[jordan801]

Who gets to decide what is a detriment to society?

Going out on a limb here, but at one point everyone thought the world was flat. Preaching that the earth is actually round, was seen as a detriment to society. So much so that people got horrifically executed for it.

We don't know anything. So sensoring ideas because we don't like them, or they seem farfetched, is probably, a real detriment to society.

[dragonwriter]

> Going out on a limb here, but at one point everyone thought the world was flat.

Maybe. More likely, at one point most people weren't concerned with more than the local topography.

> Preaching that the earth is actually round, was seen as a detriment to society. So much so that people got horrifically executed for it.

I won't say definitively that that never happened, but it certainly isn't something that there is any historical evidence I've ever heard of, and it sounds a lot like flat-earth mythology, possibly conflated with (exaggeration of) the actual heliocentrism controversy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

[jordan801]

After reading a bit, I realized I have misrecalled it. Woops. Thanks for pointing it out! :)

The referrence was to the Sun being the center of the solar system, and not the Earth. Apologies. Failure on my part. Memory is a fickle thing.

[4ggr0]

Well, that's a REALLY long time ago. 1300 years ago the vast majority of people believed that the world was round. The flat-earth theory is strangely enough a relatively modern theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

EDIT: Sorry, only just now saw that another commenter already posted the same link.