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Re:Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars by eropple on Friday June 16, 2017 @01:43PM (#14571067)
This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round--had to be, otherwise stuff like Eratosthenes's measuring of Earth wouldn't...well...work. It's a trivial thing to observe, too: if you're high enough over the ground, you can see horizon curvature. That knowledge was not, contrary to popular thought, widely lost during the Middle Ages even in Europe and definitely not in the Eastern Roman Empire or places east.

Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.

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.
Re:Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars by api on Friday June 16, 2017 @04:03PM (#14572215)
It still exists among right-wing conspiranoids determined to believe that absolutely everything is a lie.