I don't think tablets existed in the 20th

i wonder whether it is an accident that "spaceships" are called after ships

ship (plural ships)

1. (nautical) A water-borne vessel generally larger than a boat.

2. (chiefly in combination) A vessel which travels through any medium other than across land, such as an airship or spaceship.

Spaceship is a portmantau of space and ship, so nope :)

Ships, including ocean-going ships, were a thing long before 15th century. Europeans have travelled to North America in the 10th century. What happened around the 15th century was the creation of empires willing and able to colonize (plunder, steal, enslave) on a continental scale. The idea that the amerikas were somehow "the new world" rather than land stolen by massacring natives is imperialist propaganda. I think this is the reason why a lot of people fell for "colonize mars" bullshit - they subconsciously think that the land now occupied by the US was a barren wasteland which couldn't support human life until brave europeans came and covered it in McMansions and fast food chains. From that mindset it makes sense that we can do the same again, but with mars.

This isn't a meme and the comparison is wrong.

TL;DR meme is wrong. It's not the communication of information but the invention of specific technologies that allowed it

Space tech was well and truly developed decades before the internet was anything more than a curiousity.

Rockets are the primary underpinning tech of space exploration - invented centuries earlier but refined enough in the 1930s and 1940s for the Germans to put them into space en route to blowing shit up.

If you'd said "computers" it might be a better argument: while the first peacetime spaceflights were calculated by humans with pen paper & slide rule / log tables, primitive computers were soon brought in and helped in accelerating progress.

Same with exploration, it wasnt printing press in 1500s that expanded exploration (books had been around for several millenia before 1500AD), but the invention and widespread use of the sextant and accurate clocks allowed more precise navigation

A ship is, by definition, a large vessel for navigation purposes. Spaceship is an adaptation from spacecraft to specify that it is 'manned', and spacecraft is a vehicle designed for space. 'Craft' means power, strength, skill or requiring skill, and as well as originating from the items that skilled craftsmen would create, was later used as a nickname for original ships, possibly for a multitude of reasons, such as the skill required to build the vessel, to control it, or the general importance and power of using it for trade between communities.

Genocide then, genocide today.

After reading this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing#History

damn, the asians beat us to it again, i guess. (speaking as an european)