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Ackshully, “galaxy” (or rather, “galaxias”) means “Milky Way” already, it’s just a translation. It was less ambiguous when the only galaxy we could see was the Milky lights that covered a lot of our sky.

Of course, we realize there’s more than one galaxy now, so the meanings have diverged.

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shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
And we didn’t realize there was more than one galaxy until the 1920s (I think?)

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- Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  We didn’t even suspect?
  
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  - Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    There are people alive today who will tell you the moon is a hologram. Never respect human intelligence more than you have to.
    
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    ByteJunk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    May I suggest reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos? Or watch one of the TV shows.
    
    While your average human is about as smart as a brick, there are so many minds throughout history that were able to pull humanity out of our dark caves and into space.
    
    What we need, to survive as a species, is to nurture people, give them (proper) education, and more will come up.
    
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    shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    My great aunt explained to me as a child in the 70s that the moon was round because gravity pulled it into a sphere. This woman was born around 1890, educated in a one-room schoolhouse and lived on a Civil War-era farm in bumfuck West Virginia.
    
    And then ya got what we have here today.
    
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  - Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Just looking at them, they appear fairly similar to nebulas within our own galaxy. It took sophisticated spectroscopic measurements to realize they’re actually much further away.
    
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    Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Thanks, and now I know the difference between a nebula and a galaxy.
    
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