Offtopic, but people actually had a good reason to laugh at Columbus: he made a simple error in his calculations that lead him to believe Earth is much smaller

Offtopic, but people actually had a good reason to laugh at Columbus: he made a simple error in his calculations that lead him to believe Earth is much smaller that it really is. Most of the nobles he asked for money were actually better educated than him, so the error was obvious to them. And since noone could know about America's existence it was reasonable to assume that Columbus will simply run out of supplies and starve to death in the middle of the ocean. Which almost happened, they've found the land at the very last moment.