"Scale" by Brad Goodspeed

“So the basic idea is, each planet you see is the size it would appear in the sky if it shared an orbit with the moon, 380,000 kms from earth. I created this video in After Effects, and because of certain technical considerations had to keep the field of view at 62 degrees. That means the foreground element is not precisely to scale. I realized this after the fact and may update the video at some point in the future. All planets are to correct scale with one another in any case.”

What Would Zheng He Do? Mars to Stay

 Replica of Zheng He’s treasure ship in Nanjing’s Baochuan Shipyard. Courtesy of kbismarck.org
In 1424, the Yongle Emperor died. His successor, the Hongxi Emperor (who reigned for only one year between 1424–1425), decided to stop Zheng He’s voyages. Zheng He traveled only once more during the reign of Hongxi’s son, the Xuande Emperor. After that final expedition the voyages of the Chinese treasure ship fleets were ended. Xuande believed his father’s decision to halt the voyages meritorious, and thus “there would be no need to make a detailed description of his grandfather’s sending Zheng He to the Western Oceans.” This, and the claim that the voyages “were contrary to the rules stipulated in the Huangming zuxun, Ancestral Injunctions of the August Ming, the royal founding documents laid down by the Hongwu Emperor…” led the conservative Mandarin Confucian bureaucracy to scuttle the entire 250 ship fleet – by far the largest of their time – and burn the shipyards. 
By the 1500s building a ship in China with more than two masts was punishable by death. Confucian bureaucrats feared an independent maritime merchant class empowered by exposure to new cultures and foreign technologies. In 1511 Portuguese ships sailed into Canton, China. 

The Speculative Film “1421: The Year China Discovered America” Part 1 of 2

The Speculative Film “1421: The Year China Discovered America” Part 2 of 2