Carrigan
11-09-2004, 04:57 PM
Early Chinese Explorations:
Early but expensive explorations
History sometimes provides analogies to current events, in this case, to the United States' near abandonment of space exploration after the voyages to the moon.
Back in the early 1400s, the Chinese government funded a massive overseas explorations program. It was expensive and successful. Admiral Cheng Ho led 20,000 sailors and soldiers across the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar. But to reduce the government deficit, later voyages were cancelled.
It would have been possible for Cheng Ho to sail around Africa to Europe in the 1420s or 1430s.
Suppose he had, 70 years before Vasco de Gamma did the reverse?
The Chinese fleet would have been safe from attack by anyone.
The Chinese could have monopolized the trade between east and west and made a fortune, as the governments of Portugal and Spain actually did a century later. From the Chinese point of view, the foreigners would have paid for the deficit!
The Chinese might even have monopolized sea-trade among European countries, as the Europeans later did in Asia. (As a side effect, western Europe might never have developed the law-based bourgeois capitalism with which we are familiar.)
The actual, later European voyages were smaller and less expensive than the Chinese ventures. They were successful because they used more advanced technologies. (In the early 1400s, the Europeans lacked the technology to defeat a Chinese fleet; later, they would have defeated the Chinese had the Chinese kept their fleet in being.) Within 20 years of De Gama's voyage, the Portuguese were able to defeat the various Asian fleets that did try to fight them. And the Portuguese made huge profits, both for merchants and for government.
There may be a lesson here for us would-be space developers: you can do the job with backward technology, by spending lots of money and being first. However, if your government decides to save revenues, your initial successes may become no more than forgotten memories, while others gain control of your trade and your economic system.
It goes without saying that chemically-fuelled rockets are an expensive and backward technology compared to nuclear-thermal or air-breathing aerospikes; and I need not remind you that the Apollo and Shuttle programs have generated less revenue for the U.S. government than Cheng Ho's voyages did for his.
No one has yet gone that extra distance in space, to bring back and sell an amount equal to a year's current production of all the major metals in the world.
http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/chinese-exploration.html
Early but expensive explorations
History sometimes provides analogies to current events, in this case, to the United States' near abandonment of space exploration after the voyages to the moon.
Back in the early 1400s, the Chinese government funded a massive overseas explorations program. It was expensive and successful. Admiral Cheng Ho led 20,000 sailors and soldiers across the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar. But to reduce the government deficit, later voyages were cancelled.
It would have been possible for Cheng Ho to sail around Africa to Europe in the 1420s or 1430s.
Suppose he had, 70 years before Vasco de Gamma did the reverse?
The Chinese fleet would have been safe from attack by anyone.
The Chinese could have monopolized the trade between east and west and made a fortune, as the governments of Portugal and Spain actually did a century later. From the Chinese point of view, the foreigners would have paid for the deficit!
The Chinese might even have monopolized sea-trade among European countries, as the Europeans later did in Asia. (As a side effect, western Europe might never have developed the law-based bourgeois capitalism with which we are familiar.)
The actual, later European voyages were smaller and less expensive than the Chinese ventures. They were successful because they used more advanced technologies. (In the early 1400s, the Europeans lacked the technology to defeat a Chinese fleet; later, they would have defeated the Chinese had the Chinese kept their fleet in being.) Within 20 years of De Gama's voyage, the Portuguese were able to defeat the various Asian fleets that did try to fight them. And the Portuguese made huge profits, both for merchants and for government.
There may be a lesson here for us would-be space developers: you can do the job with backward technology, by spending lots of money and being first. However, if your government decides to save revenues, your initial successes may become no more than forgotten memories, while others gain control of your trade and your economic system.
It goes without saying that chemically-fuelled rockets are an expensive and backward technology compared to nuclear-thermal or air-breathing aerospikes; and I need not remind you that the Apollo and Shuttle programs have generated less revenue for the U.S. government than Cheng Ho's voyages did for his.
No one has yet gone that extra distance in space, to bring back and sell an amount equal to a year's current production of all the major metals in the world.
http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/chinese-exploration.html