Quote Originally Posted by Jiro View Post
airship?

Also, why the hell hasn't anyone else from Zanarkand just sailed out of there? If our own history is anything to go by, humanity wants the entire world charted. And if Spirans are anything to go by, they live smurfing everywhere else. So to have a physical location that is entirely unknown to people despite the existence of giant salvage ships and whatnot seems utterly bonkers.
You mean sailed away from DZ? The primary reason would be that Yu Yevon has created people that don't care. They don't need to explore if that desire has been suppressed. If all else fails, we know that Yevon has a hard-reset switch for DZ.

There weren't many airships to begin with. Even the one scrounged up during the story was one-in-a-million, and at the end of FFX-2, there are only two airships, total, and this is after the technological growth (the first one even stopped working). Is it that hard to believe that magical-zombie-Hitler-O-Brien-Stalin-Napoleon-Jesus was able to control a world where he and his daughter were the center of a global religion?

For people coming from mainland Spira, technology and population is continually reset by attacks coming from Sin. Plebs of Yevon (99% of the population) are afraid of technology. The Al Bhed are limited by their resources and by manpower (and that they're second class citizens). You reference our history of exploration, but your impression is incredibly exaggerated.

The number of explorers in Western history is extremely small. The fact explorers existed is only prominent because Europeans love starting fights. It took many of the historical explorers great efforts to get funding from their governments. Exploration was largely fueled by militaristic ambitions i.e., "we require more minerals."

Eastern exploration was largely stopped by executive order. The Chinese ended their own exploration efforts because why explore that which is inferior? If you're at the center of the world, who cares about anyone else? The Japanese and Koreans shared isolationist tendencies.

Native American exploration pre-colonialism was non-existent. Native African exploration was equally non-existent.