> Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first and then set out to explore new worlds the world would be a different place today.
Of all the examples you could have picked, you picked the one that was most explicitly not about desire for exploration. Europeans were not exploring the world for exploration's sake; they were stridently motivated by the promise of loot. The Spanish in particular explored the New World primarily to find new cities of gold to plunder, destroy, and loot, as was done to the Aztecs and Incas, with these entradas funded by people hoping for a share of the loot (unfortunately for them, there was nothing else on the scale of the Aztec or Inca Empires). Later, other countries sought less to actively loot the place but instead monopolize control over raw resources (beaver pelts being key in North America).
Better examples would have been, say, the Polynesian migrations that settled isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, which the navigators would have had no reason to believe even existed.
Of all the examples you could have picked, you picked the one that was most explicitly not about desire for exploration. Europeans were not exploring the world for exploration's sake; they were stridently motivated by the promise of loot. The Spanish in particular explored the New World primarily to find new cities of gold to plunder, destroy, and loot, as was done to the Aztecs and Incas, with these entradas funded by people hoping for a share of the loot (unfortunately for them, there was nothing else on the scale of the Aztec or Inca Empires). Later, other countries sought less to actively loot the place but instead monopolize control over raw resources (beaver pelts being key in North America).
Better examples would have been, say, the Polynesian migrations that settled isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, which the navigators would have had no reason to believe even existed.