Re:Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars
by simonh on Friday June 16, 2017 @02:38PM
(#14571582)
>This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round...
Among educated people able to afford and read a copy of Eratosthenes yes, but there were probably a lot of ordinary people that were not literate and were never exposed to any actual evidence to the contrary,who believed it was flat.
Flat earthers in the modern world really do have no excuse, education in the basic geometry and simple tools they need to prove it themselves is near universal in the Western world, but back then it was perhaps more understandable
Re:Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars
by dsfyu404ed on Friday June 16, 2017 @04:18PM
(#14572330)
>Among educated people able to afford and read a copy of Eratosthenes
who were the ones capable of funding the project in the first place
Re:Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars
by fapjacks on Friday June 16, 2017 @02:55PM
(#14571738)
Education in basic sciences and simple tools are all people need to prove that the creation myths in <religious text> are not true, but that doesn't stop the vast bulk of humanity from subscribing to those stories.
Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.