Matthewstownville wrote:Everyone though that Eratosthenes was crazy for centuries. But he was only a few meters out with calculating the circumference also by using the sun. I don't understand why people think the government NASA etc would bother going to all this effort to cover it up surely they would have just stuck with Eratosthenes is crazy, but they didn't and why bother.It seems like a waste of time and effort to make up such a fabrication and I cant be convinced that anyone would benefit from creating such a facade or even how anyone could benefit. If the earth was flat then surely they would just say it was flat... Someone said to me once 'It's because the horizon is always flat even from up really high including from a plane' - So I suppose if that's the mindset then.....
Where do you get that everyone thought Eratosthenes was crazy? He was a highly respected man. The problem with much of the knowledge he discovered was, no one knew quite how to apply it. And remember also, the vast majority of the people on Earth at the time were uneducated and things like the size of the Earth and its distance from the Sun didn't much enter into their everyday lives.