Why Explore?

Did you think of four explorers - or maybe more? Later you can share you list with other members of the class and see how many explorers you can come up with together. Did you include any fictional explorers - like Captain Jean Luc Picard and the crew of the spaceship Enterprise? After all, they go "where no one has dared to go before."

What about the reasons for the expeditions? Were they different for each expedition, or similar? It would be nice to think that the purpose of most expeditions is like the purpose of the spaceship Enterprise - to simply discover knowledge about the universe and the different peoples in it. That way everybody could get along together better.

No one knew that better than Christopher Columbus. After being rejected by three countries (including Italy, his own native land), he finally got support from Spain. There was a reason Spain supported Columbus's voyages - it expected a big pay-off. The King and Queen of Spain wanted Columbus to search for treasurers in the Far East. And they also thought it would be a good idea if he acquired some new lands along the way. That's one of the reasons the other European countries began sending out explorers - so that Spain wouldn't gobble up all the new lands.

The U.S. space program began like Columbus' voyages. Sure, we wanted to find out more about space. But the program got started during the Cold War era because the U.S. was afraid that Russia, who was then our enemy, would get to space first. If they did, we thought the Russians would fire rockets and bombs at us. So we started our own space program. Today our space program is teaching us a huge amount of information about the universe - just as the earlier explorers taught us so much about the earth.