Title text:
The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3159/
This is just wrong though. The theory of continental drift was proposed hundreds of years ago. We just didn’t know how it happened. Plate tectonics is just the mechanism that explains it.
Just like people knew that they needed to breath to survive for a long time before we knew that it was because there was oxygen in the air that our cells needed to under go cellular respiration.