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I remember figuring out on my own that the Earth is spherical when I was 6 years old and I witnessed big ships disappearing from the bottom up over the horizon.
The Flat Earth “Theory” is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard because of the simple fact that if it turned out to be true, if NASA came out and said “Eyup, we were bullshitting everyone the whole time.”
Not a damn thing about my life would change.
There’s no “The Secret” level nonsense where because this one thing is true I am suddenly empowered to free myself from the chains of society or reality. There’s no “Ah, but your honor I’m a Sovereign Citizen, that means actually the murder I comitteded isn’t illegal and you owe me a check for 69 Billion Dollars as punishment for wasting my time”
There’s not a damn thing to be gained from it.
Technically the Earth is not spherical… it’s an oblate spheroid.
Close enough
Spheroids are definitively spherical, otherwise they wouldn’t call them that.
Not true. For instance, a humanoid is specifically something that is not human, but human-like. An oval is not a circle, but maybe it’s a “circloid”.
Technically it’s a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients.
My favorite type of sphere.
Sometimes I wonder why this flat earth stuff refuses to go away and I don’t even think it lingers because the flat earthers keep bringing it up. I think really it’s just rage bait trying to get you mad about a group of people who, virtually, admit they have no critical thinking skills.
I remember reading this article on how this group of flat earthers had pooled together to buy this incredibly expensive device, that had been laser calibrated. I think I recall being some sort of gyroscope that, if the planet was truly a sphere, would record on its inclination the degrees it would shift in order to maintain perfectly balance . The group had also did the math and they had reached a value that would be expected to be measured if the Earth was truly a sphere but it was immediatly rendered impossible because the device would never record such deviation as the Earth was flat.
Can you guess where this is going?
The device measured the exact figure the group had calculated. With no margin of error. And repeating the experiment only returned the exact same result. They had, by their own standard, reached proof the Earth was not flat.
Their conclusion?
The device had been sabotaged.
Sometimes I wonder why this flat earth stuff refuses to go away
Because for these people it is more about inflating their own ego. They know what they believe is wrong, but they like to think they are better by going against the grain. It is about having the notion of “I know something that you don’t” which they imply to others by pushing the flat earth nonsense.
Alright so hear me out you guys, what if the whole thing was just a long-running prank? Nobody actually believes the earth is flat, but the Flat Earth Society is like the mafia - once you’re in, you’re in for life. And they have a Fight Club sign right at the entrance to the clubhouse so everybody knows they have to play it cool when outsiders are around.
I think it’s genuinely just people trying to make money at the top. They don’t believe a word they say, but they keep making money from idiots so they keep doing it.
For a certain group of people, science and life have gotten too complicated, and they want to feel special with special knowledge (often coupled with a distorted god belief), so they fall in the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
And flat earth is actually one of the more dangerous conspiracy theories too, according to this chart, as it is usually not the only conspiracy these people believe in.
I love how UFOs are more grounded in reality than flat Earth. Lol
That’s because they come from inside the Hollow Earth. Which you’d know already if you’d done your own research.
dangerous
It killed that guy with the home built rocket
It’s in the top category on that site, which is also all antisemitic — I haven’t noticed a religious side to flat earth believers (aside from their belief in their idea of the shape of the planet)
I’ve heard quite a few flat earthers who claim that “they” are hiding god by hiding the true shape of the earth (according to the flat earthers obviously)
According to them the Bible tells them the world is flat and there’s a dome separating the waters above from the waters below.
As with many things, the underlying problem creating conspiracy theorists is the mediocre high school dropouts need to feel superior to others in a world that values you for your skills and education. American Psychological Association: “The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.”
If you can’t develop a sense of pride by working hard to create actual merit, why not just fake it by grouping together with a bunch of other flunkies to be like “actually, we’re all better than you, because you’re all just sheep who believe what the government tells you!”
Bonus points if you combine this line of thinking with some other forms of discrimination, but even traditionally marginalized groups can fall prey to this trap. I’m not sure how to solve it, perhaps a stronger social safety net would prevent people from losing their grip on reality just to feel safe from perceived threats. Then again to quite a few people “black people” and “women” and “people from other countries” and “trans people” are threats so perhaps nothing we do can make them feel safe enough to stop being annoying online
What do Eratosthenes’ proclivities have to do with astronomy
TFE was a breaking point for the cult of the insane, it did some good, but they’re all clearly insane.
I hold fast with my position in extremist satire that anyone who thinks this way should simply be terminated for the good of our species, call it eugenics if you want, i call it culling the catastrophe. (again, this is satire)
There is literally so much evidence that anyone can perceive with their own eyes if they want to. You can easily observe the curvature of the earth anywhere with objects visible across an open plain or water.
Interestingly, most of people just believe in spherical Earth without ever checking anything, because society says so.
This is not an argument in favor of flat earth, but an argument that people around you can make you firmly believe absolutely anything without you ever bothering to check it by yourself.
Yeah I like to question everything, which is the reason I know this. I investigated and saw the evidence myself.
It’s a little disappointing to me that most people aren’t this way.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t know how many of us repeated the experiments in our chemistry textbooks to prove that what was claimed was correct. A few piddling things here and there, but when did I get to build a nuclear bomb?
Sure enough, it’s basically impossible to recreate human knowledge by checking everything yourself to see if it’s true; but something so basic really is easy to verify.
The whole thing about flat earthers is that they come up with more and more elaborate explanations to fit each individual observation, when Occam’s razor says that the theory that explains them all should probably be the correct one.
Like, they’ll argue about refraction of light due to hot air being the cause for the disappearance of ships past the horizon, and then their explanation for how time zones work is something else entirely, and why we have seasons, and why planes take the routes they do, and all this other nonsense. They all need separate, complicated explanations, and they willingly accept them and vehemently deny the simplest theory that ties everything together.
The actual explanation for this behaviour is flat earthers are a friend group, doubly so for the people who pushed “globeheads” out of their life. So to change their view is to socially isolate themselves
Eratosthenes’ experiment could just as easily prove a smaller, closer sun
The best proof is that you can look at the Sun and the moon with your eyes (maybe use a filter for the sun) and see them not change size throughout their path along the sky, which proves that they aren’t getting appreciably closer or farther
Flat earthers: “We only believe what we can see for ourselves!”
Also flat earthers: “And then there is a great ice wall around it and then there are other earths just like ours in other pockets like that”
It gets funnier. A millionaire flew two flat earthers to the south pole where they proceeded to live stream the 24 h sun. Its called “the final experiment”. Yet one of the flat earthers still said the earth was flat.
I always picture some flat earth guy stumped about what is at the edge of the world and then he stumbles on the first episode of Game of Thrones.
Insert Dicaprio pointing at TV meme
Of course it’s not spherical, it’s wider at the equator and lumpy
and lumpy
Barely. Shrink it down to the size of a pool/billiards ball and Earth is actually smoother.
Unless you go in an advanced metrology laboratory, or look at Jupiter with a telescope, it’s the most spherical object you will ever see.
I’m not sure how true that is. It’s smoother than anything else, but the degree to which it is oblate makes it less spherical than, say, a pool ball, doesn’t it?
It’s easy to check in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_bulge:
The planet Earth has a rather slight equatorial bulge; its equatorial diameter is about 43 km (27 mi) greater than its polar diameter, with a difference of about 1⁄298 of the equatorial diameter.
It’s not something so outwordly small that people couldn’t do better, but it’s better than bearing balls or a spherographic pen tip. It’s way, way smaller than any deformation you will find in a game ball.
Wow, that’s incredible. I thought for sure it would be a difference of something like 2–5%. But to actually be barely one third of one percent‽
Out of curiosity, I looked it up. Officially a pool ball is 57 mm diameter ± 0.127 mm. If we add and subtract that to different axes of the ball, that’s actually surprisingly close, coming in at 0.44% bulge, not a whole lot more than Earth’s 0.34%. It’s actually closer than I expected.
Jupiter is quite more flattened than Earth due to how fast it spins and it being made mostly of gas.
If you want spherical, look at Venus… or, even better, the Sun (not directly, though, of course; use some kind of filter or reflector).
Eratosthenes is a word I can only hear in Carl Sagan’s voice.
small voice Oblate spheroid.
The "science"tists keep changing their story. First it’s flat, then it’s a sphere, then it’s an obligatory spherical, then it’s a pear
You know who hasn’t changed their story? The ancient peoples who didn’t have accurate maps. They’ve maintained the flatness of the earth for thousands of years, so it must be the right answer
It’s turtles all the way down, young man.
But the earth is round, like a pizza
Mmm pizza balls
