| Sumario: | The paper compares two forms of imperialist expansion: the conquest of America and the conquest of outer space. The historical background for the first expansionist drive was the Iberian version of the period known as the Renaissance, and its territorial background was the Americas. The second expansionist drive, in the form of space exploration by the US and the USSR, has been limited temporally to the second half of the twentieth century. The essay proceeds from the principle that these two cases of expansionism formulated different appraisals of an analogous enterprise: the 'discovery' of the New World. Whereas on a historical level there is an obvious discontinuity - sailing vessels are replaced by rockets, horses, by computers, the conquistadors by astronauts, and the past by the present and future - on the level of theoretical interpretation, there is a marked continuity between the two periods of conquest in that open new frontiers of domination.
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