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It's free real estate (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/tenforward@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

Eh. You don't have to be the first person to discover something to discover it. This is what people always miss with the vapid line about Columbus not discovering the Americas. Sure, there were already people there. But the vast majority of the human population in 1492 was ignorant of the very existence of the American continents. And their discovery instituted an epochal change that upended both the Americas and the old world.

We can condemn genocide and displacement without becoming pedantic gotcha warriors.

If all that matters is the first person to discover something, no scientist in human history has ever discovered anything. After all, relativity was probably first discovered 5 billion years ago by some alien physicist living several galaxies away.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    This specific quote doesn't say discovered, though. It says that no one had been there before, which implies that the people who are already there are no one.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Sure. But text contains more than just the words on the page.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    Okay yeah, but this specific text is talking about a place no one has been that's already populated, not the general concept of discovery.

    Like if I say "I've discovered David Lynch", that doesn't imply that anyone other than me hasn't seen Twin Peaks. If I say "I've been watching a director that no one has ever heard of before, his name is David Lynch", I'm just wrong.

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