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SofaKingI t1_j4lh295 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in TIL Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd Century BCE was the first to present the model of the Sun as the center of our Solar system and also placed the other known planets in correct order of distance from the sun. He also correctly surmised that stars were other far distant suns. by CapnFancyPants

I feel like you're doing what the other comment is cautioning against.

Those are modern concepts and only vaguely similar. Our brains tend to jump to the closest thing we know and there's a lot of mysticism about ancient, forgotten knowledge, but Ancient Greeks had no idea about spacetime or dark energy or any of that.

Their fifth element (or aether) was just a substance a bit like air but with very different properties, that existed outside the Earth's sphere beyond the Moon. It was what gods breathed. They made it up to explain things they didn't understand. For example, they said air naturally moved in a straight line (wind), but aether moved only in circles and that's why planets had a circular orbit. It was what held the stars up in the sky.

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massivebasketball t1_j4mt3wf wrote

>They made it up to explain things they didn’t understand.

So dark matter then

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