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by bsza 3 days ago
People weren’t as ignorant back then as you think. They had very good reason to reject heliocentrism, namely that constellations don’t grow and shrink in size as the earth moves around. That, they said, would require the universe to be unimaginably big and empty, much more so than any other observation they could make at the time would suggest.

If you have the time, I recommend reading Pliny’s Natural History. I think it really shows how much more open-minded these people were than we give them credit for. They just didn’t have the technology we have.

2 comments

Another reason many people rejected heliocentrism was that you could get excommunicated (or worse!) if you professed to accept it.
Tell that to Giordano Bruno.
You haven’t even bothered to look up what actually got him executed, have you.
Apparently you haven't either and you're trying to weasel out for the church because it wasn't the only reason they executed him. It amazes me that it's okay to have an invisible friend based on 2,000 to 4000-year-old writings by goat herders high on psilocybin, but if you form a parasocial attachment to an AI, that's AI psychosis. ELI5 please?
I'm not your therapist, take this question to them. And I'm not trying to weasel out of anything. You asserted that, in the past, merely claiming that the Earth revolves around the Sun was met with getting burned at the stake by a mob of priests foaming at the mouth. I corrected that, because it's a myth. Please stop sneering at centuries/millenia-old people compared to whom you live like a king, and find another group of people to feel superior to.