Aleins

[Big_John]

BAH! I've always been bad at maths.....i beleive there] is other life out there, you may not believe, i dont mind.

i'm not talking directly about belief; believe what you like. i'm just curious about people's foundation for the belief in alien life. personally, i don't think we have a statistical basis to form an opinion. hence, i remain neutral, neither believing nor disbelieving.

Prove it. This is one hell of a statement. Sure there were a few underground scientitsts, but that's about it. They all thought Columbus would fall off the side of the world. Myth? Promulgated by whom?

I say again: Prove it.

i certainly couldn't prove it, but iirc, the spherical earth model was common in antiquity (e.g. ptolemy, eratosthenes, pythagoras, aristotle). it was challenged by flat-earth models propagated by early christian authors (on scriptural grounds) in the early "dark ages". but i don't think it's clear to what extent flat-earth teachings were prominent, or what the more commonly held belief was, either among learned people or the common man. in the medieval period, certainly, the generally accepted idea seems to be the geocentric model of the universe (which has a spherical earth).

it'll always be difficult to estimate the belief's of the common man in the medieval period. however, by the 1100s learned men were already trying to estimate the circumference of a spherical earth. flat-earth ideas have always been around, but they weren't accepted among the scholars of the medieval period to any great degree.