Future proofing President Rodrigo Roa Duterte leads the groundbreaking ceremony and time capsule laying of the Naga Permanent Housing Project in Barangay Tinaan, Naga City, Cebu last Friday. MALACÃÑANG PHOTO

The whole planet recently celebrated the 500th year of the start of Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan’s epoch-making voyage to sail around the globe for the first time, but it did not include the Philippines, which the explorer discovered for the Spanish crown and later became its colony.

President Rodrigo Duterte said there was no reason to be festive about the anniversary of the start of the country’s conquest.

“I was asked (to hold) a commemoration for the 500 years since they arrived here. I answered, ‘Why would I celebrate the arrival of the Spanish here? Why would I?,’” the President revealed during the groundbreaking ceremony and time-capsule laying for the Naga permanent housing project last Friday.

The Portuguese explorer was killed by islanders in the Philippines two years into the journey, leaving Spaniard Juan Sebastian Elcano to complete the three-year trip. But it is Magellan’s name that is forever associated with the voyage.

Mr. Duterte claimed that the one who “cut off” Magellan’s head, the legendary Mactan warlord Lapu-Lapu and his men were his relatives.

“It’s a good thing that my cousins got mad at them and cut off Magellan’s head. That made me happy,” he said.

Spain even sent a Navy frigate Méndez Núñez (F-104) of the Armada Española to the country recently to mark Magellan’s achievement.

It was the first time a Spanish Navy warship has sailed off Cavite and Manila after Spain ceded the Philippine to the United States of America in the 1900s.

“It’s all about religion,” the President said about the Magellan voyage. “When Magellan arrived there, he brought with him cannons and a cross. So, we became Christians. We didn’t have a religion back then,” Mr. Duterte averred.

He said that since the Spaniards brought with them the cross for religion and the cannons and guns, the nation was subjugated and the Philippines became the only predominantly Christian country in Asia.

“The natives yielded. They were scared,” according to the President.

For the rest of the world, Magellan was a historic figure. “Magellan is still an inspiration 500 years on,” said Fabien Cousteau, a French filmmaker and underwater explorer like his grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

“He was a pioneer at a time when explorers who went off into the unknown had a strong habit of not coming back.”

Here are five ways in which Magellan’s voyage marked human history and continues to inspire scientists and explorers today.

Magellan’s voyage was a turning point in history, as unique as the first manned journey into outer space and the later moon landings, said NASA scientist Alan Stern, leader of its New Horizons interplanetary space probe.

“When the first one circled the planet, (that) sort of meant that we now had our arms around the planet for the first time,” he said.

“That just transformed humanity in my view. I would call it the first planetary event, in the same way that Yuri Gagarin was the first off-planetary event” when the Soviet cosmonaut went into outer space.

Magellan’s voyage rewrote the maps and geography books. He was the first to discover the strait, which now bears his name, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the tip of South America.

“Perhaps his greatest feat, and still considered today one of the greatest feats of the history of navigation, was negotiating this strait, of which there were no maps and whose existence was vaguely rumored,” said US historian Laurence Bergreen, author of a biography of Magellan.

The voyage transformed humans’ own conception of their place in the world.

“It wasn’t just geography and anthropology, it showed something philosophical: that it’s all one world,” Bergreen said.

“Before Magellan people didn’t really know that. They didn’t know how the world was connected or how big it was.”

The voyage contributed to Europeans’ knowledge of the universe and has marked the worlds of space exploration and astronomy to this day.

While crossing the Magellan Strait, the explorer and his crew observed two galaxies visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, now known as the Magellanic Clouds.

Some recently designated areas of the surface of Mars have been given the same names that Magellan gave to parts of South America, with Bergreen’s help. A giant telescope being developed in Chile will also bear the explorer’s name.

Magellan’s achievement was a landmark in the history of exploration still hailed by his modern-day successors.

“In the space program, to prepare for these long duration missions, we say ‘the lessons for the future are written in the past,’” said Dafydd Williams, a former NASA astronaut, now 65, who went on two space missions.