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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.
QAnon ain’t going away, its an integral part of a fascist cult which is currently couping / causing a constitutional crisis.
QAnon is the rough equivalent of the Thule Society and the subsequent mystical/pagan/occult beliefs that many of the SS higher ups believed in.
QAnon is basically a synthesis, or syncretic combination of a whole bunch of interlocking conspiracy theories, that functionally constitute a religion, that played a crucial role in getting the Trump cult going.
Which is not unlike how the Thule Society came up with a synthesis or syncretism of existing fringe crackpot theories and norse mythology and race ‘science’, and laid the ideological/religious/worldview foundations for the Nazi party, with its beliefs continuing to evolve and inform, to varying degrees, a whole lot of the key members of the Nazi party and official policy.
…
Himmler, the head of the SS, had his own goddamned castle that he and other more devoted occultist Nazis would literally gather in for arcane rituals.
QAnon version of this is insane QAnon livestreaming prophets that talk to God and predict Trump will win and is in fact literally annointed by God, and then we he doesn’t well actually thats because demons and also he is the real President.
Those people are largely all still going strong, by the way, they all just migrated to alternative platforms… but they have huge numbers of regular viewers.
Flat earthers believe they were just inside the Las Vegas dome.
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.
Wasn’t that the Netflix movie behind the curve
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.
Technically the Earth is not spherical… it’s an oblate spheroid.
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”.
Close enough
My favorite type of sphere.
Technically it’s a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients.
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.
Emblematic of our times.
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.
The existence of the North Pole star and the Southern Cross is enough evidence that the earth is round. On a flat earth, you should see the same constellations no matter where in the earth you are.
The Southern Cross was so important for celestial navigation on the southern hemisphere it’s in multiple flags (Brazil, Australia and New Zeeland, for example).
My favorite proof, and really it’s the reason I don’t argue with flat earthers anymore. The fact that the sky appears to rotate about two points opposite each other in the sky is unassailable proof that the Earth is round. If someone is willing to just ignore that, there’s literally no point talking to them about anything
Ooh good one. I wonder what the flat earth explanation for this is.
Anyhow, the persistent belief in something like a flat earth isn’t really a question of evidence.
To most people the way we understand the world around us is through the scientific method. As in I have not personally observed the results of testing vaccines on thousands of people to ensure that they are safe, but others have and others have reproduced their findings, so I’m happy to accept their published assertions.
However, there’s plenty of people for whom the scientific method is merely one belief system amongst many, and you can simply choose which group resonates with you.
Additionally science tells us all sorts of unpleasant things about ourselves that we don’t really want to hear. Why would I want to listen to “science” telling me I need to exercise more when this nice lady on facebook tells me that this crystal can realign my chakras and restore my health.
The flat earth explanation for this is that the celestial bodies, sun, moon, planets, distant stars, do not exist and the light show in the sky is projected by Big They.
I never get that, who is Big They and why would they want to fool us? What’s the point?
Big They are non-Christians. Is what it boils down to.
A core mechanic of Christianity is a persecution complex, they see themselves as a small group of people who REALLY know what’s going on in a big scary world full of powerful authority figures who think otherwise and will kill them for failure to conform. It’s why they use a device of brutal torture/execution as their symbol, they fucking LOVE being persecuted.
Jesus had the Romans, so modern Christians have to have…the Jews, the CIA, the British Royal Family, the godless communists, the Muslim terrorists, the woke left, something that is more influential than them hell bent on destroying them, or opposing their “rightful” authority.
The bible says WE should be in charge, so we require it to be right. In those cases where observable reality conflicts with the bible, the bible is correct and reality is wrong. And somewhere in the bible, the earth is described as flat. And when you’re in “god put dinosaur bones underground as a test of our faith” deep as too many of these delusional nutcases are, they’ll refuse to accept literally anything including the results of their own experiments if it conflicts with their chosen narrative.
What if they just go “but what if the stars are fake?”?
Yeah, Eratosthenes already knew it was round.
What he did with the two sticks (and paying a guy to take a damn long walk) was measure it.
And he was only off by like single digit percentages.
Yup, all it takes is a single set of eyes, even a mediocre sence of direction, and a decent memory for stars on the celestial sphere for one person to definitively prove the Earth is round. If you can accurately measure stars, you don’t even need to do Erastosthene’s challenge with the sun.
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.
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
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.
That’s because they exist. Probably not aliens and such, but any object seen flying that’s not identified is a UFO.
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.
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]
In 2021, mathematicians Matt Parker and Hannah Fry calculated the circumference of the earth by going up to a point of known altitude and measuring the angle down to the horizon, giving them a very accurate 5500 km, which is 34500 km off (86%).
I like how Bill Nye explains it:
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.
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.
Yours is more likely, mine is more fun
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.
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.
Sure, but there comes a point where you either believe it, or you believe that there’s a “world government” running the shots, telling every single country to teach the same wrong scientific facts, and literally NO ONE has ever fact checked anything or been a whistle blower about it.
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
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.
We can’t prove in a way that they would believe.
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.
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.
Well, this is a simulation. All observations and measurements can and will be falsified by the designers of the simulator. What can ya do?
Oh, let’s be fair here…
He had to hire a guy to count lots and lots of steps too.
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
Of course it’s not spherical, it’s wider at the equator and lumpy
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.
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).
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.
and lumpy
Barely. Shrink it down to the size of a pool/billiards ball and Earth is actually smoother.
