3 ms·

It'd be really interesting to see the economic comparisons of both against each other. I.e the cost per kg of payload shipping from America to Europe in 17th C

• mortenjorck 10y ago
  It's an interesting idea to try to compare, but I wonder if the world in the 1600s or even the 1700s is just too different from ours to find anything truly analogous. To look at the human transportation side: This account (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm) by a German who traveled to the new world in the 1750s is harrowing enough, but the way the cost of passage is paid is horrifying, even heartbreaking: He writes of indentured servitude in the same language one would describe slavery (servants are "sold") and often parents would sell their children in the new world to pay for the voyage, not seeing them again for years, if ever. We could try to bring this into modern terms by multiplying the US federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40 hrs * 52 weeks) by the median indentured servitude (four years) and get $60,320 to take a human across the Atlantic in 1750, but might be painting an apple orange. Still, it gives us at least a very, very rough idea of what a trip to the new world cost then, and a good sense of just how vastly more expensive passage to Mars would cost in the foreseeable future.