But I believe he was the winner for many years under price is right rules.
Smugly: "1 mile."
Can you claim to be a winner under the rules of a game that won’t be invented yet for hundreds of years?
Yes. The fact that even this was a thought and he was charting the space bodies and trying to establish distances between them. The rules were invented. The players just were not famous.
* thousands
His method was fundamentally sound though. He realized that moonlight is reflected sunlight, and that if you observe the angle between the sun and the moon in the sky at exactly half moon, you can calculate the distance to the sun relative to the distance to the moon.
I appreciate that he worked on it at least. Around the same era, someone else calculated the circumference of the earth (and that it was round) in a pretty accurate fashion (between −2.4% and +0.8% off) based on measuring shadows on equally sized posts at different locations on the same date. Googled, it was Eratosthenes, the cities were Alexandria and Syene/Assuan.