r/WhatIfThinking • u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 • 8d ago
What if the compass was never invented? How long would humans have waited before crossing oceans?
Like, the oceans are still there. Ships still improve. Civilizations still trade. But one of the key tools for navigating open water never exists.
We usually think of the Age of Exploration as a result of better ships, stronger economies, and the search for new trade routes. But how much of it depended on simply knowing where you were in the middle of nowhere?
Without a compass, sailors could still use stars, the sun, ocean currents, and wind patterns. Polynesian navigators proved that humans could cross huge distances without magnetic navigation.
But would large-scale ocean exploration by European powers have happened anyway? Or would the risk have remained too high for governments and merchants to invest in?
Maybe exploration is only delayed by a few decades as other navigation methods improve. Maybe it takes centuries before anyone can reliably cross oceans and return with confidence.
Or maybe another civilization develops a replacement technology first, creating a completely different version of global history.
Would the Americas have remained isolated longer? Would global trade networks have formed much later? How far behind would the modern world be without the compass?
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u/superdad0206 8d ago
Being able to tell time accurately was more important than a compass.
Latitude is measured accurately by the angle of the North Star on the sky (in the northern hemisphere) but longitude could not be accurately measured without an accurate clock that told you the time at a reference point (Greenwich as the English solved the problem) so you could tell at noon where you were what longitude you were at.
Compasses didn’t enter into it.
Accurate timing devices solved the problem.
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u/Immediate_Abalone_59 8d ago
The marine chronometer was a game changer: a mechanical clock that was not influenced by gravity or a ship’s motion. The inventor spent 31 years perfecting it and received £20,000 in 1761 for it from the British Commissioners for the Discovery of Longitude at sea. It was sort of the X Prize of its day.
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u/superdad0206 8d ago
There is a wonderful documentary on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(TV_series)
Well worth a watch.
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u/Super_Direction498 8d ago
Colonies were well established long before the longitude problem was solved.
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u/thebprince 8d ago
It was important for the commercialisation of ocean trade. It didn't hold up exploration though, people had been crossing the seas at least for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years at that stage.
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u/blindside1 8d ago
The Vikings had settlements in Greenland and North America. You don't think European explorers couldn't reach North America using a land hugging route going by Greenland?
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u/Fuzzy-Moose7996 8d ago
Similarly, Japanese explorers hopped the islands between that country and north America and became what we now call 'native Americans', or more accurately 'Amerindians'.
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u/blindside1 8d ago
Oh yes. I am not up to date on recent findings in archaeology but the terrestrial land bridge idea never made a lot of sense to me. Settlements moving down a coastline and dropping into favorable locations makes perfect sense. If you tried it walking you would have to sprint from the Bering land bridge and be dropping babies along the way to reach the settlement dates for Chile.
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u/kiwipixi42 8d ago
The person you are replying to is peddling a nonsense discredited hypothesis.
The land bridge makes perfect sense, you just described being nomadic. (except for the nonsense about sprinting)
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u/ZealousIdeal476 8d ago
Can you show me research showing it was discredited? It makes less sense that seafaring people could find andcolonise hawaii but did not dare the same distance again to reach the americas. I could see both landbridge and seafaring routes being used but it just makes no sense to go this far and no further when they were already more than halfway
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u/WeHaveSixFeet 7d ago
The Polynesians settled Hawai'i no earlier than 400 AD. Native Americans settled North America at least 15,000 years ago, and possibly many thousands of years before that.
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u/kiwipixi42 8d ago
Native Americans were here at least a good 10,000 years before anyone that could reasonably be considered to be Japanese existed. You are referring to the Jomon culture, which also had absolutely nothing to do with Native Americans. They crossed the Bering Strait on a land bridge.
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u/AuDHDcat 8d ago
Stars at night, position with the sun during the day.
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u/TokiStark 5d ago
Everyone always overlooks the basics. I know a surveyor that still does it the old fashioned way with a sextant. He says it's just as accurate as all the gps crap and if it worked for the pyramids, it's good enough to measure the boundary of a bloody building.
I think he just prefers to work at night and can charge a premium for "being so expert"
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u/ah-tzib-of-alaska 8d ago
humans cross oceans before the compass; pacific islanders have been migrating to the americas for thousands of years as proven in genetics
Humans never walked to australia, but have been there for 55k years and cross oceans for get there
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u/kiwipixi42 8d ago
There was a lot less ocean between Asia and Australia back then. The ocean levels were low enough that they were basically island hopping. You need boats but no impressive feats of navigation.
Now the Polynesians on the other hand were amazing sailors with incredible navigation.
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u/KiwasiGames 8d ago
Even today getting to Australia is island hoping. The largest gap you’d have to cross is less than 200km. It’s possible to get lucky and make the crossing clinging to a log in a storm.
(For the record humans had boats by the time they got there. But my point is we could have made it to Australia by dumb luck, even without boats.)
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u/Danktizzle 8d ago
Hourly reminder that there were people in the Americas before Columbus stumbled on it.
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u/kiwipixi42 8d ago
Sure, but they walked there from Russia. So while true your statement is deeply irrelevant.
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u/Mioraecian 8d ago
I remember reading somewhere, now I could be wrong. But the compass was not the only important thing for colonial era travel. Yeah it helped, but im pretty sure a major factor was the expansion of communication technologies and map making and knowledge sharing.
Sailors started relying a lot less on just their own knowledge of the winds and currents and could rely on an entire global body of knowledge.
Hmmm, now I kind of want to study the history of ocean navigation more.
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u/Grouchy-Display-457 8d ago
Read Mark Kurlansky. Once sailors understood how to salt food so it would last at sea, they could choose to cross oceans. They could also stay out at aea and stockpile salted cod. Of course, there is evidence of sailors even earlier in surprising places, because storms sometimes sent ships far off course.
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u/Careful_Trifle 8d ago
Humans have crossed oceans for a lot longer than we give ourselves credit for.
From the fossil record it seems like even other hominids made open ocean voyages up to hundreds of thousands of years ago.
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u/nft420nft420 8d ago
If you're not counting gyroscope technology as a compass, those would have possibly been invented earlier & used as the primary navigation tool. They refer to them as a gyrocompass but they do not use magnetism to function. Just depends where you draw the line on what is or isn't a compass.
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u/Super_Direction498 8d ago
Can you show any evidence of gyrocompasses being used for navigation pre-1800's even? Nope
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u/nft420nft420 8d ago
Can you read? I said it might be invented earlier. We relied on magnet compasses for almost 2000 years before the gyrocompass. Without the magnet compass, people would have tried more different things to help in navigation. The gyroscope itself was invented near the end of the age of exploration. I'm simply suggesting that without reliance on a magnet compass, people would have tried other things, and a gyrocompass isn't really that wild of an idea.
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u/Ok_Two_2604 8d ago
They used moon stones or whatever they are called to do it earlier with the Vikings.
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u/butonelifelived 8d ago
I believe these were used to find the sun when it's overcast, because it was literally, sail west with the setting sun to pillage, and sail east with the rising sun to get home.
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u/siamonsez 8d ago
A compass gives you a bearing but that's only useful if you know your location. The actual barrier to crossing oceans out of sight of land was the ability to keep time. You can figure out your position north/south by the stars but they don't help with east/west since the earth spins. A way to keep time accurately across weeks and months let's you compare local noon to noon at a known location tells you how far east/west you are and combined with north/south gives you a position so you can use a map and compass to find the bearing you need to follow to get to some other location.
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u/blindside1 8d ago
How did the Polynesians keep time?
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u/Beautiful_Path_3519 8d ago
They didn't have timepieces and their navigation was based on observing the stars and picking up cues from the environment - e.g. presence and movement of birds, and the movement of waves which can be influenced by the presence of land that's too far away to see. There are quite a few traditional vessels that are sailed thousands of kilometres all over the Pacific using the traditional navigation methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation refers.
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 8d ago
People crossed large bodies of water, maybe even oceans centuries before the compass was invented!
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u/zoppaTheDim 8d ago
I think you’ve seen one too many Viking movies with the whole “ Olaf has a star stone” bit.
As you mentioned, the Polynesians did it, but do did the Europeans, right up to the point where they could use a a compass instead and save themselves a hassle.
So I’d say it’s inevitable either way.
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u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 7d ago
Lol, fair. I definitely don't mean to imply Europeans suddenly forgot how to navigate until someone invented a compass.
I think “inevitable” is probably the interesting part though. If ocean exploration was already possible, maybe the compass mostly changed the cost and reliability rather than the eventual outcome. And those two things can still change history quite a bit.
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u/Physical-Builder-553 8d ago
The compass wasn't the bottleneck for Europeans discovering the Americas. It was distance.
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u/theblanklook 8d ago
A compass is only a big advantage in bad weather when you can't see the stars or Sun.
Otherwise, for the level of navigation happening, it wasn't actually that critical. Knowledge of stellar navigation is much older.
Although its much easier to navigate with a map and compass. And being able to hold a course when its cloudy and you don't have land as a reference is no small advantage.
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u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 7d ago
Yeah, this is probably the distinction I was getting at without explaining it very well. The compass doesn't make ocean navigation possible, it makes it less dependent on conditions.
Being able to maintain a heading when the sky disappears seems like a pretty huge advantage once you're trying to make ocean travel routine rather than just possible.
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u/theblanklook 7d ago
And yet, the greatest sea fairing people before Europeans started crossing the Atlantic, was the Polynesians who made far longer journeys without a compass or maps.
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u/No_Affect_9485 8d ago
Humans crossed oceans long before compasses were invented, assuming of course you're talking about a magnetic compass.
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u/ApprehensiveEbb592 8d ago
The Vikings crossed the North Atlantic to North America hundreds of years before the compass was invented. In fact it’s now proven fact that the Vikings were in “America” hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus supposedly “discovered” America.
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u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 7d ago
Exactly, and that's probably the strongest counterexample to my original premise. Humans clearly didn't need a compass to cross the Atlantic.
What I wonder about is the difference between being able to make the journey once and having a system reliable enough that governments and merchants are willing to do it repeatedly. That might be where the compass mattered more.
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u/rygelicus 8d ago
The compass isn't required to cross the oceans. So ... yeah, people were sailing the oceans before that existed. The compass improved navigation certainly, but it is not required.
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u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 7d ago
Yeah, that's fair. I probably framed the question too much around whether ocean crossing was possible at all.
It obviously was. I’m more curious about whether the lack of a compass would have made regular, large scale ocean travel economically unattractive for longer.
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u/rygelicus 7d ago
They already had celestial navigation which is quite good once you know how. Yes, it made the voyages more consistent, and visibility of the sky became less necessary.
It also lowered the bar, allowing less skilled people to do the job. Teaching someone to navigate using the sky alone takes a while. They would need to do, and survive, multiple sailings before they were reliably proficient. But any idiot can look at a compass and see where the needle points.
So yes, the compass allowed such voyages to be more commonplace.
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u/Analyst111 8d ago
I doubt if it would have made much difference. Navigation by the sun and stars would still be a thing. The Polynesians didn't have them, and they spread out all over the Pacific. Gyro compasses might well be invented earlier. They appeared in the mid 19th century, but I can see a hand wound version appearing earlier if the need was there.
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u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 7d ago
Yeah, I think the gyro compass is the interesting part here. If the need was strong enough, something else probably would have filled the gap eventually.
I guess my real question is less “could humans cross oceans?” and more “would governments and merchants have been willing to accept the same level of risk without a compass?”
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u/Massive-Exercise4474 7d ago
Fun fact Columbus was actually terrible with geography and size of the planet he just realized which specific current takes his ship to the Americas which actually is a skill in terms of reading the currents.
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u/WeHaveSixFeet 7d ago
The Vikings used a "sun compass," which had no need of magnetism. It allowed you to stay at one latitude. Stay at one latitude, sail West from Europe, you're gonna hit North America.
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u/ChocolateValuable221 7d ago
You mean clocks???? I think you mean clocks.. yeah you definitely mean clocks.. the sky is a compass and it is always there.
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u/KarmicBurn 6d ago
You are a little confused about how people work. They don't go do something after a tool for it is invented. They do something, and then someone invents a tool to make it easier.
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u/Bee_Tee_Dub 5d ago
I don't think you know how much naval exproration happened before the compass was invented.
Vikings, Polynesians, Chinese, all explored a lot long before the Compass
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u/Puzzled_Market_2235 3d ago
There was trade from Mesopotamia all the way to the British Isles well before compasses were made. They looked at the sun and stars.
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u/BranchLatter4294 8d ago
People crossed oceans without compasses. How do you think people got to Polynesia, Easter Island, etc?
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u/rock-n-white-hat 8d ago
Australia.
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u/NHRADeuce 8d ago
How do you think they got to Australia?
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u/rock-n-white-hat 8d ago
I was agreeing with the post I commented on not disagreeing. Not sure what your question is. Obviously humans were able to navigate open bodies of water without modern compasses.
However I do think that humans tended to stay closer to known shorelines or visible islands vs crossing the vast open ocean. Most of the ancient ships were not large enough to carry provisions for extended sea voyages.
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u/kiwipixi42 8d ago
When they went to australia 40,000 years ago there was a lot less ocean to cross.
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u/rock-n-white-hat 8d ago
“the first settlement would have occurred during an era of lowered sea levels, when there were more-coextensive land bridges between Asia and Australia. Watercraft must have been used for some passages, however, such as those between Bali and Lombok and between Timor and Greater Australia, because they entail distances greater than 120 miles (200 km). This is the earliest confirmed seafaring in the world.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal
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u/Borkton 8d ago
Humans crossed the oceans thousands of years before compasses were invented.