You know, now that I think about it, I haven't really given Galileo his due in this series.

And what are we 218 episodes in? I've talked about his contemporaries like Kepler,

relentlessly, because Kepler's my boy, and other giants like Newton and Maxwell and Einstein. I've mentioned Galileo

in passing because, you know, he's kind of important in the history of science, but I haven't

really dug it. Unfortunately, that is not today's episode.

I'll need to save a full exploration of Galileo's genius for another day, so please ask.

But I do get to mention Galileo again today,

and I'm going to kick off today's episode with just one, one of his remarkable achievements.

He was the first person in the history of humanity to see the Milky Way for what it really is.

No, the Milky Way is the name we give to this feature that we see on the sky.

It looks like a, well, like a milky way, hence the name.

All sorts of cultures around the world have noticed this because it's kind of big.

It kind of takes up the entire sky.

It looks different than other things on the sky. It looks different

than the sun or the moon or the stars or the planets. It's definitely different. Looks kind

of like a cloud, but it's definitely not a cloud because it appears in the same position on the

sky all the time. And it stretches from one end to the other, like a road of milk, the Milky Way.

And from millennia, humanity across the globe had debated about the true nature of the Milky Way.

What is this band of whitish, milky-ish stuff that appears in our sky?

Was it in our atmosphere?

Was it just past the moon? Was it caused

by the earth? Like, refraction in our atmosphere? Was it a reflection of sunlight off of a

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