Memes

I don't get this one?

wait. isnt that the wrong guy for the meme?


i.imgflip.com/5xgt2q.jpg

research flat earth. there is a lot of evidance that earth is flat and round earth is a lie. its to get you to belief in evolution.

I've already created a very lengthy blog about flat Earth; almost an hour long, as I recall. I can't spend another hour typing up explanations against it here and now, but even if I could that would really only scratch the surface of the matter.

Flat-Earthers keep talking like they pose questions that nobody can answer and every time they say it it's a bold-faced lie. We're tired of giving them answers to questions that allegedly nobody can answer, but we keep doing it. They just don't like the answers so they ignore them and pretend they're not there, like tossing a paper towel over the dog turds on their carpet. Ignoring them doesn't make them not be there.

One of the issues with flat-Earthers is a lack of understanding. When you look at their discussions on social media like Facebook, their arguments against a globe often come down to it not making sense to them. Somehow they've decided that not making sense to them means it's a problem with the science rather than a problem with them.

One area in which they struggle in scale. As an example, they know science says the Earth spins at 1,000 miles per hour, so they imagine a desktop globe rapidly spinning and flinging everything off of it. Even at 1,000 MPH, Earth has a circumference of 24,000 miles, so it takes a full 24-hour day to make one single rotation. If you want to scale that down to a desktop globe, you need to make sure that it turns once in 24 hours. At that rate, it wouldn't be flinging anything off of it. You could stand there intently watching it and not even tell it was moving.

Their strongest argument is "It looks flat." They typically support that with a photograph, and perhaps "Where's the curve?" Again, this is an issue of lack of understanding of scale. Earth is more massive than they can really wrap their heads around.

Draw a circle that's one inch across. Now, look at one inch of its surface. It's pretty obvious that there's a tremendous amount of curvature. Okay, now make a bigger circle, twelve inches across. Look at just one inch of its surface. The curvature is still clearly there but not nearly as curvy as before, right? Expand it to ten feet across and again look at one inch of surface. Now the curve is getting pretty difficult to spot.

You can typically see about three miles out, if you're standing on the Earth's surface. In both directions that's six miles, out of 24,901 miles. To put that to scale with our drawn circle experiment, you need a circle 110 feet across, and focus on one inch of surface. At one inch of surface along a circle 110 feet wide, as near as you could tell it would be a straight line.

Once in a while they'll be so close to genuine science. One time they famously got together thousands of dollars for an extreme accurate gyroscope to test for rotation. They found that something was wrong, as it was indicating 15 degrees of "drift" per hour. 15 degrees per hour times 24 hours in a day is 360 degrees; a full circle. They accidentally proved Earth rotated 360 degrees per day. Instead of accepting the results, however, they declared the test "inconclusive" since it wasn't the answer they wanted.

Science shows people proof of the round Earth all the time, but flat-Earthers just declare them all lies. It's allegedly all faked. Okay, fine. If you don't want to believe what they show you, believe what you can show yourself.

The flat Earth models typically have a disc Earth with the sky as a dome over it and the sun hovering hundreds or maybe thousands of miles above the disc. The problem with this is the sunrise and sunset, but they may try to argue that it's actually just out of view behind hills or whatever.

Alright, so go to the Pacific coast along North or South America and look out over the ocean at sunset. Regardless of your beliefs, we all agree the Pacific Ocean is many thousands of miles across. There's no reason the sun should ever be obscured by the ocean. By flat-Earthers' own arguments, water lays flat. It shouldn't bulge high enough to obscure your view of a sun hovering hundreds or thousands of miles above it, no matter how far the sun goes.

Still not sold? Alright, drive to Lake Pontchartrain. There's huge powerlines going in a straight line across the lake. Look out along them and you can see the curvature of Earth along the row of powerlines.

Another experiment requires at least one helper and several miles of open lake. Each of you stand at opposite ends at night and communicate via phone or radio. One of you shine a bright light just above the waterline and see if the other person can see it. Since water lays flat, the light shouldn't really be obscured except maybe by little waves rippling on the lake. Raise the light and keep raising it until it comes into view. If you have to raise it several feet, especially double-digits, that undermines the notion of a flat Earth. I saw a similar experiment done in daylight with a helicopter and they couldn't see it rise into view until it was hovering a good ways over the shoreline. I don't remember how high it was, exactly, but it was high enough for anyone to walk under it comfortably.