Wednesday, May 29, 2019

"How We Know the Earth Is Round"

I suspect people who say Earth is flat are more interested in and motivated by socio-political factors than by science, but I do wonder how they explain simple phenomenon such as this? From the 1972 Hammond's Space Atlas.


(Of course in historic terms, it's only relatively recently that humans agreed on a Solar system...) 

Someone described the Moon shot almost fifty years ago, in July 20, 1969, as being like sending astronauts to space in a souped-up Chevy, the science was so rudimentary.


I remember the assumption that far-flung human space exploration would keep on going. I only realized it was an assumption when it stopped. Of course we have other spacey things--the ISS, and satellites for telecommunications that were almost unimaginable.

The book imagines "Special nylon fiber strips"--hey, that's Velcro. It was invented in the 1950s.

It's easy to scoff at the original Star Trek for being square and dated, but in 1966 the show imagined a starship staffed with a fuller spectrum of humans (and other intelligent species) than this science book could.