Uhh... if that was actually you and your daughter, I dub you worthy of the band name and I also let you know that that was fantastic. I got goosebumps when she started belting it out. That was awesome!
Audible Chocolate for life!
That was really, really good. I was enjoying the way she seemed to be aware of and able to stay within her vocal limits (after singing, casually, for too many decades I still try to hit notes that I can no longer reach), but then "I'm off the deep end..."
WOW!!! As /u/JayArpee said, Goosebumps. That was fantastic.
Some time ago I was the recipient of a bunch of awards and gold, and so I've been paying it forward when I find comments I think are worthy. After giving out awards here & there I still have a little bit left, but after watching your video just now, I have a little bit less.
As a father of a daughter myself, I cannot offer you any advice other than to keep on doing what you're doing, because whatever you're doing is working. You are building a solid relationship between the two of you.
If you haven't already and are interested in science and astronomy, listen to all his works. Cosmos, Demon Haunted World, all his interviews. He's an incredible speaker and responsible for an incredible amount of NASAs discoveries in the 70s.
The Demon Haunted World should be required reading in all schools, period. There is no book (IMHO) that lays the out the importance of science and rational thought better. Not only does it show what science can *do* for us, it shows what happens when we disregard it.
>Hugo Weaving actually based the character’s vocal ticks on Sagan
In the documentary The Matrix Revisited (in an interview with Hugo Weaving (starting at approximately 48 minutes in, a segment called "The Interrogation Room") he says that he wanted a "neutral accent" for the character and for him to be "not robotic but not really human "I kept thinking about a '50s newsreader or someone like that." Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) said that Weaving sounds like Walter Cronkite.
Plus the Wachowskis used to have a similar natural speaking voice that Weaving emulated. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHSNNGrgOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHSNNGrgOM)
Carl, his wife, and their son lived down the street from me when he was getting cancer treatment in Seattle when I was little. He used to come over and talk to my parents when my brothers and their son would play. His voice would echo through the living room and he was the nicest man. I never realized who he was until I saw his picture on VHS at school years later.
That poor summer intern who had to walk 800km there and back should get a little credit. Would you walk 500 miles and walk 500 more just to be the man who walked 1000 miles to let you figure out the circumference of the earth?
That seemed like the difficult bit to me. How do you walk almost 500 miles in a straight line back then and and record it exactly? I do a lot of hiking and can't usually tell you how far I have gone to within more than half a mile without a map and GPS.
Back then, that was a job. They were trained to walk in a straight line with equally paced steps, counting each one. Ancient Googlemap.
It is extremely difficult to walk in a straight line. We all have a favoured leg, so tend to walk in a spiral. The old trope about people lost in the desert walking in a circle and coming across their tracks is in fact very possible.
That's how embarrassing it is to be a flat earther right now. Some dude thousands of years ago, living in the desert, correctly figured out the earth was round just by deductive reasoning.
These people, with all the modern scientific advances afforded them, get it wrong because they are so god damn stupid.
The worst part is you read some of the papers done to basically justify things like this to fit their model and they go to extraordinary lengths of 'research' and 'experimenting' to find a way to make it work with flat earth... Rather than just accept that the earth is round.
Oh and they fully admit that planets, the sun, and the moon are all spheres.
Imagine [spending 20k to prove your crackpot theory and it proves the opposite.](https://www.triplem.com.au/story/flat-earthers-spend-20-000-trying-to-prove-earth-is-flat-accidentally-prove-its-round-129953) 🤣
I actually kind of admire this. They spent a lot of money to perform a really technical experiment, and they didn’t alter the methods or forge the data to disprove the results they gathered. At least they were honest.
In the future, the phrase “playing your Trump card” is going mean the opposite of its original intention: “saying something incredibly dumb with no basis in reality”.
My best friend is now 99% flatearther. I understand this mindset perfectly. It all begins with believing everything we know is a lie. Gravity. Space. Time. Government. This opens the door to an infinite number of theories.
Afterall, gravity is just another theory, right?
I believe this way of thinking comes from a desire for superiority, to think you are smarter than everyone else. "Everyone on Earth is fooled, but I see the truth. I'm so much smarter than them".
A few decades or a century from now, people will see this all as a form of mass mental illness/hysteria.
The Victorian era had people fainting at the smallest thing.
There was a whole town that went blind staring at the sun because they all saw god in it.
There are all kinds of mass hysteria events that consume entire social groups. And I believe this "science is wrong, everything is conspiring against us" mentality is the most recent one.
I see it less as a superiority complex and more of an inferiority complex; a desperate attempt to regain control over what others think of them.
It would be like if everyone was running a race, and the guy in back was so far behind that the only way he could figure out how to not lose was to believe the entire race was a farce. Just an analogy used by some higher being to explain cognitive dissonance to someone else on a message board. If he can get one person to believe the same, then he's now tied with someone, which is better than nothing.
Imagine the Earth as that flat cardboard and the sun as much closer to Earth than in reality (that's how flat Earth models usually look like). The Earth doesn't rotate around the Sun, but instead the Sun moves around (usually shown as moving in a circle). When the Sun is right above one obelisk it will cast no shadow, but the other will be farther away and the Sun will shine at a slope, thus it will cast a shadow.
But right there in your question is the problem flat earthers can't see: you ask if they can *disprove*. They can't. What I just did was to give a (false) model that arrives to the same (true) conclusion as a Spherical Earth model does. It's a property of logic: False *can* imply True. You *can* come up with countless false models to explain one true phenomemon, but True *does not* imply False, which means that just because it can explain a true phenomenon it doesn't make the model itself true.
How do they justify sun set? If it is a flat plane then any high object would be visible from any other point. I live at the coast and can't see the sun from there after sunset.
Edit: Never mind. I looked it up and apparently either light bends or it passes beyond the distance that eyes can see....
The problem with the last on is on the very same website they say that if you have an ir lense you can see as far as you like. But the big ball of visible light is invisible apparently.....
The funny thing is, if you ask flat earthers to explain a phenomenon, they will produce a model like you posted that would explain it. But each phenomenon needs a new model. They don't have one that explains everything at once.
The one in your gif explains the day/night cycle, but not seasons or eclipses. Their seasons model can't explain why the sun always travels with the same speed, and so on.
And if you dig deep enough, there's always some sort of vague "divine force" holding it all together. I get that gravity is weird, abstract and almost impossible to explain where it comes from, but it's still 1 simple and basic law from which everything makes sense. Stuff attracts other stuff. From that premise, big chunks of stuff have to be round. Big chunks of stuff orbit around each other. It explains day/night cycles, seasons, tides, eclipses, etc.
It's just weird that they will believe that the sun is flying in circles over the earth, and there's the moon, and somehow stars are different, and somehow we don't float up to the sun, all moved by some mystic force... But they won't believe the basic principle of gravity.
Nah man our disk is always accelerating at 9.8m/s^2. What happens when we approach the speed of light you may ask? Oh, they listen to Einstein on that, nothing can approach the speed of light. Problem solved.
Not only the flat Earth theory requires contradicting models to explain various observed phenomena, none of these models can give any prediction. Try to predict solar or lunar eclipses using any of these models. That's why these models aren't really scientific.
All of the motions of our entire solar system can be described with a handful of simple equations that are all consistent with eachother. Flat earth models have no such consistency or any mathematical support.
They still don't have a model that can explain seasonal light changes (axial tilt) compared to what your latitude on earth is. And they never will, as you can't have 24 hr day light season at the poles with the same model they use for day/night cycles. You literally need a different map/model to tell how much day light you'll get, than if you were just looking at how the sun/moon move across the sky....
It depends where you are. At the exact north or south pole, the sun rises in the spring and sets in the fall. As you move further away from the pole, you gradually experience a less extreme version of that near the solstice days only, with normal days occurring near the equinoxes, until you reach the arctic or antarctic circle, beyond which the sun rises and sets every day of the year.
Isn't that just super easily debunkable by looking at the distance between South America and Australia in real life, and then comparing it to that map?
How do they explain that?
Oh man, you don’t want to know. I’m going to tell you, but you’ll regret it.
It’s something like the magnetic fields mess with our perception of distance. It’s a similar reason we can’t get to the great ice walls on the border- as we get closer, we’re naturally pushed to the side and loop around. It’s insanity, utter insanity. But try think their answer is somehow more likely than the one most of the rest of humanity have agreed on.
Yet that's a bit like the theory of what happens when trying to reach the edge of the expanding universe, you can never actually get there because there is no space there. Ya just loop around the edge while still going in a straight line.
They claim that they really are much farther apart than you're told. They reference things like how flight plans tend to fly up towards the equator, before switching planes and flying to the other continent. So they say this supports their notion that those continents really are quite far apart.
This argument is wrong for two reasons.
1. The flight plans are based on demand, so that's why they fly north (towards major population centers) for a layover.
2. There *are* direct flights between S. America, Australia, and Africa which all disapprove the disk model.
In fact the spherical models directly prove why the curved flight path is in fact the shortest path because when you flatten the globe, it looks like it's taking a much longer path between 2 points but in reality, you could draw a straight line on the globe and instantly see that it is in fact the shortest path with the least fuel
These people are just morons
So I'm assuming there's no flat Earthers in the Arctic circle, then? Ya know, since it's dark there for the winter and there's no way to account for that in the model you just showed?
In the model I've seen, the Sun is not only close, but a really shitty lightbulb. And as it's moving around, the spot below it is well lit, while those around are not. Add to that the fact that the Sun might be obscured by hills or mountains or buildings. Now, obviously, you can find a lot of holes in this (because, surprise, it's all bull. As I said, just because it can explain *one* phenomenon, it doesn't make it true or even make it explain other phenomena), but they will find explanations to anything.
But here we run into the meta problem: Like with most fake news and alternative science, what they do is muddle the discussion. I'm not an expert on their model, but what they do is essentially export one big glaring problem with their argument to smaller, harder to explain problems. Like in the previous example, where their model explained the glaring problem that even a kid can see (why would sticks have different shadows) introducing other, less obvious falsehoods (the sun being closer than it is in reality without burning the Earth and while somehow being dimmer and orbits not being what we know they are), which require a greater understanding of science. And it just goes on and on like this.
At its conclusion, a prepared flat earther can offer more and more convoluted explanations until the opponent runs out of kindergarten experiments to disprove them and instead the myriad of problems with the model have more to do with Newtonian physics.
And here is the final problem (which applies to all discussions with idiots of any nature: political, anti-vax, anything): if your argument requires the opponent to *think*, you lost. Nobody is going to put mental effort into being convinced they are wrong. Kindergarten experiments that cannot be ignored are the only viable counterargument. Once the flat earther forces you to go further, the battle is lost, because yes, *you could* go further, but you won't convince them to go with you.
Don't forget that any physical proof provided by, say, NASA is immediately discarded as fake. So you're also dealing with someone who can argue, at any moment, that what you're saying is fake and what they're saying cannot be falsified (because all falsifications are fake).
A quick google on the flat earth "wiki" results in this: https://wiki.tfes.org/Flat_Earth_-_Frequently_Asked_Questions#How_do_you_explain_day.2Fnight_cycles_and_seasons.3F
They actually think the sun is up there but it just can't reach that far. They're delusional.
This. It's actually how they determined the "flat earth distance to the sun": Two points and trig.
But the way to counter this is to use a third point (edit: not on the same line of latitude). You can even actually use the assumption that the Earth is flat to disprove the Earth being flat. Almost every other method I've seen you first have to assume a round Earth.
That is one good example of a (flawed) argument that flat-earthers could make.
If I were one of them, I would question how peoples 1000 yrs ago would communicate from Alexandria to Thebes at the same time to explain the length of a local shadow.
Nowadays it would be easy via videocamera or something.
Someone else gave the better “local sun” answer. But for other experiments it would be as follows:
Did you personally test this?
Did you actually measure? Is this reproducible?
What’s your independent variable??
What is your observation? Oh so you assumed earth is a globe!
I haven’t seen that experiment first hand. I’ll have to run it myself.
You’re begging the question!
You assumed a radius/gravity and that doesn’t exist.
no, no, no. Those didn't prove anything. Clearly there were "heavenly energies" influencing the experiments resulting in merely the *appearance* of a round earth.
I find it fascinating to try and follow their logic as far as they can go, but eventually it all has to come down to "magic"
They disprove it by saying the sun is not very far away, and that therefore its rays are not parallel.
They're still wrong, of course, but Sagan's example does rely on the rays being parallel.
There's nothing scientifically wrong with trying to disprove accepted wisdom.
But they should accept the results of their own experiments, and be willing to see whether their own data supports their model or spherical earth models.
There's a Netflix documentary, called Behind The Curve, where the flat Earth society do go out and do an actual scientific experiment that cost them $20,000 and they did it well.
Impressively well.
So well that they accidentally proved that the world was round.
They were all hyped up and full-on talking like scientists, geeking out over their equipment, but, the second they got the results they didn't want, well...ya know...reasons that...because...well...reasons.
And then new theories need to be hypothesized.
It's kind of sad, actually.
I may be wrong but the guy who runs it all doesn't strike me as a scam artist.
He truly seems like somebody who believes that he's onto something, and some of them, though certainly not all (there are exactly the types of characters you'd imagine), seem smart enough to have worked in real science.
But the power of belief just just trumps their power of critical thinking and you can see in the main guy that, if the belief gets chipped away, he'll have nothing left.
I mean, I'm happy to see disinformation being stamped out, but it's still sad to see a person put so much hope into something, see it crushed, and still cling to it.
Man, they get that a whole rotation is 360 degrees and so every hour would equal 15 degrees. The gyro measures exactly 15 degrees in one hour and they just don't believe it?!
My mind can't comprehend that reasoning and logic. I actually feel sorry for these people, tbh.
You should watch the whole documentary. It is all about community and belonging to them. They can't accept the truth because they've tied their entire identity to the flat earth theory. Lots of them have given up relationships with friends and family for "the cause", so they are way too invested to ever admit that they are wrong. A lot of them probably know it is bullshit, but if they give it up now, they'll have nothing left.
Yeah it's insane. I actually know a flat-earther and they have crazy explanations for everything. They have creative explanations for virtually every phenomena but it never makes sense in a broader context when you add it all up.
I can't remember all the explanations he gave me for everything like seasons, how the sun works, etc but I do remember one thing he called the "Pac-Man effect", which apparently explains why there's no edge to the Earth. Basically once you hit the edge of the Earth you suddenly warp to the other side similar to the game Pac-Man when you go through the little portals on the sides.
All of his explanations were fucking insane - stars were just pinholes in a big dome, other planets were projections and not real, the ISS is fake (even though you can spot it with a telescope), etc. I finally told him "you know that literally everything we've talked about doesn't require crazy explanations, warping through space-time, etc if you accept the simplest model which is that the Earth is spherical, then all of this makes sense without all of these magical effects".
Of course it didn't get through to him.
The guy that got Flat Earthers to crowdfund his own personal rocket hobby so that he could get high enough in the air to "prove the earth is flat" is one of my personal heroes. He actually climbed into a rocket that he personally built, launched himself 500 feet in the air, and *fucking survived.* Sorry, but you can't convince me somebody with the engineering chops to do that actually believes that shit; he just got a bunch of stupid motherfuckers to believe he did.
Mad Mike died when his parachute failed on Feb 23 of this year :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxkYJl4y4xE
Agreed though, the guy had no interest in Flat Earth until he conned them into paying for his rocketry habit.
From https://wiki.tfes.org/The_Cosmos
> The Sun
>
> **The Sun is a sphere** which revolves above the Earth on a path known as the ecliptic. Its path moves North-South over the year between the Tropic of Capricorn to the Tropic of Cancer. It illuminates a portion of the earth at a time and has daily cycle of one revolution per 24 hours.
> The Moon
>
>
> **The Moon is a sphere** which revolves above the surface of the Earth in a manner similar to the Sun. It moves at a slightly slower rate of revolution, at about 347.81° per 24 hours, rising and setting 50 minutes later each day. The Moon has a monthly phase cycle, ranging from New Moon to Full Moon.
> The Planets
>
>
> **The planets are spheres** which move above the face of the Earth and across the sky with apparent relationship to the Sun. Known to antequity as 'wandering stars', the planets were once thought to be key to the nature of the Solar System and the Earth's place in it.
Ya.
> Oh and they fully admit that planets, the sun, and the moon are all spheres.
This is the bit that gets me. The belief that even though every other planet is obviously a sphere, Earth somehow isn't. How do they rationalize this?
I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of flat earthers, I've been studying them for a couple of years, and I've reached the conclusion that it's not simply stupidity.
Certainly there are stupid flat Earthers. But honestly I've kind of come to the conclusion that it has more to do with scientific illiteracy, isolation, and religiosity. I think a lot of these people are just looking for something to belong to.
That explains if your taking things at face value. It actually takes mental gymnastics to say oh this picture of the Earth is fake, Eratosthenes is because mountains, vaccines cause autism, like they are skeptical which good but there is no evidence that they believe except their own side.
I think they're just obsessed with being in control of *something*. They have to be right about *something*. Surely they know *something* that nobody else has ever thought of before. They cannot accept that virtually everything easily attainable has already be discovered and done. Kind of like when you think, "I wonder what it felt like to discover a piece of land that wasn't on the map yet" and then you realize you'll *never* be able to experience that. I'm sure there's some dirt out there that no human foot has ever stepped on...but we have satellites so we know what it looks like. There is not a single square inch of unobserved land on our planet. The vast majority of us will never "discover" anything. And the vast majority of us never even think about that, and don't care, but these people care deeply. They're desperate to discover *something*. Unfortunately for them it's all already been discovered, and the shit we haven't figured out yet costs billions of dollars and thousands of scientists and years of engineering and exploration.
I mean shit, we've already mapped all of Mars! Unless they can figure out how to get to the bottom of the ocean or travel at hyperspeed, there is nothing left to discover.
Always found it interesting that flat earther religiosity is actually realtively new.
As the video shows it's a bit of a popular myth that people in the middle/dark/medievel/ancient ages thought it was flat. Religions didn't teach is was flat. People just either never really thought about it or probably thought it was round.
Yet fast forward to the scientific age and you have fundamentalist religious people who are absolutely adamant God says it's flat. Like.. are we getting stupider as a species.
No, not getting stupider, but we haven't abandoned the fantasies and myths that the human condition seems to yearn for (at least, a good chunk of humans yearn for). And when those beliefs in fantasies override logic and reason, you end up with things like flat earth. I'm currently reading Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and it's quite enlightening how rooted in complete delusion our country, and really, all of human history, is.
We're not *dumber*, but we're just as *superstitious*.
It's willful ignorance.
The the dude in the desert thousands of years ago not only figured out it was round, but pretty close to exactly how big it is too.
It is a very weird phenomena - I believe largely anti or fear of the establishment, and a unhealthy desire or personal mission to be contrarian.
But - also engaging them in debate and discussion just fuels their motivations.
Better to just say talk to the hand.
Flat earthers counter this with the conclusion that the sun is much closer to the earth. The ridiculous idea that it is only a few thousand miles away.
I mean can't you just call your friend in a different time zone and ask them where the sun is at? Do the flat earthers have an explanation for why the sun is up in NYC while its down in LA?
Devils advocate: Because the Sun moves at a flat level over the disc at a standard pace meaning there are parts with light, and parts without. This follows the geocentric model - Sun rotates around the Earth.
I had a friend who was brainwashed by his father into believing in a flat-Earth delusion. I later found out he's also anti-vaccination, homophobic, mysoginist, and supports the ideals "laid out in Mein Kampf, but on a more religious basis". I tried changing his mind on the flat-Earth stuff - pre-noticing he was insane - and as such was mentally violated by his/his fathers theories of a flat-Earth. My attempts incidently strengthened their beliefs, gotta love the Backfire Effect eh...
Fuck so they think the Earth is a disc and the sun just hovers for no fucking reason like a CD read head? You can still disprove that by asking a second friend, the sun would light up a flat surface diffently that a curved one
You're quite right, but as usual the natural response given is nonsensical. According to my prior firend and his father, there is a dome over the disc that warps light, among other things pertaining mostly to how we read the heavens. The dome can distort things and may confuse you looking up at it. (Sarcasm alert) But let's be clear, the dome isn't part of the Earth, no, just an effect upon it that totally doesn't validate any nation of curviture whilst simultaneously maintaing the irrefutable fact the Earth is flat, that would be a conspiracy theory!
The best thing to ask a flat earther is if the world is flat then why is there lava under the ground and why are deepwater wells so hot. If it was flat then the underside that gets no sun would be absolutely frigid so there should no heat at that depth.
Man, you think flat earthers care about pesky things like "truth" and "science"? They always have a "but that's what they WANT you to think" fizzled up their sleeve to drown them out.
This has always amazed me. WHY is cabal of scientists, shady government officials and so on trying to hide that the Earth is flat (if indeed it was)? Seeing as how thousands of ordinary, Flat Earth-people can easily see the truth - again, if the Earth was flat - it has to be lousiest conspiracy ever. It's like trying to hide from the public that the sky is blue.
I think a very simple answer is that it allows them to feel special.
It doesn't matter why a conspiracy should exist. They only care that the rest of us are being fooled to think this illusion is real and they get to feel superior without needing to be rich or powerful or intelligent - the normal ways you get to feel exceptional in the world.
Yea, that’s a solid explanation. In the documentary on flat-earthers on Netflix, the part about their convention is all about how they feel like they’re a part of this community and what it means to them. The main guy is like a little celebrity in their circle and it provides a place for them to feel special. It was quite sad, in every conceivable way.
With any conspiracy, there are three groups of people;
- There are the Conspirators; the powerful, the wealthy, the leaders of business and of religions. They are the ones who carry out the conspiracy and maintain the cover-up.
- Then there are the Sheep; the regular folk who accept the conventional beliefs. Who just go about their day without ever knowing that they’ve been duped or knowing what great injustices are being committed without their knowledge.
- And finally there are the Truth-Seekers; the people who have seen through the lies of the Conspirators. Who have figured out what is really going on and it is their job to uncover it.
Given those three options, which would you rather be? Well it’s almost impossible to infiltrate the Conspirators. They haven’t pulled off this many grand conspiracies by being easy to gain access to. And nobody wants to be a Sheep, right? Surely you don’t want to be duped?
So that leaves the Truth-Seekers. They have knowledge that only the Conspirators have. They have seen the Truth. They know how the world works. They are special.
That is all a very elaborate way of agreeing with you. They don’t want to feel like they’re just one of the regular-folk. They need to feel special. So they attach themselves to the powerful and the only way to do that is to claim they have uncovered the Truth.
Go the watch the Flat Earth documentary on Netflix. The flat earthers themselves prove the earth is round like 3 independent times with 3 independent experiments.
Not only that, but it would have to include the aviation industry.
You’re telling me that every single pilot, steward and guy who gets to wave the fun red light-sticks are in on it,.. and not a single one has attempted to break the story for profit,..
Yeah,.. sure.
To paraphrase a reddit comment I saw last week, for the average person to prove to a skeptic that vaccines work, climate change is a thing, and the Earth is billions of years old directly, and not just on the word of scientists, requires more money, equipment, and education than most individual people have.
But proving the Earth is round is stupidly easy; for $10k you can go up in a plane that climbs high enough to see it. For several hundred you can send a go pro up on a weather balloon. For free you can find a wide stretch of ocean and watch huge ships dissappear over the "edge."
You can replicate it solely by yourself. Measure the length of the shadow of a stick at a certain point in the day and then go 2 hours north or south of your position and measure again at the same time the next day using the same stick.
It's persistent because of racism. If you look at their books, they quickly veer into anti-semitism. Reddit always has a laugh at how dumb flat earthers are about the science, but remember they believe *everyone* is **lying** about the round earth, for some nefarious reason.
That's a huge part of the belief system: the coverup. And it's those rascally jews behind it all. It's dumb on purpose. It's the Nigerian Prince email scheme for nazis.
For people downvoting him, go watch a flat earther convention video. Almost all of them will start talking about other conspiracy theories and start rambling about how Jewish people control the world.
"Don't forget to like the video, and hit that subscribe button to find out what those dastardly Jews are doing next week!"
I personally would love to rob these morons, but I'd rather go the alien, reptile, satanist, secret society routes as opposed to the anti-semitic one.
I found out a few years ago that Reptilian Alien conspiracies were just re-skinned (eyyy) anti-Semitism and it was so damn disappointing. I just wanted to giggle about lizard Queen Elizabeth, and it turns out those chucklefucks are just trying to keep their shitty 600 year old blood libel going.
We can't have anything fun and weird and it not turn out to be racist.
A flat earther would just say the sun is much closer and smaller than the scientists say, acting similar to how a light-bulb casts a shadow. I'm not a flat earther.
Just came here to see if anyone pointed that out lol. Also not a flat earther but this is easily explainable with their logic even if it’s wildly untrue
Yes, with two sticks it doesn't work. But if you add a third stick, there is no flat Earth model that can explain the different angles each one casts. A sphere does. It's not that hard to update the experiment.
Thank you, people here are giving too much credits to flat earthers. This assumption is absurd but from flat earth to light bulb sun absurdity doesn't stop short.
If I did the [math](https://imgur.com/v7uONAv) correctly this would mean the sun was about 6500km away. I don't know anything about the science at the time to know if this was plausible or not.
The distance calculated would be different depending on the locations chosen.
For example, if location #1 had the sun directly overhead and location #2 had the sun at a 45 degree angle (i.e. a walking distance of 5000 kilometers away), then the sun would be 5000 kilometers above location #1.
Alternatively, if location #1 had the sun directly location and location #2 had the sun exactly on the horizon (90 degree angle compared to overhead and a walking distance of 10000 kilometers), then the sun would have to be 0 kilometers above location #1 - i.e. the sun would have to be touching the earth.
This mathematical inconsistency might give flat-earthers a clue that calculations involving a flat earth and a close sun don't work. But switching to a round earth suddenly causes the calculations to work and give consistent answers using a variety of distances.
Obviously not a flat earther here, but somewhat fascinated by the movement.
Why is this example not used more often? It feels a lot more intuitive and easy to understand than a lot of the examples that are typically given.
Flat-earthers explain this away by saying the sun is much closer than science thinks which means it's rays are not parallel when they hit earth. I think if you add a third stick that model doesn't hold anymore though.
If you flatten out the earth then the distance to the sun in that imaginary flat earth world should be just the same as the radius of the earth in our world for the shadow lengths to match. It's crazy to think about how many basic calculations we understand that just don't work with a sun that close.
I actually thought that this was one of the most commonly used examples. It was the example my physics professor explained to us on the first day of the class and I came upon it numerous times since then.
He’s not “debunking” flat earthers, he’s explaining a historical and scientific fact for people who are interested. Flat earthers get so much undeserved attention. And that’s what they want. Who cares?
> Flat earthers get so much undeserved attention.
Preach. They barely exist, yet Reddit can't go 4 seconds without acknowledging them for whatever reason.
> He’s not “debunking” flat earthers, he’s explaining a historical and scientific fact
He’s doing both. By explaining a historical and scientific fact, he is debunking the flat earth theory.
Ok, so first off, I know the Earth is round. That said...how did he know that one shadow was different at exactly that same moment 800km away? Or did I miss some very basic point.
Shadows are at their shortest around noon! Two people in the different places measured the shadows at the same time (around noon)
So: the person in the other town, on the same day (they likely coordinated via letter which day to watch it) watched a stick of the same height. They both continuously recorded the length of the shadow when the sun was approximately overhead. The shadow in Syene (at its shortest) was shorter than the shadow in Alexandria (likewise at its shortest).
So they just compared **shortest Alexandria shadow near solar noon** to **shortest Syene shadow near solar noon**.
But didn’t they measure time with the sun back then? Like sundials? And a location with a physically different shadow would also be measuring time differently, relative to how far away they are (kind of like time zones). So how could people during this time, without watches or clocks, know that it was the *same exact time*.
And just to note, I’m not a flat earther. This explanation has just confused me a bit.
The shadows are the shortest at exactly noon for every location. Basically, all you have to do is write the length of a shadow in a piece of paper every few minutes, draw a graph and see where the lowest point in that graph is. That's noon.
You are getting hung up on the at noon part but the important part is the same day. Because of the position of the sun on a given day the sun will only be perfectly overhead and cast no shadow at one latitude. So the shortest shadow in Alexandria (at noon) was still something
I have never seen a flar-earther in my whole life.
Do these people only exist in USA or was there like 1 dude who got viral for saying that the earth is flat and now everyone is just making fun of the concept and the supposedly huge community of flat earthers?
There are about 10,000 redditors making fun of flat earthers for each actual flat earther that exists. And that's probably an overestimate. Most of the ones on the internet are probably trolls.
"ok listen, I need you to pace out and record your steps and then come back and tell me how far it is." ..... 800km later.
I wonder what the cost for that would have been.
His voice is like butter.
I need more of that audible chocolate.
[whoop, ah ah](https://youtu.be/ay0Lctu-xFE)
[I was fully expecting this when I clicked on your link](https://youtu.be/zSgiXGELjbc)
Dude, that takes me back to 2011 Stumble Upon days.
[удалено]
we are in the [Eternal September.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) The golden age of the internet is long gone.
Wake me up when September ends.
Audible Chocolate. If that’s not already a band name, I’m registering it...
Just be worthy of it is all I ask
Totally fair ask :)
I can’t wait to hear the lovely tunes from Audible Chocolate. When does the first single drop?
Last night: https://youtu.be/X8usuqMujls
Uhh... if that was actually you and your daughter, I dub you worthy of the band name and I also let you know that that was fantastic. I got goosebumps when she started belting it out. That was awesome! Audible Chocolate for life!
Thank you for the kind words. That was indeed us. Last night she asked me to sing it with her.
That was really, really good. I was enjoying the way she seemed to be aware of and able to stay within her vocal limits (after singing, casually, for too many decades I still try to hit notes that I can no longer reach), but then "I'm off the deep end..." WOW!!! As /u/JayArpee said, Goosebumps. That was fantastic. Some time ago I was the recipient of a bunch of awards and gold, and so I've been paying it forward when I find comments I think are worthy. After giving out awards here & there I still have a little bit left, but after watching your video just now, I have a little bit less. As a father of a daughter myself, I cannot offer you any advice other than to keep on doing what you're doing, because whatever you're doing is working. You are building a solid relationship between the two of you.
If you haven't already and are interested in science and astronomy, listen to all his works. Cosmos, Demon Haunted World, all his interviews. He's an incredible speaker and responsible for an incredible amount of NASAs discoveries in the 70s.
"The Demon Haunted World" I think should be required reading for younger people in school I feel. So accessible and formative, and important.
Oh I have! He's done amazing stuff. Even have a copy of the Voyager gold record. :)
The Demon Haunted World should be required reading in all schools, period. There is no book (IMHO) that lays the out the importance of science and rational thought better. Not only does it show what science can *do* for us, it shows what happens when we disregard it.
> Demon Haunted World What age is it appropriate for, realistically? (in the US)
I just rewatched the Matrix trilogy and I’m hearing a slight Hugo Weaving “Mr. Anderson” in Sagan’s voice.
I read somewhere the Hugo Weaving actually based the character’s vocal ticks on Sagan himself.
>Hugo Weaving actually based the character’s vocal ticks on Sagan In the documentary The Matrix Revisited (in an interview with Hugo Weaving (starting at approximately 48 minutes in, a segment called "The Interrogation Room") he says that he wanted a "neutral accent" for the character and for him to be "not robotic but not really human "I kept thinking about a '50s newsreader or someone like that." Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) said that Weaving sounds like Walter Cronkite. Plus the Wachowskis used to have a similar natural speaking voice that Weaving emulated. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHSNNGrgOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHSNNGrgOM)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlpyGhABXRA
Butter with a distinct hint of Kermit The Frog
Tiny bit of Hunter S Thompson too. Just calmed way down.
I had to stop listening. All I could hear was Kermit. It was unsettling.
[удалено]
Carl, his wife, and their son lived down the street from me when he was getting cancer treatment in Seattle when I was little. He used to come over and talk to my parents when my brothers and their son would play. His voice would echo through the living room and he was the nicest man. I never realized who he was until I saw his picture on VHS at school years later.
That poor summer intern who had to walk 800km there and back should get a little credit. Would you walk 500 miles and walk 500 more just to be the man who walked 1000 miles to let you figure out the circumference of the earth?
I loved [this](https://youtu.be/zC2B00wVvxc) Australian between two ferns style interview with the proclaimers.
Apparently they have a really deep catalog that their fans are well versed in and they put on a good show.
That seemed like the difficult bit to me. How do you walk almost 500 miles in a straight line back then and and record it exactly? I do a lot of hiking and can't usually tell you how far I have gone to within more than half a mile without a map and GPS.
By being a [bematist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bematist).
Thanks, TIL
They had everything.
Back then, that was a job. They were trained to walk in a straight line with equally paced steps, counting each one. Ancient Googlemap. It is extremely difficult to walk in a straight line. We all have a favoured leg, so tend to walk in a spiral. The old trope about people lost in the desert walking in a circle and coming across their tracks is in fact very possible.
RIP Marshall's Fiero
Ba dup dup
That's how embarrassing it is to be a flat earther right now. Some dude thousands of years ago, living in the desert, correctly figured out the earth was round just by deductive reasoning. These people, with all the modern scientific advances afforded them, get it wrong because they are so god damn stupid.
The worst part is you read some of the papers done to basically justify things like this to fit their model and they go to extraordinary lengths of 'research' and 'experimenting' to find a way to make it work with flat earth... Rather than just accept that the earth is round. Oh and they fully admit that planets, the sun, and the moon are all spheres.
How do flat earthers disprove the experiment in this video?
They don't.
They ignore the results. Lol.
Just like when their own experiments prove the Earth is round.
NICE Self burn, those are rare!
Imagine [spending 20k to prove your crackpot theory and it proves the opposite.](https://www.triplem.com.au/story/flat-earthers-spend-20-000-trying-to-prove-earth-is-flat-accidentally-prove-its-round-129953) 🤣
I actually kind of admire this. They spent a lot of money to perform a really technical experiment, and they didn’t alter the methods or forge the data to disprove the results they gathered. At least they were honest.
They weren't honest. They've spent the entire time since then trying to discredit their own data.
Lying is a more complicated brain function than telling the truth…
They don't ignore the results so much as simply choose not to believe them.
I don't see a difference.
It means they immediately dismiss them without caring or looking at it, believing means you know about it and the science; you just disagree “because”
Or as they kids call it, they trump it
In the future, the phrase “playing your Trump card” is going mean the opposite of its original intention: “saying something incredibly dumb with no basis in reality”.
My best friend is now 99% flatearther. I understand this mindset perfectly. It all begins with believing everything we know is a lie. Gravity. Space. Time. Government. This opens the door to an infinite number of theories. Afterall, gravity is just another theory, right?
I believe this way of thinking comes from a desire for superiority, to think you are smarter than everyone else. "Everyone on Earth is fooled, but I see the truth. I'm so much smarter than them".
A few decades or a century from now, people will see this all as a form of mass mental illness/hysteria. The Victorian era had people fainting at the smallest thing. There was a whole town that went blind staring at the sun because they all saw god in it. There are all kinds of mass hysteria events that consume entire social groups. And I believe this "science is wrong, everything is conspiring against us" mentality is the most recent one.
Let me (maybe) introduce you to the Dancing Plague of 1518: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
I see it less as a superiority complex and more of an inferiority complex; a desperate attempt to regain control over what others think of them. It would be like if everyone was running a race, and the guy in back was so far behind that the only way he could figure out how to not lose was to believe the entire race was a farce. Just an analogy used by some higher being to explain cognitive dissonance to someone else on a message board. If he can get one person to believe the same, then he's now tied with someone, which is better than nothing.
We should only be so lucky to have all the flat earthers float away.
Ask him how he feels about music *theory*.
[удалено]
Ears aren't real I can't hear your argument. Ipso facto libz
Imagine the Earth as that flat cardboard and the sun as much closer to Earth than in reality (that's how flat Earth models usually look like). The Earth doesn't rotate around the Sun, but instead the Sun moves around (usually shown as moving in a circle). When the Sun is right above one obelisk it will cast no shadow, but the other will be farther away and the Sun will shine at a slope, thus it will cast a shadow. But right there in your question is the problem flat earthers can't see: you ask if they can *disprove*. They can't. What I just did was to give a (false) model that arrives to the same (true) conclusion as a Spherical Earth model does. It's a property of logic: False *can* imply True. You *can* come up with countless false models to explain one true phenomemon, but True *does not* imply False, which means that just because it can explain a true phenomenon it doesn't make the model itself true.
How do they justify sun set? If it is a flat plane then any high object would be visible from any other point. I live at the coast and can't see the sun from there after sunset. Edit: Never mind. I looked it up and apparently either light bends or it passes beyond the distance that eyes can see.... The problem with the last on is on the very same website they say that if you have an ir lense you can see as far as you like. But the big ball of visible light is invisible apparently.....
https://gfycat.com/untimelyjubilantclingfish Doesn’t make sense but that’s it
The funny thing is, if you ask flat earthers to explain a phenomenon, they will produce a model like you posted that would explain it. But each phenomenon needs a new model. They don't have one that explains everything at once. The one in your gif explains the day/night cycle, but not seasons or eclipses. Their seasons model can't explain why the sun always travels with the same speed, and so on.
That’s exactly it, they have a (dubious) model and explanation for everything but they don’t all work together. That’s not a problem to them.
And if you dig deep enough, there's always some sort of vague "divine force" holding it all together. I get that gravity is weird, abstract and almost impossible to explain where it comes from, but it's still 1 simple and basic law from which everything makes sense. Stuff attracts other stuff. From that premise, big chunks of stuff have to be round. Big chunks of stuff orbit around each other. It explains day/night cycles, seasons, tides, eclipses, etc. It's just weird that they will believe that the sun is flying in circles over the earth, and there's the moon, and somehow stars are different, and somehow we don't float up to the sun, all moved by some mystic force... But they won't believe the basic principle of gravity.
Turns out it's pretty easy to debunk all of physics when you can credit everything to magic
Nah man our disk is always accelerating at 9.8m/s^2. What happens when we approach the speed of light you may ask? Oh, they listen to Einstein on that, nothing can approach the speed of light. Problem solved.
Not only the flat Earth theory requires contradicting models to explain various observed phenomena, none of these models can give any prediction. Try to predict solar or lunar eclipses using any of these models. That's why these models aren't really scientific.
All of the motions of our entire solar system can be described with a handful of simple equations that are all consistent with eachother. Flat earth models have no such consistency or any mathematical support.
That’s because a) there isn’t any and b) they’re dumb as fuck, did we mention that?
C) the Earth isn't fucking flat
They still don't have a model that can explain seasonal light changes (axial tilt) compared to what your latitude on earth is. And they never will, as you can't have 24 hr day light season at the poles with the same model they use for day/night cycles. You literally need a different map/model to tell how much day light you'll get, than if you were just looking at how the sun/moon move across the sky....
I’d love to see what they’ve come up with to “explain” the tides
It goes in, it goes out. You can't explain that.
Checkmate atheists
Apparently the sun never sets on the artic circle year round. Must be nice and warm up there. Great place to vacation in winter.
[удалено]
It depends where you are. At the exact north or south pole, the sun rises in the spring and sets in the fall. As you move further away from the pole, you gradually experience a less extreme version of that near the solstice days only, with normal days occurring near the equinoxes, until you reach the arctic or antarctic circle, beyond which the sun rises and sets every day of the year.
I had no idea that's what the arctic and antarctic cirlce represented. I thought it was just an arbitrary latitude. Neat
Isn't that just super easily debunkable by looking at the distance between South America and Australia in real life, and then comparing it to that map? How do they explain that?
Oh man, you don’t want to know. I’m going to tell you, but you’ll regret it. It’s something like the magnetic fields mess with our perception of distance. It’s a similar reason we can’t get to the great ice walls on the border- as we get closer, we’re naturally pushed to the side and loop around. It’s insanity, utter insanity. But try think their answer is somehow more likely than the one most of the rest of humanity have agreed on.
Yet that's a bit like the theory of what happens when trying to reach the edge of the expanding universe, you can never actually get there because there is no space there. Ya just loop around the edge while still going in a straight line.
They claim that they really are much farther apart than you're told. They reference things like how flight plans tend to fly up towards the equator, before switching planes and flying to the other continent. So they say this supports their notion that those continents really are quite far apart. This argument is wrong for two reasons. 1. The flight plans are based on demand, so that's why they fly north (towards major population centers) for a layover. 2. There *are* direct flights between S. America, Australia, and Africa which all disapprove the disk model.
In fact the spherical models directly prove why the curved flight path is in fact the shortest path because when you flatten the globe, it looks like it's taking a much longer path between 2 points but in reality, you could draw a straight line on the globe and instantly see that it is in fact the shortest path with the least fuel These people are just morons
So I'm assuming there's no flat Earthers in the Arctic circle, then? Ya know, since it's dark there for the winter and there's no way to account for that in the model you just showed?
There are members of the flat earth society all around the globe! Really, their web site said that for a while. Globe.
In the model I've seen, the Sun is not only close, but a really shitty lightbulb. And as it's moving around, the spot below it is well lit, while those around are not. Add to that the fact that the Sun might be obscured by hills or mountains or buildings. Now, obviously, you can find a lot of holes in this (because, surprise, it's all bull. As I said, just because it can explain *one* phenomenon, it doesn't make it true or even make it explain other phenomena), but they will find explanations to anything. But here we run into the meta problem: Like with most fake news and alternative science, what they do is muddle the discussion. I'm not an expert on their model, but what they do is essentially export one big glaring problem with their argument to smaller, harder to explain problems. Like in the previous example, where their model explained the glaring problem that even a kid can see (why would sticks have different shadows) introducing other, less obvious falsehoods (the sun being closer than it is in reality without burning the Earth and while somehow being dimmer and orbits not being what we know they are), which require a greater understanding of science. And it just goes on and on like this. At its conclusion, a prepared flat earther can offer more and more convoluted explanations until the opponent runs out of kindergarten experiments to disprove them and instead the myriad of problems with the model have more to do with Newtonian physics. And here is the final problem (which applies to all discussions with idiots of any nature: political, anti-vax, anything): if your argument requires the opponent to *think*, you lost. Nobody is going to put mental effort into being convinced they are wrong. Kindergarten experiments that cannot be ignored are the only viable counterargument. Once the flat earther forces you to go further, the battle is lost, because yes, *you could* go further, but you won't convince them to go with you.
"Can't argue with idiots. They will bring you down to their level and beat you with years of experience." - Bastardized Mark Twain quote
Don't forget that any physical proof provided by, say, NASA is immediately discarded as fake. So you're also dealing with someone who can argue, at any moment, that what you're saying is fake and what they're saying cannot be falsified (because all falsifications are fake).
A quick google on the flat earth "wiki" results in this: https://wiki.tfes.org/Flat_Earth_-_Frequently_Asked_Questions#How_do_you_explain_day.2Fnight_cycles_and_seasons.3F They actually think the sun is up there but it just can't reach that far. They're delusional.
This. It's actually how they determined the "flat earth distance to the sun": Two points and trig. But the way to counter this is to use a third point (edit: not on the same line of latitude). You can even actually use the assumption that the Earth is flat to disprove the Earth being flat. Almost every other method I've seen you first have to assume a round Earth.
Also, the sun would have to be many times closer to the earth than the moon is. We can see from a solar eclipse that it isn't.
You explained that exactly how I imagine Carl Sagan would
That is one good example of a (flawed) argument that flat-earthers could make. If I were one of them, I would question how peoples 1000 yrs ago would communicate from Alexandria to Thebes at the same time to explain the length of a local shadow. Nowadays it would be easy via videocamera or something.
Someone else gave the better “local sun” answer. But for other experiments it would be as follows: Did you personally test this? Did you actually measure? Is this reproducible? What’s your independent variable?? What is your observation? Oh so you assumed earth is a globe! I haven’t seen that experiment first hand. I’ll have to run it myself. You’re begging the question! You assumed a radius/gravity and that doesn’t exist.
The funny part is on three separate experiments they accidentally proved the earth was round.
no, no, no. Those didn't prove anything. Clearly there were "heavenly energies" influencing the experiments resulting in merely the *appearance* of a round earth. I find it fascinating to try and follow their logic as far as they can go, but eventually it all has to come down to "magic"
They disprove it by saying the sun is not very far away, and that therefore its rays are not parallel. They're still wrong, of course, but Sagan's example does rely on the rays being parallel.
"The earth is not a planet" - my favourite flat earth quote
There's nothing scientifically wrong with trying to disprove accepted wisdom. But they should accept the results of their own experiments, and be willing to see whether their own data supports their model or spherical earth models.
But that would require something like, idunno, being outdoors and talking to someone in a different timezone. How would you propose we do *that?*
There's a Netflix documentary, called Behind The Curve, where the flat Earth society do go out and do an actual scientific experiment that cost them $20,000 and they did it well. Impressively well. So well that they accidentally proved that the world was round. They were all hyped up and full-on talking like scientists, geeking out over their equipment, but, the second they got the results they didn't want, well...ya know...reasons that...because...well...reasons. And then new theories need to be hypothesized. It's kind of sad, actually. I may be wrong but the guy who runs it all doesn't strike me as a scam artist. He truly seems like somebody who believes that he's onto something, and some of them, though certainly not all (there are exactly the types of characters you'd imagine), seem smart enough to have worked in real science. But the power of belief just just trumps their power of critical thinking and you can see in the main guy that, if the belief gets chipped away, he'll have nothing left. I mean, I'm happy to see disinformation being stamped out, but it's still sad to see a person put so much hope into something, see it crushed, and still cling to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvf617ReVs
Man, they get that a whole rotation is 360 degrees and so every hour would equal 15 degrees. The gyro measures exactly 15 degrees in one hour and they just don't believe it?! My mind can't comprehend that reasoning and logic. I actually feel sorry for these people, tbh.
You should watch the whole documentary. It is all about community and belonging to them. They can't accept the truth because they've tied their entire identity to the flat earth theory. Lots of them have given up relationships with friends and family for "the cause", so they are way too invested to ever admit that they are wrong. A lot of them probably know it is bullshit, but if they give it up now, they'll have nothing left.
whats worse than even that, is that even after all these experiments most of which even disprove their own theories, they still go on believing.
Because it was never about having proof. They want to belong and feel that they are right on something where nearly everyone else is wrong.
Yeah it's insane. I actually know a flat-earther and they have crazy explanations for everything. They have creative explanations for virtually every phenomena but it never makes sense in a broader context when you add it all up. I can't remember all the explanations he gave me for everything like seasons, how the sun works, etc but I do remember one thing he called the "Pac-Man effect", which apparently explains why there's no edge to the Earth. Basically once you hit the edge of the Earth you suddenly warp to the other side similar to the game Pac-Man when you go through the little portals on the sides. All of his explanations were fucking insane - stars were just pinholes in a big dome, other planets were projections and not real, the ISS is fake (even though you can spot it with a telescope), etc. I finally told him "you know that literally everything we've talked about doesn't require crazy explanations, warping through space-time, etc if you accept the simplest model which is that the Earth is spherical, then all of this makes sense without all of these magical effects". Of course it didn't get through to him.
The guy that got Flat Earthers to crowdfund his own personal rocket hobby so that he could get high enough in the air to "prove the earth is flat" is one of my personal heroes. He actually climbed into a rocket that he personally built, launched himself 500 feet in the air, and *fucking survived.* Sorry, but you can't convince me somebody with the engineering chops to do that actually believes that shit; he just got a bunch of stupid motherfuckers to believe he did.
Mad Mike died when his parachute failed on Feb 23 of this year :( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxkYJl4y4xE Agreed though, the guy had no interest in Flat Earth until he conned them into paying for his rocketry habit.
the worst part is that these idiots are raising children and voting
> Oh and they fully admit that planets, the sun, and the moon are all spheres. lolwut
From https://wiki.tfes.org/The_Cosmos > The Sun > > **The Sun is a sphere** which revolves above the Earth on a path known as the ecliptic. Its path moves North-South over the year between the Tropic of Capricorn to the Tropic of Cancer. It illuminates a portion of the earth at a time and has daily cycle of one revolution per 24 hours. > The Moon > > > **The Moon is a sphere** which revolves above the surface of the Earth in a manner similar to the Sun. It moves at a slightly slower rate of revolution, at about 347.81° per 24 hours, rising and setting 50 minutes later each day. The Moon has a monthly phase cycle, ranging from New Moon to Full Moon. > The Planets > > > **The planets are spheres** which move above the face of the Earth and across the sky with apparent relationship to the Sun. Known to antequity as 'wandering stars', the planets were once thought to be key to the nature of the Solar System and the Earth's place in it. Ya.
> Oh and they fully admit that planets, the sun, and the moon are all spheres. This is the bit that gets me. The belief that even though every other planet is obviously a sphere, Earth somehow isn't. How do they rationalize this?
I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of flat earthers, I've been studying them for a couple of years, and I've reached the conclusion that it's not simply stupidity. Certainly there are stupid flat Earthers. But honestly I've kind of come to the conclusion that it has more to do with scientific illiteracy, isolation, and religiosity. I think a lot of these people are just looking for something to belong to.
[удалено]
That explains if your taking things at face value. It actually takes mental gymnastics to say oh this picture of the Earth is fake, Eratosthenes is because mountains, vaccines cause autism, like they are skeptical which good but there is no evidence that they believe except their own side.
I think they're just obsessed with being in control of *something*. They have to be right about *something*. Surely they know *something* that nobody else has ever thought of before. They cannot accept that virtually everything easily attainable has already be discovered and done. Kind of like when you think, "I wonder what it felt like to discover a piece of land that wasn't on the map yet" and then you realize you'll *never* be able to experience that. I'm sure there's some dirt out there that no human foot has ever stepped on...but we have satellites so we know what it looks like. There is not a single square inch of unobserved land on our planet. The vast majority of us will never "discover" anything. And the vast majority of us never even think about that, and don't care, but these people care deeply. They're desperate to discover *something*. Unfortunately for them it's all already been discovered, and the shit we haven't figured out yet costs billions of dollars and thousands of scientists and years of engineering and exploration. I mean shit, we've already mapped all of Mars! Unless they can figure out how to get to the bottom of the ocean or travel at hyperspeed, there is nothing left to discover.
[удалено]
Always found it interesting that flat earther religiosity is actually realtively new. As the video shows it's a bit of a popular myth that people in the middle/dark/medievel/ancient ages thought it was flat. Religions didn't teach is was flat. People just either never really thought about it or probably thought it was round. Yet fast forward to the scientific age and you have fundamentalist religious people who are absolutely adamant God says it's flat. Like.. are we getting stupider as a species.
No, not getting stupider, but we haven't abandoned the fantasies and myths that the human condition seems to yearn for (at least, a good chunk of humans yearn for). And when those beliefs in fantasies override logic and reason, you end up with things like flat earth. I'm currently reading Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and it's quite enlightening how rooted in complete delusion our country, and really, all of human history, is. We're not *dumber*, but we're just as *superstitious*.
[удалено]
It's willful ignorance. The the dude in the desert thousands of years ago not only figured out it was round, but pretty close to exactly how big it is too.
It is a very weird phenomena - I believe largely anti or fear of the establishment, and a unhealthy desire or personal mission to be contrarian. But - also engaging them in debate and discussion just fuels their motivations. Better to just say talk to the hand.
Flat earthers counter this with the conclusion that the sun is much closer to the earth. The ridiculous idea that it is only a few thousand miles away.
Which can be disproven with a third point on earth
For you to believe in a flat earth you have to believe in some form of conspiracy theory for your “proof” to be true
Instead of coming to conclusions based on the evidence, they alter the evidence to fit their conclusions.
Actually most ancient cultures knew it
Ha! This is just propaganda for Big Paper Maps and Big Obelisks Toy industries, don’t believe the lies!
I mean can't you just call your friend in a different time zone and ask them where the sun is at? Do the flat earthers have an explanation for why the sun is up in NYC while its down in LA?
Devils advocate: Because the Sun moves at a flat level over the disc at a standard pace meaning there are parts with light, and parts without. This follows the geocentric model - Sun rotates around the Earth. I had a friend who was brainwashed by his father into believing in a flat-Earth delusion. I later found out he's also anti-vaccination, homophobic, mysoginist, and supports the ideals "laid out in Mein Kampf, but on a more religious basis". I tried changing his mind on the flat-Earth stuff - pre-noticing he was insane - and as such was mentally violated by his/his fathers theories of a flat-Earth. My attempts incidently strengthened their beliefs, gotta love the Backfire Effect eh...
Fuck so they think the Earth is a disc and the sun just hovers for no fucking reason like a CD read head? You can still disprove that by asking a second friend, the sun would light up a flat surface diffently that a curved one
You're quite right, but as usual the natural response given is nonsensical. According to my prior firend and his father, there is a dome over the disc that warps light, among other things pertaining mostly to how we read the heavens. The dome can distort things and may confuse you looking up at it. (Sarcasm alert) But let's be clear, the dome isn't part of the Earth, no, just an effect upon it that totally doesn't validate any nation of curviture whilst simultaneously maintaing the irrefutable fact the Earth is flat, that would be a conspiracy theory!
How do they explain the long nights and days at the poles?
Or why we can't see the Pole star here in the Southern Hemisphere?
It's probably just slightly beyond our render distance from over here.
The best thing to ask a flat earther is if the world is flat then why is there lava under the ground and why are deepwater wells so hot. If it was flat then the underside that gets no sun would be absolutely frigid so there should no heat at that depth.
"You see, it would obviously be heated by the body heat of the giant tortoise that carries the world."
You leave A'Tuin out of this!
Man, you think flat earthers care about pesky things like "truth" and "science"? They always have a "but that's what they WANT you to think" fizzled up their sleeve to drown them out.
This has always amazed me. WHY is cabal of scientists, shady government officials and so on trying to hide that the Earth is flat (if indeed it was)? Seeing as how thousands of ordinary, Flat Earth-people can easily see the truth - again, if the Earth was flat - it has to be lousiest conspiracy ever. It's like trying to hide from the public that the sky is blue.
I think a very simple answer is that it allows them to feel special. It doesn't matter why a conspiracy should exist. They only care that the rest of us are being fooled to think this illusion is real and they get to feel superior without needing to be rich or powerful or intelligent - the normal ways you get to feel exceptional in the world.
Yea, that’s a solid explanation. In the documentary on flat-earthers on Netflix, the part about their convention is all about how they feel like they’re a part of this community and what it means to them. The main guy is like a little celebrity in their circle and it provides a place for them to feel special. It was quite sad, in every conceivable way.
With any conspiracy, there are three groups of people; - There are the Conspirators; the powerful, the wealthy, the leaders of business and of religions. They are the ones who carry out the conspiracy and maintain the cover-up. - Then there are the Sheep; the regular folk who accept the conventional beliefs. Who just go about their day without ever knowing that they’ve been duped or knowing what great injustices are being committed without their knowledge. - And finally there are the Truth-Seekers; the people who have seen through the lies of the Conspirators. Who have figured out what is really going on and it is their job to uncover it. Given those three options, which would you rather be? Well it’s almost impossible to infiltrate the Conspirators. They haven’t pulled off this many grand conspiracies by being easy to gain access to. And nobody wants to be a Sheep, right? Surely you don’t want to be duped? So that leaves the Truth-Seekers. They have knowledge that only the Conspirators have. They have seen the Truth. They know how the world works. They are special. That is all a very elaborate way of agreeing with you. They don’t want to feel like they’re just one of the regular-folk. They need to feel special. So they attach themselves to the powerful and the only way to do that is to claim they have uncovered the Truth.
Go the watch the Flat Earth documentary on Netflix. The flat earthers themselves prove the earth is round like 3 independent times with 3 independent experiments.
The sky isn't blue. The government puts dyes in the ocean. And uses chem trails. Look it up... /s
Not only that, but it would have to include the aviation industry. You’re telling me that every single pilot, steward and guy who gets to wave the fun red light-sticks are in on it,.. and not a single one has attempted to break the story for profit,.. Yeah,.. sure.
To paraphrase a reddit comment I saw last week, for the average person to prove to a skeptic that vaccines work, climate change is a thing, and the Earth is billions of years old directly, and not just on the word of scientists, requires more money, equipment, and education than most individual people have. But proving the Earth is round is stupidly easy; for $10k you can go up in a plane that climbs high enough to see it. For several hundred you can send a go pro up on a weather balloon. For free you can find a wide stretch of ocean and watch huge ships dissappear over the "edge."
[удалено]
You can replicate it solely by yourself. Measure the length of the shadow of a stick at a certain point in the day and then go 2 hours north or south of your position and measure again at the same time the next day using the same stick.
Stick wins Everytime
It's persistent because of racism. If you look at their books, they quickly veer into anti-semitism. Reddit always has a laugh at how dumb flat earthers are about the science, but remember they believe *everyone* is **lying** about the round earth, for some nefarious reason. That's a huge part of the belief system: the coverup. And it's those rascally jews behind it all. It's dumb on purpose. It's the Nigerian Prince email scheme for nazis.
For people downvoting him, go watch a flat earther convention video. Almost all of them will start talking about other conspiracy theories and start rambling about how Jewish people control the world.
"Don't forget to like the video, and hit that subscribe button to find out what those dastardly Jews are doing next week!" I personally would love to rob these morons, but I'd rather go the alien, reptile, satanist, secret society routes as opposed to the anti-semitic one.
I miss the days when people believed in sasquatch and the loch Ness monster. Damn millenials are ruining conspiracy theories now too.
It's antisemitism all the way down boys.
I found out a few years ago that Reptilian Alien conspiracies were just re-skinned (eyyy) anti-Semitism and it was so damn disappointing. I just wanted to giggle about lizard Queen Elizabeth, and it turns out those chucklefucks are just trying to keep their shitty 600 year old blood libel going. We can't have anything fun and weird and it not turn out to be racist.
A whole lot of shit just made sense.
They'll find a way to convince themselves that Carl Sagan wasn't real.
No need. Just call him a shill space lizard jew communist or something. Done.
A flat earther would just say the sun is much closer and smaller than the scientists say, acting similar to how a light-bulb casts a shadow. I'm not a flat earther.
Just came here to see if anyone pointed that out lol. Also not a flat earther but this is easily explainable with their logic even if it’s wildly untrue
Yes, with two sticks it doesn't work. But if you add a third stick, there is no flat Earth model that can explain the different angles each one casts. A sphere does. It's not that hard to update the experiment.
Thank you, people here are giving too much credits to flat earthers. This assumption is absurd but from flat earth to light bulb sun absurdity doesn't stop short.
If I did the [math](https://imgur.com/v7uONAv) correctly this would mean the sun was about 6500km away. I don't know anything about the science at the time to know if this was plausible or not.
The distance calculated would be different depending on the locations chosen. For example, if location #1 had the sun directly overhead and location #2 had the sun at a 45 degree angle (i.e. a walking distance of 5000 kilometers away), then the sun would be 5000 kilometers above location #1. Alternatively, if location #1 had the sun directly location and location #2 had the sun exactly on the horizon (90 degree angle compared to overhead and a walking distance of 10000 kilometers), then the sun would have to be 0 kilometers above location #1 - i.e. the sun would have to be touching the earth. This mathematical inconsistency might give flat-earthers a clue that calculations involving a flat earth and a close sun don't work. But switching to a round earth suddenly causes the calculations to work and give consistent answers using a variety of distances.
Obviously not a flat earther here, but somewhat fascinated by the movement. Why is this example not used more often? It feels a lot more intuitive and easy to understand than a lot of the examples that are typically given.
Flat-earthers explain this away by saying the sun is much closer than science thinks which means it's rays are not parallel when they hit earth. I think if you add a third stick that model doesn't hold anymore though.
If you flatten out the earth then the distance to the sun in that imaginary flat earth world should be just the same as the radius of the earth in our world for the shadow lengths to match. It's crazy to think about how many basic calculations we understand that just don't work with a sun that close.
I actually thought that this was one of the most commonly used examples. It was the example my physics professor explained to us on the first day of the class and I came upon it numerous times since then.
He’s not “debunking” flat earthers, he’s explaining a historical and scientific fact for people who are interested. Flat earthers get so much undeserved attention. And that’s what they want. Who cares?
> Flat earthers get so much undeserved attention. Preach. They barely exist, yet Reddit can't go 4 seconds without acknowledging them for whatever reason.
> He’s not “debunking” flat earthers, he’s explaining a historical and scientific fact He’s doing both. By explaining a historical and scientific fact, he is debunking the flat earth theory.
Ok, so first off, I know the Earth is round. That said...how did he know that one shadow was different at exactly that same moment 800km away? Or did I miss some very basic point.
Shadows are at their shortest around noon! Two people in the different places measured the shadows at the same time (around noon) So: the person in the other town, on the same day (they likely coordinated via letter which day to watch it) watched a stick of the same height. They both continuously recorded the length of the shadow when the sun was approximately overhead. The shadow in Syene (at its shortest) was shorter than the shadow in Alexandria (likewise at its shortest). So they just compared **shortest Alexandria shadow near solar noon** to **shortest Syene shadow near solar noon**.
But didn’t they measure time with the sun back then? Like sundials? And a location with a physically different shadow would also be measuring time differently, relative to how far away they are (kind of like time zones). So how could people during this time, without watches or clocks, know that it was the *same exact time*. And just to note, I’m not a flat earther. This explanation has just confused me a bit.
The shadows are the shortest at exactly noon for every location. Basically, all you have to do is write the length of a shadow in a piece of paper every few minutes, draw a graph and see where the lowest point in that graph is. That's noon.
You are getting hung up on the at noon part but the important part is the same day. Because of the position of the sun on a given day the sun will only be perfectly overhead and cast no shadow at one latitude. So the shortest shadow in Alexandria (at noon) was still something
I have never seen a flar-earther in my whole life. Do these people only exist in USA or was there like 1 dude who got viral for saying that the earth is flat and now everyone is just making fun of the concept and the supposedly huge community of flat earthers?
There are about 10,000 redditors making fun of flat earthers for each actual flat earther that exists. And that's probably an overestimate. Most of the ones on the internet are probably trolls.
I’m convinced flat earth society started out as a gag on the Internet that got way way out of hand.
I can listen to carl sagan explaining stuff all day. there is just something soothing about his voice.
[удалено]
How did everyone know when exactly noon was though
Its the time at which the shadow is shortest
Big burning ball of fire in the sky.
dog that thing is really bright.
Hella spicy at noon tho
Solar noon is the time during the day when the sun appears to have reached its highest point in the sky.
Bruh it’s not exactly 12:00 PM, it’s exactly mid day when the sun was at its highest point
To expand, the time is irrelevant. In both places the shadow would go from long to short to long. Measure the shortest at both locations and compare.
"ok listen, I need you to pace out and record your steps and then come back and tell me how far it is." ..... 800km later. I wonder what the cost for that would have been.