Discovery– the action or the processes of finding something new. Exploration to the unknown or uncharted. In legal terms, disclosure of evidence before trial.
The word has often been associated with maritime settings thanks to the Age of Discovery, 15th to 17th centuries. That history shaping time period immortalized the names of Henry the Navigator, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. Sailing across the ocean in wooden boats without the technology of today (or even of the 18th century) is truly amazing.
After the Age of Discovery on the high seas, Americans set out to discover the Wild West.
“When the United States finally did send an overland expedition beyond the Rockies in 1803, it was a to find a navigable waterway to the Pacific. That was why the Lewis and Clark Expedition was called a voyage of discovery.” -Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory
In mathematical fields, discovery can have a very specific definition.
“The word ‘discovery’ is generally used only when the confidence crosses a mathematical threshold: the probability of being misled by a statistical fluke in the data must be less than about one in 3.5. million (an arbitrary-looking number but one that naturally emerges in statistical analyses).” -Brian Greene, Until the End of Time
Space truly is the final frontier and the starships in sci-fi movies are on quests of discovery with intentional maritime allusions. In reality, Voyager I and II have left our ecliptic plane and are drifting into the unknown. So that could mean any violent species that discovers either probe, and discovers the map on the golden record, could set out on their own voyage of discovery to imprison the human race. I’ll never understand why we put a map on those things.