SETI again

actually i was going with what was taught it school, and that was
that they believe the earth was flat and there were demons and
monsters and such that would kill and eat any crew that strayed too
far from land. of course, it would not be the first time that schools
teach the wrong thing. In America, they did once upon a time teach
that there was no evolution and a'white men were men and black men
were animals'. both fallacies have long since stopped being taught
and the beliefs of the europeans could have been fixed since i went
to school. I always had something of a problem with it.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Lucio de Souza Coelho"
wrote:
>
> On 7/20/06, Robert wrote:
> (...)
> > ok some believed it, but just look at how much trouble Columbus
had
> > in conviencing anyone in the 1400's that the world was round.
>
> Although popular belief holds that (perhaps due to that Bugs Bunny
> cartoon were a comical Columbus is portrayed trying to convince the
> Spanish king), Earth sphericity was not the problem in Columbus
> theories.
>
> The problem was that Columbus used calculations from an ancient
> Phoenician from the 1st century before Christ, Marinus of Tyre,
which
> postulated that landmasses occupied two-thirds of Earth
circumference,
> and also misconverted measurements of Earth circumference from the
> writings of a Persian astronomer from the 9th Century AD, Al-
Farghani.
> As a result, the Earth imagined by Columbus was 25,000 Km in
> circumference, almost half of the actual size of Earth (more
> Mars-sized than Earth sized) and mostly covered by land instead of
> oceans. However, most of the geographers and astronomers of the time
> agreed upon a circumference close to the real value of 40,000 Km and
> (taking apart fictional works like the Divine Comedy) assumed that
> there was nothing else but water in the rest of the world. In such a
> situation, trying to cross an ocean that big seemed a temerity, and
it
> was simply natural to find that Columbus was a lunatic sloppy with
his
> calculations - and yes, that was precisely what he was ;-).
>
> In fact, even the Spanish crown probably saw Columbus as a demented
> navigator, but they were hopeful that he would find some unknown
> islands during his folly. (After all, the Portuguese had discovered
> many new islands in the 15th Century.) It turns out that they were
> lucky and Columbus found another group of continents. (Even though
he
> died thinking that the Americas were in fact Asia.)
>
> > everyone still said you fell off the earth if you went to far
away
> > from land.
> (...)
>
> Actually, the prevalent theory of gravity (again developed by
ancient
> Greeks, and in parallel by ancient Hindus) among educated people at
> the time said that objects have a tendency to fall towards the
ground.
> if Earth is spherical, then the ground is also curved and what
is "up"
> in some point of Earth maybe "down" from some other point. An
example
> of this notion among educated people is in the aforementioned
Dante's
> Divine Comedy. In the book Dante travels through the center of Earth
> (yes, Jules Verne was not that innovative ;-) and emerges in the
> antipode, in the then-unknown Southern Hemisphere, were he finds the
> Purgatory, which was an island inhabited by the ghosts of the
> recently deceased. However, the Purgatory is not described
as "upside