Undiscovered Lands

Think Tank #26

I sometimes think about the possibility of undiscovered lands.

Or lands that were discovered, but hidden.

Intentionally left off the map.

How would we know?

It’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave—or at least sort of, anyway. It’s the idea that what you conceive as your whole entire world could really be some minuscule speck in something far larger, and the reason why you haven’t realized the scale of what you are a part of is simply because you’ve been conditioned not to look.

It’s brilliant, really.

This concept is most often thought of in conjunction with some type of conspiratorial planning. The masses are ignorant because they have been misled. And this could be true—who knows?

Well, some people would have to, making the whole idea precarious and, put simply, unlikely (at least on a large scale).

Does this mean we’ve discovered all there is to discover? That we’re out of that proverbial cave, bathing in the sun? Of course not.

The jury is still out as to whether the modern world is captivated by malevolence. But it is certainly captivated by ignorance.

Ignorance. Arrogance. Apathy.

If humanity stumbled upon a never-before-discovered land, how many people would seek it out?

Perhaps some of us would be curious enough to watch footage of it on TV.

Would you go? Even if there was no guarantee of comfort?

How many people would cancel their cruise to the Bahamas, or their much-awaited getaway to Santorini, or even just their weekend on the couch to venture into the unknown?

People don’t care.

There’s so many places most of us haven’t seen. Why go somewhere that we haven’t even been told is nice yet?

Maybe. if it were a thousand years ago, some conquest-minded adventurer would go try to claim it as theirs. In this world, we can rest assured that all the big governments with their tanks and their nukes would wipe the place off the planet before they let anyone else have it.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe human beings aren’t meant to see the whole world.

Still, if new lands were discovered, concealing them would be the easiest thing in the world, which makes the whole thing seem a lot more likely.