I was getting back into watching Cosmos by Carl Sagan again, when he mentioned something I had forgot to bring up in the forums back when I was talking about Archimedes. Aside from Archimedes being an absolute bloody genius (up there with Einstein and Newton), it's absolutely incredible how smart and intelligent people were hundreds of years BCE. Concepts that wouldn't be rediscovered for another thousand years!
Aristarchus was a Greek astronomer from Samos. He correctly identified the inner planets, their order, and position
around the sun. All of this without a telescope. He also calculated the angle and distance of the moon to the earth, although he was off by a few degrees. If he had been a bit more accurate, he would have correctly calculated not just the size of the moon and its distance from the Earth, but also the size of the sun and the Earth's distance from it. His math was correct, he just had the wrong variables by a few degrees!
Aristarchus' work, along with Archimedes, was mostly lost when the library of Alexandria had burned down for the second time. It just boggles the mind how much these guys knew, and what advancement there may have been today if the library had remained. We're 1000 years behind.
I keep hoping some archeologist some place will dig up a few hundred thousand scrolls that were miraculously saved from Alexandria.
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