Even today, humanity, though widely spread around the globe, concretely occupies only a tiny fraction of the plant's surface, leaving enormous hollows with all kinds of curious secrets.
This is the very reason why even now we constantly have news of newly discovered species, newly discovered geographical features and new discoveries of ancient ruins even. Hell there are even major unclimbed mountains left in the world, now, in 2023.
Should even these be too much to ask for, simply finding places to travel to and looking into their more obscure corners, especially if you accompany this with some sort of hobby, like photography, or collecting or cataloging certain things, could leave you busy with adventure for decades.
No, nobody is going to discover any new continents or be the first ever to set foot in some large new region of the world, but reframing your expectations can work wonders for realizing just how much of the world is far from completely categorized, sorted, filmed and fully pigeonholed. It's absurd to think that only the void of space and the worlds within it are what's left for the deeply curious and adventurous.
also
"We are the middle children. Too late to explore the continents of Earth, too early to explore space. I do not understand your sorrow. My friend, we stand upon the backs of explorers whose sacrifices nurture us. We hold in our hands the keys to the garden of space in which the infinite spring of adventure pours. The fountain of youth is not one where old men go to stave off death's embrace, but it is where we send our children and their children so that they may live.
Brother, we are the Gatekeepers, the Architects, the Creators, the Bridgemen. It is our age that connects one era to another, one explorer to the next. We are not explorers, we were never really meant to be. Our children are the ones who will touch the intangible, ride asteroids around the stars; when they wake up, it will be stardust they scrape from their eyes.
Sister, our children cannot come into their own if we do not come into ours. Do not mourn a destiny that was never yours. We must make for them their future through our own sacrifices.
If you must, chug your alcohol and go to bed, but please be ready in the morning - we have work to do." - /u/bumrumble
And that's before we talk about botany, which has vast frontiers that remain unexplored.
So we are certainly not "too late for the earth", unless we drive these species to extinction before we are able to study them.
But I'm not sure what will happen first.
Just not a comfortable or pleasant one.
In all seriousness it doesn't mean we've explored literally everything, but a lot of the wonder is missing. It's frustrating that there might be millions of planets we can inhabit out there with limitless exploration....maybe billions or even trillions of worlds depending on how many galaxies to include, but it's all out of reach. We haven't even left the kuiper belt not to mention the Oort Cloud and have no idea how to do something remotely like warp to reach distant stars in a reasonable amount of time and maybe never will. Star Trek may be the wrong solution too. Perhaps it's more likely we have a singularity event first and can then increase our intelligences rapidly and then figure something out. Or maybe we just build our own simulations to dwell in and direct our exploration more inwards <End Rant/>
It always sounds like an excuse to me. They've picked a thing that they can't do and set it as the only meaningful goal, to avoid having to do anything that might actually matter.
I'm sorry that they got denied the thing that they specifically want to do. They can join the line with all the kids that fail to become movie stars and tech CEOs. It's a club called "everybody", and we meet at the bar.
I think this is directly related to our means (and speed) of transportation. From the very old days where horses were used, then with cars, trains, boats, planes and so on. We’re “the middle children”, as the post states, stuck on this planet without sufficient speed to break our earth bound chains.
Let’s hope that Faster Than Light travel, or some other exotic way, will allow us to roam the stars and continue our civilization (with its bad and good behaviors).
These are all examples of human exploration in my lifetime, the kind of thing that inspires you to hitch a ride on a pearling lugger and shoot the horizontal falls in a home made sea kayak, scope out the tower in Sydney for the Chris Hilton climb *, cross the NZ south island and Tasmania on foot and all manner of fun things still left in the world.
We are pretty sure it is high pressure and high maintenance.
