Debunking Flat Earth and the Hollow Earth

a reply to: Hyperboles

Nope, I'm quite happy with my answer. (because it's right)

It's straight up basic long division, there's quite frankly absolutely nowhere for any subtleties to hide and produce a gotcha moment!

I suppose that there's quite a few people out there who you could bluff into losing confidence in their own basic math and reasoning skills when you've made such a colossal blunder by telling someone they're wrong when they're not and then tripling down on it like you just have...

Unfortunately for you, I'm not one of them since I actually use math and geometry very often in my daily life and consistently come up with correct answers to much harder logic problems than dividing 24901 by 360.

I really don't know why people do what you just did here, but it is ridiculously funny when they do, so thank you I guess...

originally posted by: turbonium1

originally posted by: roguetechie
POST REMOVED BY STAFF

Gravity won't make planes fly level over a sphere, that's the problem.

Understanding how to use aerodynamic forces to overcome it will.

A force making a plane fly along the surface below cannot make it a level flight.

Yes it can, because that's what happens.

A plane following a curved surface is always curved in flight, no matter what makes it follow the curved surface.

Correct, but...

Planes must descend to follow the curve. No exceptions. No excuses. No illusions.

Nope, wrong, because this is not what happens. All a plane has to do us trim its wings to be at a certain height, at any point along its journey, measure the distance to the ground. Even on a curved surfaces, this will still be the same distance wherever it is along the journey.

Saying a plane follows curvature of Earth means it has to descend constantly to match the curvature. [/quote

No, only you are saying that. Everyone else is saying that it is just following the laws of physics. Does a plane following a line of latitude constantly have to bank?

No evidence supports the claim, game over.

False, no matter how many times you pretend to yourself it isn't.

a reply to: turbonium1

8 inches per mile squared is wrong that's why we don't use it now... It's literally from an 1850's encyclopedia and is an approximation surveyors used to use for certain projects because Charles Babbage's new fangled calculation engines weren't anywhere close to portable yet!

This meant that in the field you needed something which could get you close enough over limited distances, and thus this formula which only works over pretty short distances was born. And also thus, the reason modern surveyors etc have no idea what the hell you're talking about when you ask them if you use the 8 inches curvature formula!

Surprise!

It's not because there's a conspiracy to hide the flat earth at all, rather it's because you're asking them about a formula that was last used by surveyors probably 100+ years ago!

That means that the real answer to why has nobody heard of my formula is... Umm.. because people retire at 62?

The issue with the flat earth movement and flat earthers as individuals is that somehow they've made it through life and not figured out that they suck at forming coherent questions, and that the confusion inconvenience and frustration of dealing with their ridiculous questions and inability to understand or accept answers anyway is the reason people get angry etc, not because they alone have somehow stumbled onto this massive conspiracy!

How do we know the world's not flat?

Simple really, if the world was flat the modern technological world as you know it would not exist!

PERIOD FULL STOP

Flat out (heh), your GPS wouldn't work, your cellphone wouldn't work, god damnit even the way your phones and tablets flip between landscape and portrait automatically WOULD NOT WORK!!

For a bunch of people who claim to be about Occam's razor (though only one in ten thousand flerfers can even spell Occam) at what point do you not look around you at all the things that would have to be faked or done radically differently than even experts in their fields believe it is and think to yourself....

Gee, either the flat earth is real and it's literally me and about 900,000 other people out of the 7 plus BILLION PEOPLE ON EARTH that they're hiding this from... Or the earth might just actually be round!

Seriously here, think really hard about this!

What's more likely?

There's a point beyond which people are just being stupid and contrarian for the sake of being stupid and contrarian and if you believe in a flat earth you really do need to ask yourself if that's what you're doing.

a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

Aircraft and aerodynamic flight literally cannot work without gravity, as soon as they throw gravity away....

Huh.... Brb need to get an $8000 loan to ride the vomit comet!

I seriously just thought of a great way to demonstrate that gravity is absolutely real and it's not just a density thing! Take a sealed vessel full of a liquid and various materials which will settle out into nice gradiations in 20 or so seconds after you stop shaking the vessel up while on the ground. Get in the vomit comet and film the material in the sealed vessel not even beginning to settle in the entire 30 seconds of zero g as well as filming the materials settling out to the Same degree they normally do in 20 seconds in more like 8 seconds during the high g portions of the flight path...

Bam... GRAVITY!

Once you kick the gravity leg out from under them their whole house of cards comes crashing down...

Or we could just show them a centrifuge and say, explain that if it's all density sucka!

Not that any of this will work because willful stupid is not actually about a lack of good information, but I would get to ride the vomit comet!

a reply to: roguetechie

Once again read this www.abovetopsecret.com... and calculate again and while you are at it, read this post www.abovetopsecret.com... again and again till you understand

a reply to: Hyperboles

Nah I'm good, I know how the world works just dandy and at the end of the day I only have so much patience for repeating myself.

originally posted by: roguetechie
a reply to: Hyperboles

Nah I'm good, I know how the world works just dandy and at the end of the day I only have so much patience for repeating myself.

Doesn't look like it at all does it? Anyway w enjoy your ignorance is bliss

originally posted by: Hyperboles
a reply to: roguetechie

Once again read this www.abovetopsecret.com... and calculate again and while you are at it, read this post www.abovetopsecret.com... again and again till you understand

So according to you, what would happen if the airplane pilot didn't tilt the nose down, are you saying he'd end up in outer space from going in a straight line, with the surface of the earth 4000 miles below him?

That notion is just as ridiculous as your claim that pendulums disprove relativity which nobody ever figured out before, except of course for you. At least on the plane needing to tilt its nose down, you have some flat-earthers on your side...oh wait, that's more of a negative than a positive.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

They'd hit the dome silly...

What impresses me the most is that how an aircraft flies has been pointed out many times and yet nearly 100% of the focus in regard to the nose down question has become an obsession boiled down to. "If a pilot doesn't pitch down during flight, it means the Earth is flat"

Absolutely 100% ignoring the fact that an aircraft's flight is governed by a fairly complex amount of physics, of which the most major factor is, lift performance of the wings (function of air pressure, air craft velocity vector and air flow vector).
Then also coupled to the fact that, air pressure on the Earth is fairly smooth, and decreases also fairly smoothly with altitude.

As an aircraft flies, it has a service ceiling defined by the amount of lift of the wings (see above) the performance of the engines at those pressure conditions, mass, and general aerodynamics.

Add to this that also how the aircraft naturally wants to fly also depends on the centre of mass and its relation to the centre of lift. THUS an aircraft will naturally want to pitch down, or up, depending upon for example, its fuel reserves and where they are located etc.

An aircraft in 'level' flight with a completely stable aerodynamic performance (doesn't naturally want to pitchup or down), will approximately fly at an altitude as defined by the pressure differential and lift performance of the wings for the given velocity. AS already pointed out... the Earth being a globe it still has a smooth pressure drop with altitude, and such any relative 'pitch up' will reduce aerodynamic performance of the wings, the performance of the engines, and the whole system will aim to keep equilibrium. The aircraft nose will maintain a position of equilibrium which would be to naturally follow the 'level' flight path.

Now... if anyone cant understand why the pitch down argument is just completely dumb... then sorry... Im just... sorry.


The dumb part is that, it doesn't really matter one way or the other...

originally posted by: ErosA433

"...ignoring the fact that an aircraft's flight is governed by a fairly complex amount of physics..."

ErosA433, nice post, and making use of real principles of flight.

originally posted by: ErosA433
Absolutely 100% ignoring the fact that an aircraft's flight is governed by a fairly complex amount of physics...

What's funny is to hear flat earthers use physics to support their claims, when I don't know of a single physicist who thinks the earth is flat (though if there was a not very good physicist who believed that, it wouldn't shock me).

One physics idea that comes to mind is the battle between gravitational forces of very massive bodies like the moon and larger that tend toward a spherical shape because the compressive strength of the rocks they are made of can only resist gravity by a limited amount, so you can have things like mountains, but they can only deviate from a spherical shape by so much before gravity wins. This is not just a theory, but observation confirms that rocky objects more than a certain mass tend toward spherical shapes. Below that mass of course rocks can have any shape, so a flat earther might say if they can make a small rock in the shape of a pancake why not the Earth? The answer of course is because the earth has a lot more gravity.

The interesting claim I heard from one flat earther video on youtube was why the hulls of a sailboat disappear over the horizon before the mast. He explained it was because Einstein's theory of relativity says light bends in a gravitational field, so the light rays coming from the hull are bending down before you can see them. Einstein's theory actually does say something like that, but it's a mathematical expression from which the amount of bending can be computed, and once you plug in the Earth's mass and figure out how much light bends on Earth's surface, you find it doesn't bend enough to explain the way ship hulls vanish before their masts. As Phage pointed out, once you try to bring up any math with a flat earther, that's where the discussion tends to grind to a halt as they don't seem interested in the math.

Anyway I was wondering how that flat earther came up with that idea about relativity, and I think I figured out the answer which I find entertaining. The following video on youtube is labeled as a documentary and makes the exact same claim starting at about 8:30:

Flat Earth - In search of the edge (1990 Documentary)


However, it's not a documentary, it's a mockumentary that was made to encourage critical thinking skills, but unfortunately some flat earthers apparently believed it's a real documentary and quote the same flawed physics application as in the mockumentary. One of the youtube comments even claims it's not a mockumentary, and some people apparently believe it contains real proofs about the flat earth.

For anybody who believes that, here are the critical thinking questions in black the students are supposed to answer after watching the video. The comments in blue are teacher's notes about why the proofs of flat earth are not valid after applying critical thinking skills (or actually doing the math if someone wants to calculate exactly how much the earth's gravity is bending light rays from a ship offshore).

www.indiana.edu...

a reply to: ErosA433

The thing that throws me off in these conversations and unfortunately makes me not get my message across as well as I'd hope to is that I get angry at people who want to take away the majesty of the world around us...

By insisting the things that they do, and essentially saying that humans can't know anything truly substantive about this place we inhabit they are seeking to jam us back into a cage of ignorance privation and fear!

By saying because we can't truly know anything and all the things we believe we know are wrong they are trying to forcibly insert god and religion back into humanity's drivers seat...

And to that I have to say F*** their god and the S****y little tinpot dictators masquerading as clergy that head up organized religion!

The single greatest accomplishment of humanity so far has been wresting power from the sadistic sky daddy and his capo's under bosses and goombas also known as the clergy!

Someone in this thread eventually had to say it and I guess it was probably always going to be me...

If your god is such a petty little psycho that he either insists in you repudiating science and everything it can do to make life on earth better and or is such a twisted freak that he deliberately constructed every inch of the universe to fool us into always chasing chimeras while never finding the truth....

Then F*** your god!

And if you're not religious and you still believe in the flat earth.... Please don't breed... Seriously... At least religious people have the excuse of being lied to by their sadistic sky daddy and his capo's.

originally posted by: mytquin
I'm not convinced one was or the other. Both sides have very good points. Here's one on the Flat Earth side that I can't explain...
Why doesn't a pilot ever have to tip the nose of the plane down to keep from gaining altitude...if said pilot never dipped the nose of the plane down while flying over a globe, logic dictates that as the plane kept flying level he would fly right out into space... wouldn't it

By the way, pilots have been asked if they occasionally have to dip the nose down to account for flying over a curved earth and they are on record as stating that they in fact don't ever have to do this.

But that is a false assumption that you would need to dip the nose down. I am a private pilot, and the reason you don't need to dip the nose down is because you are inside the sphere of the earth and it's influence of gravity and motion and everything around you also is, including the air, plus, wherever you are on the globe of the earth, for all intents and purposes, is like being on top of a flat surface because it is so large compared to you, so no matter where you are, you are always at the same place so to speak, in relation to everything else.

The flying off into space because the earth is curved is a complete false analogy.

a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

I love all the pilots on ATS coming out and going NOPE NOPE NOOOOOOPPPPEEE ..... not how it works!

Pilots, helping prevent the spread of flerfes

but our resident flat earth proponents simply ignore ANY evidence that contradicts thier delusions

originally posted by: ignorant_ape
but our resident flat earth proponents simply ignore ANY evidence that contradicts thier delusions

Yes, and they usually accuse those in a position to know better than they do, as being part of the cover-up.

It’s sufficient to say that as a group flatEarthers aren’t culled from the scientifically literate segment of the population anyway, nor even from the larger number of non-expert citizens who nonetheless know how to separate credible fact from horsesh*t. Despite this, the “flerfers” happily claim more expertise in physics, aeronautics, mathematics, geography, navigation, geology, astronomy…and a whole host of other Earth-related fields, than they are willing to recognize in the actual professionals who work in such fields.

It’s quite a whopper of a defense mechanism, really.

a reply to: Rollie83

Happens all the time... in the same way as people say ALL scientists lie because they want funding and job security. Without any experience in scientific research, what the going pay rate is (its not high) and this weird idea that science research funding is somehow infinite... when really its not, it is in fact very limited.

originally posted by: NoCorruptionAllowed

originally posted by: mytquin


The flying off into space because the earth is curved is a complete false analogy.

Its a legitimate analogy. read my posts above

a reply to: Rollie83

First of all, I just want to say – Rollie83, don’t ever change. I know some people gave you the razzies for the long, detailed explanations of flight mechanics you gave a while ago but I was eating it up. So good.

Experts spending time giving factual information is a priceless service to all of us and as a frequent flyer who doesn’t know the first thing about flight aerodynamics, I learned a lot.

But this whole thread seems to me a philosophical debate for flat earth folks akin to “If a tree falls in the woods but no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

We don’t notice gravity; we just are planted on the ground. So is gravity a personally relevant human experience? And if not, can we just say “It doesn’t exist?” Rejecting its existence changes nothing in how we live our daily lives (except maybe we feel we’ve unshackled our chains of “oppression” and are now “free” from the thought police, or some such).

If I personally am never able to see the Earth from far enough away to know it’s spherical, does that make it not so? Could it be a slice of cheese instead?

These questions are more about our conscious experience of the world and how we filter information through our cognitive reality. Everyone must grapple with a world too big and too complex to understand fully and through which we live but a blip of time with our own limited experience.

What do we accept around us as factual? Sometimes, we think things are factual because of our strongly held belief it must be true. It is true because it feels true. This isn’t factual – it’s a belief system. We then twist all sorts of information around us to make it fit with our belief system (whether that’s a government cover-up, conspiracy, lies or whatever). My two cents – this misunderstanding between belief and fact has hit crisis levels in the world today.

Factual information must be reproducible, verifiable, testable representations of the outside world (meaning, outside our brain and into the matrix of the computer simulation we live in or blah, blah, blah). Really good factual information can do all the things I just mentioned *and* can be used to predict future events.

So nose up or nose down, I don’t care. When the flat earth folks can use their theory to provide an accurate estimate of the next solar eclipse or use their theory to accurately place a GPS satellite into orbit in a verifiable, reproducible way, then I will be convinced. Until that time, it’s just a thought experiment about the conscious world - no different than me saying Elvis rides shotgun in a Ford Fiesta with Jesus on the moon because it feels right to me.