(or more likely was reminded) of the work of Aristarchus of Samos:

“In the third century BCE, an astronomer proved the Sun was vastly larger than Earth—and deduced it made no sense for a giant fireball to orbit a tiny rock.

This led Aristarchus of Samos to propose a fully heliocentric universe. It was not merely a lucky guess, but a conclusion drawn from astronomical geometry. Although his precise relative measurements of the Earth, Moon, and Sun were inaccurate due to naked-eye limitations, his geometric methods were entirely sound.

It was not a lack of mathematics that doomed the ancient heliocentric model. Ancient Greek astronomers possessed incredibly sophisticated geometry, later showcased by the Ptolemaic geocentric model’s complex system of epicycles and deferents. Instead, the rejection of heliocentrism was rooted in a lack of precise observational tools and the dominance of established physics.

The most formidable scientific objection to a moving Earth was the absence of observable stellar parallax. If the Earth actually moved in a wide orbit around the Sun, the apparent positions of the stars should shift relative to one another over the course of a year. Because ancient astronomers could not observe this visual shift, they logically concluded the Earth was stationary. They had no way of knowing that the stars were so unimaginably distant that the parallax shift was simply too microscopic to detect without telescopes—instruments that would not be invented for nearly two millennia.

Furthermore, Aristotelian physics dictated that heavy earthly materials naturally rested at the center of the universe. If the Earth were spinning and hurtling through space, people expected that objects dropped from a height would fall behind, or that a constant, violent wind would scour the surface. The physical concept of inertia did not yet exist to explain how an atmosphere could travel alongside a moving planet.

A century after Aristarchus, a Hellenistic astronomer named Seleucus of Seleucia actively defended the heliocentric theory, reportedly using reasoning related to the movement of the tides. However, without the telescopic precision required to detect stellar parallax, or a new framework of physics to explain terrestrial motion, heliocentrism remained a minority view. The geocentric model prevailed for centuries not because ancient scholars were unscientific, but because the best empirical evidence available to the naked eye overwhelmingly supported a stationary Earth.”