Rumors spread in Spain of a powerful and wealthy kingdom in the Mexican interior in Central America. Only four years later, the Aztec capital was a heap of ruins, the Aztec Empire a thing of the past, and the Spaniard Hernana Cortes reigned over a vast empire in Mexico. Just a decade later, Francisco Pizarro discovered the Inca Empire in South America (never discovered by the Aztecs in millennia of civilization) and completely conquered it in 1532. The powerful (militarily and commercially) Asian empires of the time—China, Japan, India, Turkey, and so on—quickly learned of the Spanish and later Portuguese fortunes in the Americas, but no conquering or trading expedition was ever sent in that direction for centuries. The first Asian expedition to conquer the Americas took place in June 1942, when the Japanese Navy conquered the islands of Kiska and Attu off the coast of Alaska. The Asian empires would never get any closer to the American mainland. It’s not that they weren’t capable. The Asians simply weren’t interested. What made the difference was that Europeans had an insatiable desire to explore and conquer, driven, according to evolutionist Yuval Noah Harari, by a “culture of awareness of ignorance,” compared to the “awareness of wisdom” of most previous cultures, which therefore didn’t encourage exploration to discover the unknown.
