He mentioned the firmament. Said that the earth doesn't move because you can't feel it move. Said that we use sun dials because the sun moves.
And after dumping all his memes on me he did finally come back & say that the sun makes tight circles & then larger circles & he can prove with simple trigonometry that the sun is small & local.
Phew, that's a lot to take in. And there are people who romanticize living in the past...
Flat Earth was never a thing of the past.
It was artistic renditions, nothing else.
The real nature of the planet was known since the beginning.
We're fed a lot of 20th century myths, it's sad.
In Western world since 4000 yrs ago, the earliest models of the earth were statistical (predicting sun, moon, weather for crops) - they just didn't think about the shape of the earth. The Greeks are the first well known people to develop a geometric model of the earth. It was straightforward to do measurements to determine the rough geometry and size of the earth.
The sky was more difficult due to the distance, and they split into two speculative camps: Pythagoras (earth orbits sun orbits central furnace) and Aristotle (earth as center of the universe). The telescope (an invention financed and published by Pope Urban viii, patron of Galileo) allowed measurements capable of distinguishing these models. (With a result much to the consternation of establishment science.)
The earliest mercator map does show a spherical model that includes part of the world not yet discovered.
"Most people didn't know" doesn't mean "the people that matters didn't know".
It's like today, most people believe that "electricity travels at the speed of light", but the consensus has shifted to "almost instantaneously" among the people that really matters.
In the future they will say "they didn't know". Well, we do know.
