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Comment by LogicFailsMe | Hacker News Reader

Heliocentrism calling...

Yeah, we reject anything new and scary. Gotta wonder what the cavepeople made of the wheel.

Edit: still triggered by heliocentrism in 2026? OK then.

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.

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.

I mean Zeppelins were supposed to be the premier form of air travel despite the glaringly obvious issues.

Invoking “heliocentrism” is the HN version of “Ive already drawn you as the virgin and me as the Chad.”

A modern equivalent of abandoning zeppelins because of the Hindenberg would be abandoning skyscrapers because of 9/11.

But it's humorous that Sergey Brin has a company dedicated to bringing back zeppelins and that's a lot more fun than Zuck's doomsday bunker or Bezos's doomsday yacht.

Who said I was referencing the Hindenburg?

They had a ton of fundamental problems despite seeming like a good idea at first. It was only after we started using them did we realize they weren’t actually as good of an idea as they seemed.

That was ~90 years ago. We're a few branches higher on the tech tree now. Their return has been promised for over 40 years. Only the future itself will answer whether they do.

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