Maria Popova

How can we remain excited about scientific discovery when there's so much corporate interest?

And so I, of course, being a fan of giving our fears a historical calibration, mentioned what traversal opens with, which is the story of the transit of Venus observation, which is when Venus passes in front of the sun, like a tiny, tiny, tiny black dot.

and how transits of Venus are the rarest of all the predictable astronomical events.

They happen every 200 and some years in pairs of two.

So Edmund Halley, for whom we've named Halley's Comet, had figured out that if you observe the transit of Venus from different vantage points on Earth, you could apply basic trigonometry to calculate the Earth-Sun distance, so the yardstick of the universe.

We didn't have one until then.

We had a map of the solar system, but nobody knew how far things were.

But then Halley died before the next transit of Venus.

It just didn't happen in his lifetime.

So when it did happen in 1769, scientists around the world used his essentially manifesto and sent different expeditions.

Catherine the Great in Russia sent a team.

King George III sent a team, hired James Cook to be the commander of the ship.

But what was actually happening is that

You know, this was a very turbulent time, a lot of wars in different parts of the world, and the scientific vessels got permission to pass unharmed through the warring waters.

So King George III, who was like the Elon Musk, I mean, I don't think he was that smart, but he was that, you know, he decided he was going to use the scientific mission wisely.

as a guise to do what he actually wanted to do, which was to find the Great Northwest Passage, this very lucrative trade route over the top of North America up to, you know, the other side to Asia, which had only been theorized and most important to find the Great Southern Continent.

Antarctica had only been a theoretical notion and the American colonies were slipping out of his grip and he wanted land and he wanted trade routes.

So he totally tried to hijack the scientific pursuit.

And in a way, he did.

But the thing is, the science was still done.