Explorers
People must have thought the early explorers were nuts. Magellan, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus… whoever decided to sail out into the ocean for months with a hundred people on the chance that they might survive and find some new land that might be there.
To most people of the time, the world ended with their coastline. The ocean was endless and empty. Can you imagine those send-offs?
“Bye Chris! Best of luck!…”
The ships start to leave.
(muttering to a friend) “Well, they’re dead. What nutjobs. We’ll never see them again.”
It would be like if we loaded a space shuttle with 200 people and blasted them off into space, just headed in one direction, blindly, forever. Hey, they might find something interesting.
“Bye!… Those people are nuts. They’re all going to die. What a shame.”