From what we know Ozymandias was a king of kings. After him men like Alexander, the generals of Rome, Genghis Khan were all men on the road to conquering the known world. In the great age of exploration when trade routes were being established countries were expanding into the unknown, to bring new wealth and power to their rulers. When America was expanding in the hundreds of years after it was founded until it was mapped no one actually knew quite how far it expanded. Always people have been moving out into the vast unknown, over mountains and plains and always we have found each other, usually in a bloody conflict we could all have done without.
But as we have been expanding what we have actually found is the world is finite. Borders end, which is what borders do. The world isn’t getting smaller it was always small we just had to run around it to find that out. And what we inherited was the fact that the world is actually not as large as human imagination so now people explore the unknown of space as we used to explore the unknown of the world. We exchange extra terrestrials for the ‘little people’, visitations for magic spells from sprites, and a host of other inventions to give ourselves explanations of what lies ahead of us.
Always what lies ahead of us is so important to human beings.