Some time ago I commented on a post involving @lasseehlers and may have expressed some incredulity in the theory of a flat Earth that he seems quite attached to. He said I needed to watch a documentary that would convince me otherwise. Could I be bothered to spend an hour on that? He bugged me about it again, so I decided to see what the fuss was about. I have made notes so you do not have to watch it. See comments at the end.
02:00 'flat earth' is a top search term. So what?
03:00 Presented by rapper ODD TV. So not a scientist.
04:00 Google ad says 'The Earth is flat'. No idea why. Maybe marketing thought it would get attention. Seems Youtube has lots of flat earth videos. I bet a lot of them are debunking the idea. Plus there are probably videos about 'bronies'.
06:30 The sun looks like it is moving relative to us. Well we do not feel like are on a moving thing as a plane does not feel like it is moving in smooth flight, so it might look that way. Also, it looks small from here. The size of the sun may be distorted by having its light pass though a lot of atmosphere near the horizon. There are some optical illusions related to this too.
07:15 Shows the sun bouncing off the horizon. I'll assume this in the far north in summer when the run does not actually set.
07:30 Dave Murphy (programmer and fireman, not a scientist). He talks about the way the sun's rays appear to diverge. If parallel lines are coming toward you they will do that. It is simple perspective. As they come from what is essentially a point source it is impossible for them to look parallel. They would trace back to empty sky.
09:00 Seems we need the flat earthers to tell us what the sun really is. Hundreds of years of study by scientists does not seem to have achieved that using all sorts of highly accurate instruments.
09:40 Mr Murphy shows how the sun is light a small light held above a table illuminating a patch. So why does the sun seem to go down to the horizon rather than moving away whilst still high up?
10:00 He says we would not be able to see the light once it passed over, but we can clearly see it from a dark part of his table. As the sun would have to be high enough to clear mountains and high flying planes we should be able to see it a long way off if the Eath is flat.
12:20 He talks about 'atmospheric lensing' which seems to accept that the appearance of the sun could change.
13:20 The Moon produces 'cold light'? Maybe the object blocking the moonlight is also keeping that area from losing heat. Anyone managed to create cold light artificially?
13:30 Can see stars through the Moon. So what is it made of? Holey cheese?
14:20 Professor R. Foster claims the Moon is made of plasma. Cannot find out what he was a scientist of. Does not explain persistent lunar features or tides.
15:00 Fake lunar landings. Hardly worth a comment. A lack of emotional display by astronauts is not compelling evidence of fakery. They were hard-boiled military men.
16:40 Johnny Giampapa (tattooist, not a scientist). Says NASA could take a picture from space of an Australian upside down. There is no 'up' on a globe or in space and they could invert the image anyway. So people 'down under' are not in danger of falling off the Earth.
18:00 Astronaut Don Pettit says he would go back to the Moon, but we 'destroyed the technology'. Well it needed the biggest rocket every made and we do not have that now. I think Elon Musk is looking to build one, but they do not come cheap. Getting to the Moon was largely about beating the Russians and once it was done the cost of repeating it was hard to justify. It does look like new lunar missions will happen soon, so we shall see how the flatties respond to those. No doubt they will claim fakery again, but maybe we will be able to see people on the Moon with telescopes.
18:40 Buzz Aldrin says "we didn't go there", but the full quote suggests he meant we did not go there since the old missions. Selective quoting can change apparent meaning, as can selective evidence.
19:10 Giampapa says water is 'magically attached to the globe'. So is everything else then. It is called gravity and is a very well understood physical principle. He also says 'outer space is a fantasy'.
22;00 'Bubbles in space'. Implies stuff is filmed in a pool, but any moisture that forms on their suits would freeze in a vacuum and might drift off. Call me sceptical on the fakery angle. If you see actual footage from the pools where they practice it looks very different. The footage that pupports to show astronauts on harnesses is not convincing either. Clothes will hang differently when there is no gravity and may sometimes give the appearance of there being straps that were edited out. This is carefully selected footage.
23:30 Space travel is amazing, but I am bewildered by the eyebrows of the young lady passing comment. What holds those up?
25:30 Some glitches on images from ISS. Maybe you will get some as you receive signals from something zooming around the planet. No system is perfect and I bet the flatties trawled through a lot of footage to find these.
27:00 Eddie Bravo (jiu jitsu instructor, not a scientist). Says all footage from space is CGI. Well some shots are impossible to record for real when making science shows and we have plenty of real stuff anyway. Where is the one image taken from high altitude to show a flat Earth?
30:00 Eddie does not believe in gravity. Says if it can hold the oceans, then why not a helium balloon? Those literally float on air like a boat floats on water by being less dense. Seems it does not work on butterflies either. He must be amazed by airplanes.
30:40 Gravity is explained by 'relative density'. So what defines 'up'? They are right about why things float though, apart from missing our that gravity is necessary. They say the textbooks were changed when NASA started, but earlier books on gravity are still relevant.
32:00 Wernher von Braun was responsible for some NASA engineering. He had the experience from the German V weapon rockets that the US and Russia wanted regardless of his political past. It gets a bit surreal and irrelevant around here to fill some time.
33:30 Santos Bonacci (musician/astrotheologist, not a scientist). Doubts evolution and says NASA run Disney. Seems Jesuits invented the globe in 1542. Why would they? Various cultures had worked out the world was not flat by then through astronomical observations. He says the planets are all lunimous bodies. That makes eclipses hard to explain. He says the constellations have not distorted over long periods, but given the distances involved we have not travelled far enough to make much difference. How would he explain all the observations made from ground based telescopes if he thinks those from space are fake? Why do we see different stars depending on whether we are north or south of the equator? The Earth moving at 66,600pmh suggests diabolical intervention to him. Dissing astrologers will not upset the scientists or help his case.
39:00 A mountain is visible 35 miles away, but that is from a plane. Being high up extends how far you can see. Atmospheric refraction may also extend it.
42:00 Talks to various pilots who say the Earth is flat, but then the curvature is not obvious unless you are really high up and maybe they meant it looks flat. Some of that seems to be have filmed surrepticiously, so I assume the pilots were not told the reasons for the questions, which may have been leading. Planes to not need to 'dip their noses' to follow the curvature. That is not how gravity works.
43:30 Astronatut Chris Hadfield says the world is 'flat gorgeous'. That is just an expression you can find elsewhere.
44:40 A flight manual says to assume the Earth is flat and non-rotating. That is to simplify the maths and would not cause significant errors for most cases. Will they show all the international flight corridors? For a flat Earth with the North Pole at the centre routes between southern locations ought to be much longer than those in the north.
47:00 Shows a 'crashed satellite' with a helium balloon attached. It seems remarkably undamaged. Maybe it was actually some instrumentation sent up on a balloon. That is a real and accepted thing. Look up Google's Project Loon. Balloons are cheaper than satellites, but it is harder to know where they will go.
47:20 Ah, they acknowledge that Project Loon exists. This does not mean balloons are doing all the high altitude work. Would we not see them up there? You can see satellites with a telescope and the ISS with the naked eye, as I have done.
50:00 Balloon launches done from Antarctica where we 'are not allowed to travel'. Has anyone tried? It is not the easiest place to get to anyway. My own ancestor Robert Falcon Scott died on his way back from the South Pole long before NASA built a wall.
51:20 Tanner Stewart (entrepreneur, not a scientist). Talks about the 'ice wall' that keeps the water in.
55:00 'You cannot make water stick the bottom of a ball'. This assumes that anyone is on the 'top'. Look up gravity.
56:00 Sceptic sends lots of questions to Neil deGrasse Tyson and does not get answers. I expect he has better things to do than debate nonsense.
So there was nothing here to change my mind. You need a very narrow mind to ignore all the evidence that we live on an oblate spheroid. The video makes out that NASA (or the Jesuits) are being the conspiracy, but it seems the Russians, Chinese and other space agencies are also in on it, despite being in competition with the US. They could have provided evidence to show it is flat. Not that most people would really care. On a local scale it is effectively flat.
NASA does get a lot of money, but much of that is for military purposes. I would be more concerned about that.
The conspiracy would have to extend to millions of:
- Scientists of various kinds.
- Astronomers in particular who have made lots of measurements and are able to predict various events based on a round Earth.
- Meteorologists. The rotation of the Earth affects hurricanes and other storms.
- Long distance pilots. They have to take the curvature into consideration.
- Sailors who have navigated by the stars for centuries.
- Radio amateurs. They have to bounce signals off the ionosphere to extend their range.
- Architects. On really large bridges the tops of the pillars will be further apart than the bases.
- The space industry is building thousands of satellites to send into space. They are not going on balloons. Many are in geostationary orbit which gives a some delay to signals.
- Cartographers. There are map projections that show the North Pole at the centre, but others do not and these date back centuries. Distances and areas will be distorted on a flat projection.
If gravity does not exist then a lot of things are hard to explain. Newton's equations successfully predict lots of things and are used in all sorts of fields.
This video needed to find some more convincing proponents. Any scientist who had proof that we are not on a globe would get plenty of attention. Science is based on proof even if there are rivalries and powerful forces to surpress stuff that is unpopular.
I get that people want to have 'forbidden knowledge' and call others ignorant, but making stuff up by ignoring evidence is no way forward. The internet gives them exposure, but that does not mean they are right.
