odds of succeeding are acting both as deterrent and physical limiting factor to any attempt. The fact that happened is an exception. Not until the odds improve and a strong enough incentive changes things. The incentive for Moon landing has been political. Once achieved, it dissipated, and there isn't much sense for it to be repeated until a new motivating factor will appear.
Addition: Diolkos, considering the cost and efficiency of how it could have been operated and maintained back in the antiquity, was clearly an artifact that could work only for short distances, where the gains were significant enough to justify it, and there was little sense for it to be constructed on the scale that rails were later constructed.
> The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit
Or a technology at the peak of its influence. Railroads were a huge thing, but peaked in terms of geopolitical influence in about 100 years. Same with modern highways, telephones, telegraph machines, etc.
Maybe bioengineering is the next big thing. That will probably peak in 100 years too.
Edit: which civilization are you attributing the voyage to? The Phoenicians were past their peak. The Egyptians were at their peak, but they basically were cutting a check.
The potential of a large gap between lunar expeditions is an interesting thought experiment. What course of future events could make it so we don’t return to the Moon for another 1,000+ years?
Sailing around Africa is actually quite easy to do. If you're a qualified sailor and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft single sailed sailboat - no navigation equipment needed.
I read a story of a 16 year old girl sailing around the entire planet - totally solo. Sailing is easy.
Perhaps a HN comment circa year 04000 CE will read: “Circumnavigating the moon is actually quite easy to do. If you’re a qualified astronaut and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft spacecraft — no navigation equipment needed.”
History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wright Brothers' first flight and then impending moon landings and conclude -- very reasonably! -- that there would be cities on the moon in 2001. And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years.
I'd love to see an alternate history which diverges at 600 BC. What if somebody had managed to connect an aeolipile to a drivetrain to a dialkos bogey, and kicked off the industrial revolution in Greece, at the same time as the circumnavigation of Africa had started the era of Phonecio-Egyptian colonialism? How different would the world look today?