Colonization of Black Sea by Anaximander to Colonization of Mars by Elon Musk

At the time BC 6th century, most of the places in the world was unknown to Ancient Greeks. The America hadn't been discovered yet, the place that they had lived was the whole universe for them, but Anaximander prepared a world map at that time, and it was the first attempt to sketch our home even though it wasn't perfect one as seen in Figure-1... In the map, Mediterranean in the middle like a huge lake and around of it covered by lands and the whole world covered by the Ocean... Anaximander was a politician, philosopher (the best friend of Thales), mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and naturalist. He was born in west part of the Türkiye (Turkey) so called Miletus.

This post is not dedicated to Anaximander's philosophy part, but in the near future a post will come that you will enjoy reading about and you may learn something from him, especially, one of my favourite dialog that happened between Thales, the discussion of where the Earth stands, what holds it?

At that time, people (Ancient Greeks) who leave in nowadays Greece lands and west part of the Türkiye (Ionia) had horses to travel and for trading the place to go was of course Egypt, so for that, sailing ships was only thing that was able to take them to Egypt... Another gift by Anaximander was a sun-watch (gnomon) as a useful tool but still they did not have compass, no advanced communication tool such us walkie-talkie, internet etc...

Anaximander was the leader of group of people to colonize Black-Sea part of the Türkiye around BC 6th or 5th century with horses and sailing ships they went there... But, what if someone told them one day humanity will colonize the Mars? What folks would think about it? Consider that folk as who thinks the celestial bodies that they see are Gods... What a paradigm shift!
The main motivation was the fear from Persian at that time, but what is today's humanities motivation or fear splitting into 2 planets? Although all advances we have achieved, is it fear of humanities stupidity (World War 3)? Chance of a celestial body crashing to Earth? And, the knowing that one day sun is going to eat us? Looks like knowledge brings also additional concerns/stress, it is important to learn how to handle the side effects of "being wiser" to secure our mental health. As Heraclitus said once, "knowing to much doesn't educate the mind if it would be it would educate Pythagoras".

After almost 2500 years, Elon Musk is talking about sending people to the Mars for colonization and it can not be considered as a dream for today's world. We have ability and knowledge (thanks to philosophy and science) to do that; we can build spacecrafts, space-stations, horses are replaced by trains/cars/airplanes/ships to go anywhere we want, we've reached quite far from our starting point, yet, we do not know the limits of the universe and the idea of going to an another galaxy is still a dream. It took quite long time to get to this point, more than 4million years ago, first homo species appeared; homo-habilis, homo-erectus, neandertals, etc.... Our ancestors started making tools from stones, then understood how to control fire, made better tools for hunting, then became farmers... We were climbing on the steres of food-chain by using one of our strongest ability among other creatures.
Invention of math as the language of science is built our foundation, and on top of it, physics, chemistry and biology advanced overtime. Archimedes built first examples of great engineering "machines" BC 3rd century showing off homo-sapiens intelligence and its potential, then, Newton has reviled a secret of nature which allowed us to discover new planets just by using a pen, and allowed us to step on to the Moon....

It is like a relay race, it has been started by our very first ancestors, and now, we have the flag, carrying it to out of our planet... Are we going to hand-over the flag to another homo species or we are going to be the last ones?

Lastly (a note to myself), the below tweet gave me the inspiration today for the post while sitting in Stromovka (Prague). Somehow it triggered the connection between Anaximander and Elon.

07/09/2025 - 12:02 AM
Prague