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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”
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
Have you run across big earth theory? it is quite possibly more insane than every other conspiracy theory ive heard because its like all of them together.
There was this one video where flat-Earthers tried to prove the Earth was flat, so they recreated the experiment by Eratosthenes and accidentally proved the Earth was round. I can’t find it right now but it’s hilarious.
This past December, The Final Experiment went down to Antarctica to take a video of the 24 hour sun. It’s causing much consternation among flat earthers.
I believe firmly once the Flat earthers start to lose traction so will the Qanon and all the other dumb “conspiracy theories” then we can get back to the good stuff, bigfoot, aliens, loch Ness monster
Unfortunately, what’s more likely is that while some will fall away, the remainder will be more extreme. That’s what happens when religious prophecies fail, such as The Great Disappointment among Adventists.
You may find this video interesting. It talks about how “big tent” conspiracy theories like flat earth and qanon are related. https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44 TO BE CLEAR: the video is not in support of the theories! I’m reading the first sentence of this comment back in my head and it feels like it could go either way.
Love this video and have forced it on many of my friends. It’s a straight up documentary and it’s so interesting to me.
Dan is the best. One of the great old school YouTuber essayists. He really leans into a topic and interrogates it from every direction.
Hes got great videos on the metaverse, crypto scams and hilariously, the complexity of making cooking videos.
To be perfectly fair, when the guy said the test was inconclusive, he was right… To a point.
His failure was that he only did the test once and in one location, which just proves a hill/valley could be playing a factor in the results. To have true empirical results, the test would need to be done at multiple locations, each a random but sizable distance apart.
The scientific method relies on repeatability and reliability in data to provide proof to anything and he wasn’t really using either.
Wasn’t that the Netflix movie behind the curve
There was one guy who designed what is actually an elegant experiment, placing several vertical surfaces, signs basically, with holes in them in a straight line a distance apart at the same elevation above sea level. If the Earth is flat, one should be able to see straight through all of the holes in the signs; if the earth is round, the holes will curve down and away. He observed that they curved down and away. Then of course proceeded to make up bullshit about how his own test was invalid.
Yes, that’s it! I must have gotten confused about what video it was.
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.
Spheroids are definitively spherical, otherwise they wouldn’t call them that.
My favorite type of sphere.
Close enough
Oh, let’s be fair here…
He had to hire a guy to count lots and lots of steps too.
Explanation: Not only did the ancient Greek philosopher Eratosthenes (born and raised in what-is-now Libya) know the earth was spherical, he used that knowledge to measure the circumference of the earth - with two sticks and some carefully applied mathematical thought - to an astounding accuracy!
According to Cleomedes’ On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies, around 240 BC, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth in Ptolemaic Egypt.[8] Using a vertical rod known as a gnomon and under the previous assumptions, he knew that at local noon on the summer solstice in Syene (modern Aswan, Egypt), the Sun was directly overhead, as the gnomon cast no shadow. Additionally, the shadow of someone looking down a deep well at that time in Syene blocked the reflection of the Sun on the water. Eratosthenes then measured the Sun’s angle of elevation at noon in Alexandria by measuring the length of another gnomon’s shadow on the ground.[9] Using the length of the rod and the length of the shadow as the legs of a triangle, he calculated the angle of the sun’s rays.[10] This angle was about 7°, or 1/50th the circumference of a circle; assuming the Earth to be perfectly spherical, he concluded that its circumference was 50 times the known distance from Alexandria to Syene (5,000 stadia, a figure that was checked yearly), i.e. 250,000 stadia.[11] Depending on whether he used the “Olympic stade” (176.4 m) or the Italian stade (184.8 m), this would imply a circumference of 44,100 km (an error of 10%) or 46,100 km, an error of 15%.[11] A value for the stadion of 157.7 metres has even been posited by L.V. Firsov, which would give an even better precision, but is plagued by calculation errors and false assumptions.[12] In 2012, Anthony Abreu Mora repeated Eratosthenes’s calculation with more accurate data; the result was 40,074 km, which is 66 km different (0.16%) from the currently accepted polar circumference.[10]
I like how Bill Nye explains it:
We can’t prove in a way that they would believe.
Why do we need to convince them in the first place? I see them as the equivalent of internet trolls, they know they’re wrong and half the fun is moving the goalposts.
I remember when some of them tried to prove it was flat, and ended up proving it was round.
100%. I watched a video on TFE where there was a minister guy saying the Earth is flat because the bible says so and that any evidence to the contrary is manufactured by (literally) Satan and the US government and that they may not be able to prove it one way or the other, but they have to have faith in the word of God.
There’s literally nothing you can say to that.
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.
They also can’t prove for sure that the earth is flat
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 talked to a guy that worked in one of the deepest underground mines in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. He said one of his bosses, a highly educated libertarian nut job was a flat earther and would debate his workers on a regular basis about it. I told him they should ask for more danger pay because at one point they might drill through the flat earth plain and fall into space … or land on a turtle.
Then they start talking about “as above, so below” in that water is both above and below us (with no distinctive* collectively agreed upon measurements).
There’s are so many weird-ass suppositions.
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.
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.
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.
But the earth is round, like a pizza
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)
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
