Flat Earth

Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light? If you have a personal favorite theory, that is in someway related to the Electric Universe, this is where it can be posted.
KTMKim
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Flat Earth

Unread post by KTMKim » Mon Feb 28, 2022 11:22 pm

Hate me if you must (no I am not a flat earther).
I searched this forum, but found nothing (because it is laughable I suspect) that falsifies point by point some of the flat earth tale.

I heard David and Wal in interviews be asked about it, and laugh it off, but never really go toe to toe about it in a once and for all 'NO IT ISNT, and this is why' kind of approach.

I found the same kind of 'roasting' when a newbie to electric universe brought up a question involving Sitchins work, during the q and a period of the 2017 rebroadcast if I remember. I was glad to see the moderator effectively encourage an honest answer despite the heckling that began to erupt.

I admire critical thinkers to reconsider what we have been taught is fact, and I must say if what the YouTubers have measured is accurate, they make a stable 'WTF' case for themselves. But being the layman I am, with limited resources, I must rely on measurements taken by experts to decipher reality. Namely what I hear from you in contrast to my schools science books.

Flat earth points often seem to be:
-Curvature of the earth calculations are not accurate based on building heights measured at distance.
-No actual photos of the earth globe exist beyond composites or generated images.
-bottoms of clouds are never visible as they traverse the sky ( I know that one is silly but just another point they make).

Who can direct me to a an essay, blog, or video that encompasses eu theory and pits it in opposition (kindly of course) to the flat earth story that has been making waves on YT. Takers ?

jacmac
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by jacmac » Tue Mar 01, 2022 1:07 am

Don't waste your time.
Complete nonsense.
Take a long plane trip aROUND the world.
You can write your own essay on the way.

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spark
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by spark » Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:49 pm

Flat earth nonsense is easily debunked because we all can literally go out and easily see the sky curving concave all around us right above our heads to match the convex curvature of the earth. The sky curves with the curvature of the earth.

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nick c
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by nick c » Tue Mar 01, 2022 4:56 pm

We had a proponent of Geocentrism/Flat Earth who made some posts on the NIAMI board on V2.0

https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/php ... 27#p124527

The OP's account is still active on V3.0, though there is no recent activity. The signature for his TB Forum membership is a link to the following site:
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/for ... ic=30499.0

allynh
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by allynh » Wed Mar 02, 2022 2:27 am

I always enjoy discussions of Flat Earth but rarely get a chance to comment before the thread is locked. This is a repost of part a comment I made in 2017.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... 15#p120235
I've missed many an opportunity to comment on "flat earth" because it always seems to descends into "conspiracy theory" at some point, and my chance to point out the obvious fatal flaws was lost.

We won't talk about the current group of "flat earth" people who get crazy with "conspiracy theory". Strip away the "conspiracy theory" and the whole thing falls apart. They literally use "conspiracy theory" to hide the fact that their concept does not work.

I love the concept of "flat earth". It's great for story. I have a number of novel series that use the idea, but without the fatal flaws that cripple most of the other stories out there.

- Terry Pratchett had his Discworld series, plus his novel "Strata" that inspired Discworld.

- The novella "Missile Gap" by Charles Stross, with a disk world on an Alderson disk.

- And of course Larry Niven's Ringworld series.

All of these have the fatal flaw that they ignore physical reality.

First:

- A flat earth would be unstable. Put the slightest spin on the disk and all the atmosphere, water, soil would go spinning to the edge.

- Put the slightest tumble on the disk, and the same problem occurs.

Second: Everybody is also demonstrating two dimensional thinking. They forget that gravity is pulling across the disk as well as down.

- If you have a flat earth, no spin, no tumble, gravity would pull all of the atmosphere, water, soil, into the center of the disk. There would be a hemisphere of wet soggy mess sitting in the center of the disk, not a nice surface to live on.

- The Alderson disk that Stross wrote about, with the diameter of over a hundred million miles, would also pull everything into the center. There would be no surface to live on.

- Look at Ringworld. The ring is a million miles wide, with the atmosphere supposedly held in by the walls at the edge of the ring. The problem is, a million miles of atmosphere would not lie flat against the ring. The gravity would pull all of the atmosphere into the middle of the flat ring. The water and soil would also pull together making a wet soggy mess in the middle of the flat ring.

Remember: Any theory that you come up with has to match observed reality.
This is another post I was able to make.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... 45#p122727
I found this video showing what I was talking about.

Is Earth Actually Flat?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNqNnUJVcVs

The video only falls apart at about 7:00 minutes when he brings in the nonsense of time dilation shrinking distance. To get so much right, then trip up at the end. Oh, well.

As I said in my other post, I'm not interested in the conspiracy theory Flat Earth people use to hide the fact that it doesn't work, so let's not go there. HA!

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nick c
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by nick c » Wed Mar 02, 2022 3:52 pm

Flat earthers are inseparable from conspiracy theory. Either they don't believe that humans have been to the Moon and have sent probes throughout the solar system, or, they believe that the "Truth" is being suppressed. Either way it is a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories are convenient because it allows the believer to dismiss falsifying evidence.

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JP Michael
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by JP Michael » Wed Mar 02, 2022 10:53 pm

KTMKim wrote: Mon Feb 28, 2022 11:22 pm
Flat earth points often seem to be:
-Curvature of the earth calculations are not accurate based on building heights measured at distance.
-No actual photos of the earth globe exist beyond composites or generated images.
-bottoms of clouds are never visible as they traverse the sky ( I know that one is silly but just another point they make).
1. Curvature - See "Things Disappearing Over the Horizon" section of this article, esp. photograph of CN Tower, Toronto.
2. Amateur Rocketry refutes this claim completely (and there's plenty more vids of such non-NASA amateur rocket launches which clearly demonstrate a spherical earth)
3. Flat-bottomed Clouds are plentiful across the planet. Larger cumulonimbus storm clouds may also have flat tops, too ("anvil" clouds).

KTMKim
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by KTMKim » Thu Mar 03, 2022 1:22 pm

Bless you guys. Very well done! I've got a lot to chew on here including Nick's important points of 'inseparable convenient conspiracy theories'. That especially makes a lot of sense and is what I've noticed.

They really have NOTHING if it wasn't for their constant debunking. But attempts to disprove theories certainly don't advocate for anything.

Many thanks, I'm going to go through some of the links as well. So far what I've read from allynh JP and Nick, I've got my point by point rebuttal.

A_D_E
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by A_D_E » Thu Mar 03, 2022 4:59 pm

I've wondered how flat earthers explain that it is daytime and winter in north america at the same time it is nightime and summer in Australia.

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paladin17
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by paladin17 » Mon Mar 07, 2022 12:03 pm

A_D_E wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 4:59 pm I've wondered how flat earthers explain that it is daytime and winter in north america at the same time it is nightime and summer in Australia.
I assume they'll say that the internet is an illuminati trick to hide the truth.
(To be fair, it kinda is lol).

Roshi
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by Roshi » Tue Mar 08, 2022 6:34 pm

Flat Earth would be cool, it would mean there is an edge of the world somewhere. Also it would mean that you can go beyond the edge of the Earth and fall on the elephants that sustain the Earth, then on the turtle, then in the sea. Then go to the edge of that sea and repeat. Meet some mythological creatures on the way :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle

If we want to keep (most of) our laws of physics - the Ringworld of Larry Niven would be cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

allynh
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by allynh » Tue Mar 08, 2022 8:56 pm

To make the system work in Story, you have to have some device or mechanism that tells local space how to behave.

This is like in Star Trek, when you have people walking along the deck while the Enterprise is moving and shifting. When they show people staggering during high speed maneuvers, that is for effect. Actually having the internal system not protect the people would be disastrous.

In the Honor Harrington series, they have inertial compensators while the ship is under hundreds of gravities of acceleration. When the compensators fail, everything inside the ship is reduced to pulp. That is a common event during combat, when the whole crew is killed.

In Pratchett's Disc World series, everything is made of "Narrativium". Basically magic is used to tell matter how to act and thus Disc World is stable.

To have a Ringworld style ribbon to work, I have a honeycomb of cells across the surface that tells matter that gravity is down, and to not see the gravity sideways. Essentially like the inertial compensators in Star Trek spread across the surface of the ribbon.

In Story you can correct for the limitations of Reality.

BTW, I saw a graphic novel based on Disc World, that had a panel showing dozens of different disc worlds, each riding on the back of a different creature or creatures. The concept is so fun I have borrowed it for my stuff. I have ships get near a disc world and sound the alarm to stay well away since the entity does not want its travelers disturbed.

There was basically a "Singularity" ages ago, and various advanced beings created disc worlds to carry "natural" humans safely. They wanted to preserve populations of "natural" humans because there was a tendency for humans to evolve super fast as technology changed and thus transcend Reality.

This is like the Culture Novels by Iain Banks, where the Singularity occurred, the AI took over without destroying humans, and each AI is the ship that humans live in, both "natural" and advanced humans.

The Confluence Trilogy by Paul McAuley is about a group of world ships that are joined together in a flat world with a vast river running through it, carrying 10,000 bloodlines created in various singularities. The creators have transcended Reality leaving them behind to further evolve.

BuckeyeFrank
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by BuckeyeFrank » Tue Mar 15, 2022 6:59 pm

I like flat earth ideas, they explain things differently, exposing assumptions, as EU does.
But when I am using that paradigm, I prefer an infinite plane and finite space.

Also, https://ifers.123.st/f1-the-internation ... ch-society seems a little less of a true believer approach.

With my flat earth hat on, I see many compatible points with GaryN's nonvisible sun and stars, seeming reasonable due to the fraud of NASA and other space agencies.
I recently listened to "A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Moon"
by Bart Sibrel, Audiobook, on a long road trip, as an example of NASA fact issues.

Even with EU, I can have a more detached evaluation, because of its acceptance of space agency data without question (IMO).
A little conspiracy a day, keeps the blind faith away? :|

allynh
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by allynh » Wed Mar 16, 2022 2:09 am

This is a book review from Skeptic.org about a book on the Flat Earth movement and history. It looks interesting,

Off the Edge: Why so many people came to (wrongly) believe the world is flat
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2022/03/off- ... d-is-flat/
9th March 2022
As the last few years have made achingly clear, people around the world find themselves deeply in the grip of the age of conspiracy theory. Where conspiracism was once relegated to whispers in back rooms and pseudonymous rumour-mongering on niche message boards, today conspiracy theories pour into our lives from every angle.

It used to be unusual to find someone willing to share with you their belief in an alternate version of reality; these days we need only glance at our social media of choice – or, indeed, an alarming proportion of mainstream politics – to be confronted with distortions of the truth and sage warnings of hidden, malevolent forces at play. Ordinary people from all walks of life find themselves sucked into the rabbit hole, spreading misinformation and paranoia.

A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has certainly not helped, but long before COVID-19 put conspiracy theories around vaccination and depopulation front and centre, and even before the QAnon movement feverishly mistook a 4chan troll for a prophet, it was a different grand narrative that caught the eye and caused a section of society to Question Everything: the flat earth movement.

Understanding why so many people in the late 2010s found themselves questioning the shape of the world – a fact which humanity had established far beyond reasonable doubt several millennia earlier – is a task no shortage of researchers have undertaken. And while some writers try to make sense of the modern conspiratorial mindset through a focus on the psychology of believers, others favour a more anthropological approach, aiming to understand how we got to where we are today, which actors played their part along the way, and what forces amplified their voice.

“Off the Edge Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything”, by Daily Beast journalist Kelly Weill, is very much in this latter category, tracking the growth of the flat earth movement, from the early 19th century to its digital-age peak, and beyond. It is, as best as I can tell, the first book to cover in-depth the Flat Earth movement since the theory and its devoted followers re-emerged in the late 2010s, and it does both an admirable and entertaining job.

Weill’s fascination with the flat earth movement (a fascination I share) is clear to see, not just in her recollections of time spent talking to and meeting with believers, but also in the historical research she draws on. No true telling of the modern flat earth movement could explain the appeal of the theory without introducing the reader to the cast of characters on whose back the contemporary belief has been built, and Off the Edge does an excellent job in taking the reader through highlights of the progenitors of the modern flat earth belief.

Included, of course, is a detailed back story on Samuel Rowbotham – the infamous “Parallax”, from whose Zetetic Astronomy pamphlet so much of the current movement’s primary theories have been lifted (indeed the hugely influential Flat Earth book/video 200 Proofs the Earth is Not a Spinning Ball, released in 2015 by Eric Dubay, republishes many of Rowbotham’s original diagrams in full). It is unclear whether many modern flat earthers are fully aware of the full history of the man who is very much the intellectual origin of their worldview – from Rowbotham’s time in a scandal-ridden commune to his brief spell selling soda water as a cure for mortality.

Following Rowbotham, Weill’s quickly takes us on a tour of the other key figures in the flat earth history – from William Carpenter and John Hampden, to John Dowie, to the aristocrat Lady Elizabeth Blount (author of possibly history’s only adventure-novel-cum-musical-cum-flat-earth-treatise), through to the 20th century figures of the Flat Earth Society: Samuel Shenton and Charles K Johnston.

The cover of Kelly Weill's book with a red backdrop and white writing which reads "Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything". An abstract depiction of the sea cuts across the centre of the book cover with the silhouette of a ship falling off the edge.

However, as entertaining as the history of the flat earth is, it is once Weill has brought us back to the relatively present day that the relevance of Off the Edge really starts to become apparent. Weill lays out the ways in which the Flat Earth movement grew, and was allowed to grow by platforms and tech companies who amplified and proliferated the gospel of flat earth, from shady networks of crosslinked conspiracy websites gaming Google’s search ranking, to the YouTube algorithm and its indiscriminate amplification of flat earth videos.

Notably, the book describes a 2017 experiment by a former employee at YouTube, where a search query on the platform about the flat earth returned more than a third of results arguing that the earth was flat – while 90% of videos actively recommended to viewers by YouTube put forward arguments for the flat earth, even when the viewer had made no effort to seek out flat earth material.

While YouTube and social media platforms may have subsequently adjusted their algorithms to deprioritise flat earth content, their role in growing the movement should not be underestimated – especially as the same flaws in the technical forces which accelerated the flat earth movement to prominence existed and were exploited by the QAnon movement, and most recently by movements promoting anti-vaccine myths and even white supremacists “Great replacement” conspiracy theories.

The uglier side of the flat earth conspiracy theory is not neglected by Weill, as she notes the ease in which flat earth believers would parrot fascist and antisemitic talking points. It is a point which my own experience echoes: having spent over a year touring a talk on my own research into the flat earth movement, one of the first questions I’d find myself asking of a flat earther who approached me after an event was what they thought about the Holocaust. After more than 40 lectures, and dozens of flat earth audience members, I met only two who believed the Holocaust was a real event.

Above all, while Off the Edge is an entertaining and informative read on the history and growth of the modern flat earth movement, its biggest strength is in Weill’s attitude toward flat earth believers. It would be easy for the book to have a scornful, mocking or superior tone – indeed, as the majority of skeptical coverage of this topic has taken – but Weill instead keeps sight of the humanity of flat earth believers, never more so than when discussing her relationship with Mike Hughes, the daredevil stuntman who died during an experiment with his homemade rocket. Weill describes Mike as a friend, and the chapter that covers his experiments and his subsequent accident is delicately handled.

For those of us who argue, as is the position of this magazine, that skepticism needs to be conducted with respect, compassion and humility, Off the Edge is an invaluable and deeply human look at a movement which, while divorced from reality in many ways, inhabits the same (spherical) space as the rest of us. It is only by understanding why people are drawn to a grand narrative conspiracy theory that we can start to be effective in helping them challenge those beliefs.

“Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything”, by Kelly Weill, is available now.
One key flaw is the attempt to send a rocket into the stratosphere to see the actual shape of the Earth.

If the Earth was flat they can only send a rocket so far up. In the story Missile Gap by Charles Stross he points out that a rocket goes up, and the curve of the Earth falls away. That there is not enough power in a rocket to lift up and travel any distance without the curve of the Earth to help.

The title Missile Gap refers to the inability to launch missiles at each other, US and Soviet.

BTW, here is an excerpt from the book for The Atlantic showing the downside of people actually being out and open in public about this. Yikes!

When Your Friends Fall off the Edge of the Earth
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/arch ... on/622908/

The concept is fun in Story but not welcome in the Real.

BuckeyeFrank
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Re: Flat Earth

Unread post by BuckeyeFrank » Wed Mar 16, 2022 8:17 pm

allynh wrote: Wed Mar 16, 2022 2:09 am by allynh » 01 Mar 2022, 21:27
I always enjoy discussions of Flat Earth but rarely get a chance to comment before the thread is locked. This is a repost of part a comment I made in 2017.
Post by allynh The concept is fun in Story but not welcome in the Real.
EU theory suffers the same issues, at lest, more so in years past.

Actually, these days the more popular the ridicule of a theory is, the more interesting it becomes to me. I wonder, in a idealistic science, should inquiry with significant Citizen Scientist effort be considered to have value and deserve "welcome in the real" ?
This to discover what its valuable contributions might be.

I think a good example of a Citizen Scientist who simply gathers data and presents it... J Tolan Media1 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqjHW3 ... Hcw/videos

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