Jan 062015
 

Documentaries purporting to support creationism, ancient (or even current) aliens, ghost hunting, etc. are bad enough. But there’s a concept so mind-bogglingly backwards that you’ll shed neurons just finding out that there are supposedly educated people who actually buy into it: geocentrism. Yes, there are people in the modern world who actually believe that the Earth is the unmoving, non-rotating center of the universe.

Self-Centered: ‘Geocentrist’ Movie To Get Limited Theatrical Release

Look, I know if you look into the sky, it *looks* like the Sun and Moon and stars are turning around the Earth, and that you don’t *feel* the Earth turning. For most people and most professions, a geocentric worldview works as well as a heliocentric one.

But you know what kind of person a geocentric worldview *doesn’t* work for? Forget the astronomers. Forget the cosmologists. It doesn’t work for anyone who uses GPS. It doesn’t work for anyone who needs to aim an ICBM. it doesn’t work for anyone involved in trying to put something in orbit. And I don’t even mean an orbit out to Saturn, I mean the simplest orbit around the Earth.

Sigh.

Look, I get it. Some people have a driving need to feel special. So they try to become celebrities, or politicians, or conspiracy theorists, or religious cranks like these goobers. But individual humans are, statistically speaking, *not* special. And Earth? Even more not special. We’ the center of precisely nothing, except a cloud of satellites and space junk that *we* launched. We are the center of the universe in precisely the same way that Mecca is the center of the spherical surface of the Earth: it ain’t. There ain’t no such damn thing as a center to the universe, anymore than there’s a center to a finite but unbounded region such as a spherical surface.

 Posted by at 3:42 pm