Blog 2: The Allegory Of The Cave Through History

  Throughout history people have lived in illusions. One illusion I am interested in, is the illusion of ancient cultures that the world is flat. Ancient cultures including Greece, India, China, and Egypt; thought the land was like a flat disk floating in the ocean. They thought if you went too far you would fall off the Earth. Even some of the brightest philosophers of those times thought the world was flat.  Philosophers like Democritus, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus just to name a few. Everyone just excepted it as a fact and didnt question it. Years later a man named Pythagoras was recognized in the 6th cenury BC for discovering that the earth was actually a sphere. That is half-way true because nowadays we know the Earth is a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole with a bulge around the equator. He was on the right path though, that basically opened up people's minds. In later years Christopher Columbus wanted to go to India for precious spices. He wanted to sail from Spain and land on India but people thought he was going to fall off the Earth if he tried that, but it is said that ancient sailors already knew the world was round. He ended up sailing from spain and he thought he landed on India but he really landed on Caribbean Islands. A couple of years after that a man named Ferdinand Magellan would try to be the first person to sail around the world. He almost circled around the world but he died close to the end of his voyage, but the survivors finished the voyage. After a voyage circled around the world the theory of a flat world was a thing of the past. If the people of the past wouldn't have ask questions, we would still think the world was flat. The only sad part is the amount of deaths it took to prove the world isn't flat, also the deaths of the people who were killed when their lands were "found".