Christopher Columbus Technology

While the technology available to Christopher Columbus in 1492 was certainly sufficient to impress his memory firmly upon future generations, if he had had access to modern navigational techniques and technology, the organization and outcome of his voyages would have been vastly different. Methods of elucidating longitude in Columbus’s time were nonexistent, and those for determining latitude could be deeply flawed. Thus, given the defective nature of the technology Columbus employed on his voyages, during which he hoped to discover a new pathway from Europe to Asia, both the planning and execution of his mission led to him encountering not East Asia as planned, but rather islands off the coast of the previously barely-documented Americas.
However, upon returning for his later voyages, he would have been able to use GPS to either plan further voyages with the intent of exploring the Americas (which he would have known were not Asia, due to GPS), since the first voyage would have made it clear that he was incorrect regarding his conjecture that it was possible to reach the east coast of Asia from Spain more quickly than the west coast. This would have greatly impacted Columbus’ next voyages, which may not have existed at all had he been able to use GPS to determine his latitude as he was unable to do with the technology available to him. It is reasonable to consider that Columbus, whose goal was to reach East Asia, hopefully opening up a lucrative trading network, would have not considered it profitable to explore the Americas, which offered none of the above. However, had Columbus decided to explore the Americas further after his first voyage as he did in real life, he would have known in this case that they were not Asia, and would have been able to create the first maps available to Europeans accurately displaying the existence of the Americas between Europe and Asia. Either way, it is likely that Columbus would have realized that his
GPS operates through the positions of twenty-four satellites, which orbit the Earth from 20,000 kilometers in the air, transmitting regularly spaced signals traveling at the speed of light, which are intercepted by and inform individual GPS receivers of their positions and the current time. As previously mentioned, Columbus’ inexperience with the already-limited navigational equipment available to him caused him to believe on his first voyage that he was much closer to his perception of where Asia was located in relation to Europe than he actually was, which in turn led him to carry out his next two expeditions believing he was interacting with Asia. Had Columbus been able to access GPS, he would have received a constant stream of accurate information concerning not only latitude, but also longitude, which would have given him a much clearer picture of his distance from Asia. This would have given him the option to either forge ahead into unknown waters or to change direction so as to navigate closer to where he believed Asia could be found, allowing him greater understanding of and agency regarding his voyages and the opportunity to explore the Americas with the knowledge of what they truly were, which could perhaps have let to earlier Spanish colonization of the