100 years from now they will look at us as about as smart as the Papeocracy insisting Gallileo declare the earth as the center of the universe!
You know, that's basically what I told a buddy of mine at work this week. I told him that 500 years from now, people will look back on us and our time as a bunch of barbarians. The bigger joke is that 1000 years from now, those people 500 years from now will be looked down upon.
I find it disturbing that people in general today look back at society 100, 200, 300 or more years ago, and instantly come to the conclusion that those people in the past were mostly primative barbarians. While at the same time people today very quickly forget that the 20th century was the bloodiest century in recorded human history.
At the time of the Galileo controversy, a bishop and cardinal were funding Copernicus' research into heliocentrism.
Copernicus dedicated his most famous work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, in which he gave an excellent account of heliocentricity, to Pope Paul III, who he hoped would protect him from Protestant attacks.
Copernicus entrusted this work to Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman who knew that Protestant reaction to it would be negative, since Martin Luther seemed to have condemned the new theory, and, as a result, the book would be condemned. Osiander wrote a preface to the book, in which heliocentrism was presented only as a theory that would account for the movements of the planets more simply than geocentrism did—something Copernicus did not intend.The (fallible) Church tribunal that condemned Galileo to house arrest objected to his insistence that the Church teach heliocentrism as dogmatic fact. Interestingly enough, the evidence that Galileo presented at the time, in favor of his theory, was scientifically erroneous.
Hate to burst everybody's bubble, but if you accept Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, then you have accepted that neither geocentricity nor heliocentricity can be proven and are merely two equivalent CS that can be used interchangeably.