Actually - the knowledge that the world was a sphere is thousands of years old, at least among educated people. Pretty easy to argue from lunar eclipses from the shape of the Earth's shadow on the Moon.Kismet wrote: ↑Thu Jun 25, 2020 2:26 pm (omitted)
Cradle - New knowledge is discovered every day and the record is often corrected quite soon after. As an example, it was acknowledged publicly some time after Magellan circumnavigated the globe in 1519 that the world was a sphere and not flat. In fact, the king of Spain issued him a Coat of Arms whose motto was Primus circumdedisti me (in Latin, "You went around me first").
So, it seems to me, that there is no issue with promptly correcting things that are subsequently discovered to be incorrect, wrong or insensitive at the time they are discovered to be so. In fact, the longer it takes to do so the worse the potential adverse reaction IMHO.
Erastosthenes in around 300 BCE actually used geometry and solar shadows to estimate the circumference of the world, and depending on how you translate the Roman measurement of stadia into modern measures was anywhere from a couple of percent to ten percent or so off the correct value. Not bad at all given no real technology (the ability to build a deep well, and tall obelisks).
Given that there was general knowledge about the rough size of the Earth, what Columbus' genius was in convincing his financiers that he had done a better job of measuring the same thing (getting a dramatically smaller value) and therefore the journey to India became feasible using the ship technology of the day.
Got lucky that there was something in between.
BTW, I teach this every time I have an Astronomy class (from 1992 to present).