[Doctor Stochastic]

It is astounding to me that we could figure out that our average distance to our sun was infact 93 million miles even before we sent out probes that would behave exactly as the theoretical equation stated they would...at the exact distances theorectically pre-calculated...

You should check out Encyclopædia Britannica, 1768 edition. It's not illegal; it's not even bigamy; it's trigonometry.

[mdmathis6]

My point was that we launched those probes never having been in space before....we had no way of really knowing sure distances until we actually tried it, we only had mathematical extrapolations based on observations here on Earth!