...you are skating on thin Martian Ice. "Science" never said there were canals on Mars - Perceival Lowell did, and he never demonstrated or verified this at all, and his detractors and doubters were legion even in his own day. It was a working hypothesis - of which "Science" past has a great many such, but which it is only selective data picking by you to select out one outmoded, discarded one (never verified) as the voice of "Science speaking." As for Nicky... he didn't know a thing that Tycho Brahe before him hadn't spelled out in detail in his star ledgers - but he did go and write it all up for posterity, true. Eratosthenes a millennium earlier had a good fix on how far the sun was from Earth (surprisingly so, considering!). I bet he even had surmised the orbiting part too (maybe) - but of course there is no known specific study or reference (yet!). As for the Earth not "going around the sun"... better pour it back in your crystal ball and cork the hole: if you are being cutesy with fact they "both go around a common center of gravity" - you still lose: the CG point of the Earth/Sun system lies so deep inside the sun that one can still say logically, the Earth "goes round" the sun (as the latter is properly defined) no matter how you wave your prestidigitator's wand there!....

Don't get your ectoplasm all wet!

Bernie