SETI again

im afraid you might be a little off on your time scale. Galileo and
his compatriots were demonized by the church for saying the earth was
round and that it was not the center of the universe. all of this was
well after christ.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Lucio de Souza Coelho"
wrote:
>
> On 7/20/06, Xenophile wrote:
> (...)
> > Hi. I'm an Australian Aborigine in the year 1500. And I can't
help
> > but wonder: If there are people beyond Australia, where are they?
> (...)
>
> Nobody is denying that a habitat packed with godless communist
> bug-eyed aliens entering the Solar System next Tuesday is a
> possibility, and *then* we will finally have ground-truth evidence
as
> the Australians had after some time ;-). (Or, who knows, perhaps the
> aliens are already here, as Mike suggests in his story Eyes, Shining
> Back from the Dark -
http://members.aol.com/howiecombs/eyeshine.htm .)
> Or, extending the Australian analogy, the aliens in fact will be
> the... Refugees from the 12 Colonies running away from Cylons! ;-)
>
> Pre-contact Australians, on the other hand, probably did not have a
> very accurate notion of continent-scale Australian geography. It is
> likely that they didn't even know that they were in a big piece of
> land surrounded by ocean.
>
> However, Old Worlders knew since pre-Christian times that Earth was
a
> really big ball, and the mapped surface that they had at hand at the
> time was just a fraction of the total surface of this sphere. This
> lead them to hypothesize that there were other lands with strange
> peoples out there in those unknown regions - that is what Swift did
in
> Gulliver's adventures and Thomas More in The Utopia. Both authors
also