I’ve just run across something I think will prove useful to me: a conceptual model of seafaring. That may sound esoteric, but it’s actually straightforward, and it could be usefully applied to any number of technological choices, by anybody.
The model considers four factors influencing the choice of whether or not to engage in seafaring, and what the chance of success is likely to be, given the relationship between those factors. They are: location, motivation, environmental conditions, and marine technology. In the article, they’re plotted on a three-dimensional graph, to provide a clear visual representation of their relationships.
Varying one factor changes the range within which seafaring is likely to occur successfully—or unsuccessfully. To give an extreme example, which would represent perhaps one end of a three-dimensional continuum: if a certain people don’t live in a place where some other land is reasonably accessible by sea, and they are not motivated to go to sea, and they don’t have any appropriate technology at hand for doing so, and the environmental conditions at sea close to their home area are discouraging—say, the ocean is cold and stormy most of the time—then these people are highly unlikely to engage in seafaring. A good real-world example of people who eschewed the sea for similar reasons, while making good use of their inland rivers and sounds, are the people of that part of the West African coast that became known to Europeans as the “Slave Coast.”
Motivation can be complex, but it can be considered more usefully by asking “who?”—as in, who exactly are we talking about? The authors consider, separately, explorers, traders, and colonists. Each group has a different motivation. A group of explorers may accept a high level of risk, increasing their motivation to undertake seafaring in more challenging conditions. Colonists are likely to include more vulnerable group members, such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly; their motivation may be low if no suitable marine technology is available to carry them safely, and/or if environmental conditions are especially harsh. Traders are likely to fall between these two.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto considers the early-medieval Irish monks, who set sail downwind in craft ill-equipped for a return trip, trusting in the will of God to guide them where it would. That is a specific motivation leading to a specific—and unusual—approach to exploration.
The four factors cannot, of course, be completely separated. Each influences the others. Without sufficient motivation for seafaring, a group of people are unlikely to invest energy and other resources in the development of marine technology—vessels and their equipment adequate for crossing proximate bodies of water with acceptable risk. Conversely, those with such motivation are more likely to develop such technology. Explorers might be willing to attempt seafaring even with no firm evidence of a land destination over the horizon. Colonists will likely have a higher threshold of motivation. If environmental conditions are relatively benign, as they can be in tropical waters or more sheltered waters, the required investment in adequate marine technology will be lower; that means motivation does not have to be as high for such technology to be developed and used.
Even if one doesn’t employ this model directly in their own work, the idea of it is an important one for anybody to consider, because it is a forceful reminder that technology and technological choice are inextricably bound up in broader realities. Just because we can develop some technology does not mean we will. We might develop it for a certain purpose, and when that purpose no longer motivates us, abandon it in favor of some other investment of resources that better meets our currents wants and needs. One hypothesis suggests that this is exactly what the original settlers of northern Australia did—the people later referred to by Europeans as Aborigines.
It would be useful to think of similar models for use in considering technological endeavors other than seafaring. What would be a useful model for, say, the development of a vaccine? The motivation to develop the COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as possible could not have been much higher, but without other factors being at a certain point—the capability, the funding, the logistics of distribution—that motivation would not have been nearly enough to make it happen.
The first thing this model made me think about was the relationship between motivation and available technology. If someone already has access to a highly-effective technology, they need less motivation to do what that technology allows them to do than someone who does not have access to that same technology. Someone who gets into an argument with someone else in a crowd over something of fleeting importance will have to be highly-motivated by rage to attempt to murder that person with his bare hands. On the other hand, that same person needs less motivation to engage in lethal violence if he has a 9mm stuck in his waistband. It’s so easy to pull it out and pull the trigger that he might do it before he fully realizes he’s doing it; and within a few seconds, a husband has no wife and their children have no mother.
Andrew Dugmore, Andrew F. Casely, Christian Keller & Thomas H. McGovern, “Conceptual modeling of Seafaring: Climate and Early European Exploration and Settlement of the North Atlantic Islands,” in Atholl Anderson et al., eds., The global origins and development of seafaring (University of Cambridge, 2010), 213—25.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (New York: Norton, 2006).