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This is a lot of working backwards. I find this interesting but ultimately not compelling. I see a lot of: "If things were different than the way they are, the
by crunchycensus 2y ago
This is a lot of working backwards. I find this interesting but ultimately not compelling. I see a lot of:
"If things were different than the way they are, they couldn't work they way that they work!"
- cowsup 2y agoAgreed, I find lots of these "what is the universe?" questions fall apart, due to the fact that humans aren't great at figuring out what we don't know. Just a thousand years ago, our smartest minds had a very different idea of what "space" was, how our solar system behaved, and even the shape of our planet, but it made sense to them at the time with the technology they had, so it's hard to mock them. For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
- tsimionescu 2y agoI generally agree, though one small caveat - the shape and even size of the Earth was pretty well known to scholars since ancient times, at least since the 3rd century BCE, both in the Hellenistic world and in India.