Is this a silly question for a history class to make a question of?

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

I feel bad for Samtemdo who asked a pretty trivial question about something he's passionate about, and instead got a good page of "your degree is useless and you will be sad and homeless" for his troubles.

LOL! That was not my intention at all! I was hoping to help him not have to find out the hard way the same as my friends have after the fact when he can make plans now to make sure that does not happen in the future.

You can still learn about and enjoy your love of History even if that is not what you plan on using to make an income, and people can switch their majors and still take the classes they enjoy. It is far better people tell them beforehand rather than waiting until afterwards and then feel " stuck" because people were too worried about disappointing them to tell them the truth. IF it were me, I would much rather people warn me ahead of time than just let me go through it and find out after it was too late to do anything about it.

You know, there is also the possibility that it's just one of his majors, right? Also the fact that he might actually have a job he's happy in and is studying part-time ... or he's simply happy?

Also, those postal service vehicles are wicked. In Australia in the rural/subrural places they use these...

They're actually a lot of fun to ride, and practically bulletproof the old CT110s. Also with a clever in built clutch... which makes sense. You wouldn't want to have to operate an additional handle orhave to put it into neutral every time you came across a mailbox.

I used to have to repair them constantly as a 12 year old working at the stables. The staff used to use them getting around the paddocks. Plus they're pretty well suited for when you wanted to take a dog with you to some of the further plots to help skitterwilder stock towards the lot.

All around solid motorbike that is cheap as chips.

Then again, nothing as flashy as that jeep.

I don't think they would ever be able to use those bikes here because of how wild the weather changes here are. You can have scorching heat, hail, rain, and cold all in the same day. Texas Baseball and softball sized hail makes bikes not a viable solution for postal workers here on their long routes.

 

[Catnip1024]

Now now, that's very arrogant and egocentric of you to say that. You didn't discover bubble tea because I already knew about it beforehand!

Well, clearly you don't count, so I'm going to claim it as my discovery and appropriate the shit out of it...

Not necessarily.

One might argue that the space race "found" very little indeed[footnote]There's a moon? And it's made of rock? OMG hold the press![/footnote] , but it was far from pointless.

Depends what you are talking about "finding". The most important stuff to come out of the Space Race wasn't in cartographic knowledge, but rather in technological and scientific advancement. Even the discovery of how things react in zero gravity is arguably far more important than finding another remote island in the middle of the Pacific, for instance.

And you could go for the approach that even finding that nothing is out there is still a discovery, since it is a knowledge that you didn't have before. Either in space or in the ocean.

 

[Agema]

Depends what you are talking about "finding".

Yes, but that's the point.

The "Age of Exploration", contextually, finds new lands. But even if it didn't, it could for one reason or another spur a great deal of advancement (or "findings") in other ways.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I don't think they would ever be able to use those bikes here because of how wild the weather changes here are. You can have scorching heat, hail, rain, and cold all in the same day. Texas Baseball and softball sized hail makes bikes not a viable solution for postal workers here on their long routes.

You do understand that Australia collectively gets all of these things, right?

We have flash floods the size of three of your Texases every year or two.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

I don't think they would ever be able to use those bikes here because of how wild the weather changes here are. You can have scorching heat, hail, rain, and cold all in the same day. Texas Baseball and softball sized hail makes bikes not a viable solution for postal workers here on their long routes.

You do understand that Australia collectively gets all of these things, right?

We have flash floods the size of three of your Texases every year or two.

Yes, we have them all in the same day and often do not know when they will occur. The problem with most of Texas is the storms form right on top of us that move on to cause great destruction elsewhere. This is why Texas usually has more Tornadoes than any other State averages around 132 Tornadoes a year here. Since the weather can be clear on the radar and then have hail hit us out of nowhere, with very little warning, if any, due to the storms forming right on top of us. How would a mail person on their route have any sort of protection from getting pummeled with hail on a bike such as that when there isn't even anywhere to seek cover here in most places? You would get a mail carrier killed and their mail lost having them drive around on a bike here. I didn't even start in about the 90mph straight winds we tend to get on some windy days without even having storms.

I remember when I was walking to a shopping center years ago when it started hailing and I took cover in a car wash and watched a guy get smacked upside his head and have to be taken in an ambulance. It can be pretty nasty. Considering the Post here is supposed to be running rain or shine, that would be scary for them on a bike.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Yes, we have them all in the same day and often do not know when they will occur. The problem with most of Texas is the storms form right on top of us that move on to cause great destruction elsewhere. This is why Texas usually has more Tornadoes than any other State averages around 132 Tornadoes a year here. Since the weather can be clear on the radar and then have hail hit us out of nowhere, with very little warning, if any, due to the storms forming right on top of us. How would a mail person on their route have any sort of protection from getting pummeled with hail on a bike such as that when there isn't even anywhere to seek cover here in most places? You would get a mail carrier killed and their mail lost having them drive around on a bike here. I didn't even start in about the 90mph straight winds we tend to get on some windy days without even having storms.

I remember when I was walking to a shopping center years ago when it started hailing and I took cover in a car wash and watched a guy get smacked upside his head and have to be taken in an ambulance. It can be pretty nasty. Considering the Post here is supposed to be running rain or shine, that would be scary for them on a bike.

Yeah, sounds like parts of Australia. Well, less tornadoes.... more cyclones and supercells.

Motorcyclists do wear helmets there, right? I've ridden through hailstorms. It's actually your fingers you have to be most careful about. It does hurt when you get hit by them, but if you tuck against the fueltank and lock your knees against it hard and hope you're wearing a decently reinforced jacket, you'll just end up with bad bruising. But what else are you going to do while trying to find cover?

Even the weakest part of the helmet, the visor, they test by firing ball bearings at them. A quality, regulation helmet will stand against hail. It will stand against bricks.... well it depends on the angle of incidence and your forward momentum. But if you're just standing there and someone throws a brick at you.

 

[Pseudonym]

I think I'm going to side with OP's early hunch. This is sterile semantics. It's not a duckrabbit with an interesting different perspective, it's the difference between a duck and something that quacks like it. (you might want to play along when doing graded assignments depending on your teacher, though) And if I'm wrong about that and there is some interesting historiography tied to these specific words, then it seems to me none of us would know what that is. One reason that is clear is because the stated reason of Eurocentrism applies, as near as I can tell, just as much to exploration as to discovery. Those are both the same activity in a different stage of succes carried out by the same people. Also, I don't know why several people are claiming you do not need to be the first person to know something to count as discovering it. That's simply not how that word is commonly used. (examples below)

It's definitely not the Age of Discovery. You can't discover stuff that has already been found. Its typical eurocentric nonsense.

Edit: Discovery implies that no one owned it previously. So you can take places like the Americas without considering the native inhabitants

That's not how the word is actually used. I'd say you can't discover stuff you already know, but you can discover stuff that other people already know. And in any case it was also only the Europeans who where doing a significant amount of exploring or discovering in the relevant sense. Exploration won't be much less Eurocentric. You might want to say 'early globalization' or something like that. Or you just point out that we should also take the point of view of the non-Europeans on board and that the name of the period is of necessity not going to give you the whole picture.

In science, the person who "discovers" something is the first person to find that something out. So were Europeans the first people to discover the Americas?

In the history of science/natural philosophy that I've seen, saying 'Leibniz discovered infinitessimal calculus later than Newton, but independently' would not be particularly controversial. There are theorems and discoveries that are explicitly named after multiple people. Things being discovered in different cultures would be fairly normal vernacular too. Besides the word, the idea that being the literal first in time would be the thing that is historically relevant is nonsense. Lets pretend for the sake of argument that Fermat did in fact have a proof for his last theorem. Should we brush aside the historical relevance of Andrew Wiles for that reason? Of course not. For the same reason Columbus is more interesting than Leif Eriksson. In this case, discovery might be a onesided description and maybe we should drop it for that reason but certainly not a false one, unless you want to argue the most pointless semantics and pass it off as historiographical debate. To be clear, I don't take issue with maybe rethinking what words to use exactly, but the stated reasons here are not convincing at all.

Age of Discovery is dumb, anyways.

How do you arbitrarily determine when it has ended?

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest biological structure on Earth ... not much about it has actually been properly charted.

How do we arbitrarily decide where the boundaries of any word end? This is not how historiographical notions work. It's not really how any word works except maybe for some confined notions in logic and mathematics. Lets not pretend 'age of discovery' should mean 'all time when some discovery happened'. That definition would make the term historically sterile and unworkable. Wikipedia gets this right. "The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (approximately from the beginning of the 15th century until the end of the 18th century) is an informal and loosely defined term for the period in European history in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture and was the beginning of globalization." Whoever wrote this had the good sense to simply acknowledge that the term is loose and used to describe a period of particular interest. In this case a period when discovery of a certain kind was particularly influential on broader culture and life. Or maybe you want to argue that the charting of the great barrier reef will have a similar historical impact as the charting of the oceans and continents. But otherwise this point seems rather facile.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

How do we arbitrarily decide where the boundaries of any word end? This is not how historiographical notions work. It's not really how any word works except maybe for some confined notions in logic and mathematics. Lets not pretend 'age of discovery' should mean 'all time when some discovery happened'. That definition would make the term historically sterile and unworkable. Wikipedia gets this right. "The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (approximately from the beginning of the 15th century until the end of the 18th century) is an informal and loosely defined term for the period in European history in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture and was the beginning of globalization." Whoever wrote this had the good sense to simply acknowledge that the term is loose and used to describe a period of particular interest. In this case a period when discovery of a certain kind was particularly influential on broader culture and life. Or maybe you want to argue that the charting of the great barrier reef will have a similar historical impact as the charting of the oceans and continents. But otherwise this point seems rather facile.

It's a meaningless eurocentric term. Something like the Age of Sail is more accurate. Still eurocentric, still pretty meaningless, but at least it adequately describes a common motif and can actually be measured by something tangible.

By the end ofthe 'Age of Discovery' Australia hadn't even its proper first inland township. Perth hadn't even been properly established. Which means the best guesstimations of what was actually there was from the words of Dutch sailors and people like Cook ... and even they didn't bother to stop for long.

Seriously, the Dutch were weird...

Spoiler: How dare you call something this adorable a rat...?

Like, no joke .. the paradise island off WA known as Rottnest literally just means 'Rat nest'.

Other explorers were more charitable, calling it 'Maiden Is.' because it's kind of fucking beautiful. But apparently Australians went with Rat Nest Island ... Your guess is as good as mine. Point is there were still 2 big continents worth of discovering by the time the 'Age of Discovery' had ended. One of them had the unfortunate problem of a group of native nations that had a constructed, oral history that can accurately retell the geographical story of the beginning of the Holocene epoch and the birth of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it.

They had kind of been there and had built the world's first organized cartography system about 40,000-50,000 years before Europeans showed up. Seriously, the Songlines are pretty fucking incredible.

'Age of Discovery' is a dumb title. We didn't just stop finding new places or filling in gigantic holes in our understanding of geography.