Is Our Earth FLAT and Motionless, Not a Spinning Globe?

[gsjackson]

Put me in the first category, with a strong lean toward FE. Truthseeker is a flat earther. There are lots of other globalists who have put in a dyspeptic appearance on this thread. It is, after all, the conventional wisdom.

You cannot convince me that the sun is 93 million miles away. You cannot convince me that the earth is spinning around 1,000 mph at the equator, while it hurtles through space at 66,000 mph, in a solar system that is traveling 1.3 million mph, or whatever it is. You cannot convince me that I can see stars that are trillions of miles away. You cannot convince me that the earth curves eight inches per mile squared when I have looked out over an expanse of 120 miles and seen no curve, and looked down from 35,000 feet and seen no curve. You cannot convince me that the big bang is anything but science fiction.

No less an eminence than Stephen Hawking has said that the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system explain the known facts equally well. You're not going to convince anybody on this thread of anything unless you bring something new, and I don't know what that would be. Going over the same old ground -- blah. Not to discourage your eagerness to engage on an interesting and obviously important topic, but I think everybody here is worn out beating on it in this forum. It got kind of nasty at times.

[Aron]

@gsjackson

Put me in the first category, with a strong lean toward FE. Truthseeker is a flat earther. There are lots of other globalists who have put in a dyspeptic appearance on this thread. It is, after all, the conventional wisdom.

Well at least you are not a 'full' flat earther, whatever that means. Although you do seem to believe a lot of their points which is unfortunate.

You cannot convince me that the sun is 93 million miles away. You cannot convince me that the earth is spinning around 1,000 mph at the equator, while it hurtles through space at 66,000 mph, in a solar system that is traveling 1.3 million mph, or whatever it is. You cannot convince me that I can see stars that are trillions of miles away. You cannot convince me that the earth curves eight inches per mile squared when I have looked out over an expanse of 120 miles and seen no curve, and looked down from 35,000 feet and seen no curve. You cannot convince me that the big bang is anything but science fiction.

OK it seems like your main argument here is personal experience which you interpreted as proving flat earth. How do you know you were looking over a 120 mile expanse? I guess i need to check for you how much of a curve you're supposed to see at 35'000 feet and if it's to a degree where it would be obvious. But i'm pretty sure your standard commercial airliner doesn't go so high that it is an infinitely obvious curve. Although you could see it at plenty of heights if you tried and scientifically measured it in detail with the right equipment without just eyeballing it.

No less an eminence than Stephen Hawking has said that the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system explain the known facts equally well. You're not going to convince anybody on this thread of anything unless you bring something new, and I don't know what that would be. Going over the same old ground -- blah. Not to discourage your eagerness to engage on an interesting and obviously important topic, but I think everybody here is worn out beating on it in this forum. It got kind of nasty at times.

I'm going to have to ask where you got your source on that one since what is probably going to happen if i take a few minutes googling this claim about stephen hawking, is i'm going to find Stephen Hawking himself saying it's a fake quote, that you heard from a flat earther who copied the claim from another one all the way back to someone who originally lied. Also Ptolemy while he was not right about astronomy he did not claim Flat Earth, he only claimed Geocentrism and those are not compatible positions. I guess some Flat Earthers out there will use geocentrist arguments sometimes when they think they only serve to disprove Round Earth, and say the evidence for Geocentrism they present is wrong,but Geocentrists in general certainly didn't think so. And to me when the flat earthers do this they undermine themselves since then they get people to think critically about a model that is incompatible with modern cosmology. They would need to be careful about doing this since if people learn certain aspects of geocentrism are wrong for the reasons modern astronomy claims they will then figure out flat earth is wrong too. A delicate illusion so to speak.

Well I'm not trying to be nasty. But i wonder what exactly is required to make new points here, the main Flat Earth arguments are things like Eric Dubay's many claims and those of the Flat Earth society. Ultimately it's going to revolve around the same central issues of astronomy and what we know about the earth. If you could just say which Eric Dubay points i need to try to disprove that would help. Or if it's not that, then what else. Crepuscular rays, the Flat Earth version of eclipses, the motion of the stars, or whatever else it is.

If you don't want to argue about it, I get that that doesn't mean you've changed your mind. If Adama was here I would give up eventually if he 10 times in a row did not really respond to anything i said in a coherent way and just repeated the same thing, while adding in his fundie beliefs and telling everyone who doesn't believe them to burn in hell. So I sort of get your point in the context of long discussions in general. I just don't see why you're on the other side of the discussion this time.

[Moretorque]

Radar proves the earth is round, there is no reason too insult Adama in such a way. He is a direct pipeline to God you know......

[gsjackson]

Real quickly:

I could see Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta, and everything in between from an overlook in the Sierras. It's 120 miles between the two mountains. That's supposed to be over a mile and a half of curvature. None is visible.

When ascending in an airplane the horizon continuously rises to eye level. On a clear day in the Southwest at cruising altitude you can see 100 miles in either direction. No curvature.

I don't recall the video, but I'm pretty sure I heard Hawking himself speak those words, and recently (that is, on a recently circulated FE video). It's been alleged by several flat earthers that he did.

[Aron]

@gsjackson

How high up is the overlook? Something you should be aware of is you were on top of a mountain. And on mountains you can see over a lot more curvature because you're at a higher altitude.

The horizon does not 'rise' to eye level. The reason it looks that way is because you are not so high up that you no longer see a horizon AKA you are in orbit. That's how high up you have to be for the horizon to disappear.

Airplanes fly higher than mountains are at in altitude so it's no wonder you see far. Here's a calculator saying how far you're supposed to be able to see. Tell me the cruising altitude and i'll check if what you said is compatible.
http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm

Well you have no video to reference so here is what probably happened:The Flat Earthers cherry picked some quote where Hawking's describing the opinion someone else has and later in the video he says why he's against it, but they leave that part out. Somewhat similar to what they did in misquoting NeildeGrasse Tyson about the 'pear shaped' earth, although in that case they just left out how he said that it's only very very slightly pear shaped/fatter on the equator and to a human's eye it still looks like a perfect sphere.

[gsjackson]

@gsjackson

How high up is the overlook? Something you should be aware of is you were on top of a mountain. And on mountains you can see over a lot more curvature because you're at a higher altitude.

The horizon does not 'rise' to eye level. The reason it looks that way is because you are not so high up that you no longer see a horizon AKA you are in orbit. That's how high up you have to be for the horizon to disappear.

Airplanes fly higher than mountains are at in altitude so it's no wonder you see far. Here's a calculator saying how far you're supposed to be able to see. Tell me the cruising altitude and i'll check if what you said is compatible.
http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm

Well you have no video to reference so here is what probably happened:The Flat Earthers cherry picked some quote where Hawking's describing the opinion someone else has and later in the video he says why he's against it, but they leave that part out. Somewhat similar to what they did in misquoting NeildeGrasse Tyson about the 'pear shaped' earth, although in that case they just left out how he said that it's only very very slightly pear shaped/fatter on the equator and to a human's eye it still looks like a perfect sphere.

I wasn't on a high mountain. I'm not even sure it was still the Sierras that far north. I was at elevation, but probably not over 5,000 feet. I don't know what "see over a lot more curvature" means. I was probably 40 miles away from a line directly connecting the two mountains, and if there had been a mile and a half of curvature I would have noticed it.

I don't know what your second paragraph means.

That calculator is bogus. It says the horizon is 7.2 miles away at 35,000 feet. WTF? From an elevation of 4,000 feet here in Tucson I can see Mexico 60 miles away, so I'm pretty sure I can see further than that at 35,000.

OK, a pear-shaped object that looks like a perfect sphere. Right. Guess NASA reminded Tyson afterwards that the "photos" they've been producing have been of perfect spheres. We can all speculate about what was in videos we haven't seen, but what's the point? Obviously, Hawking opted for the Copernican theory, but I suspect he was correct that the Ptolemaic system lines up geometrically just as well, with the advantage that it doesn't have to invent ludicrous distances -- such as the sun 93 million miles away, and the stars quadrillions -- to make it all work out. You know, you can get a look at the sun from 35,000 feet up too, and it looks decidedly closer than on the ground. In the Andes they will tell you not to stay out in it very long if you go up another few thousand feet because of the greater intensity. Is that distance really going to make such a difference if it's 93 million miles away?

[Aron]

@gsjackson

I don't know what "see over a lot more curvature" means.

The higher your elevation the less of the earth is in your way. The most extreme example is being in orbit, then you can see a vast amount of the earth at once. The same principle applies when you increase elevation to lesser degrees, you get a broader view of the earth.


I don't know what you're saying either when you say the horizon always rises to eye level. There's no reason it would.

Who knows. It's not like you're posting pics of your observations or anything so I've got nothing to go on here.

Dude you should know what he meant by Pear shaped if you watch the video where the quote is mined from. He clarifies what it means. No NASA didn't have to tell him anything. Since i don't think you're going to make the effort to look up the video on your own i'll do it for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeWTrEA5fE
It's 5 minutes long, if you watch the whole video you will figure out that the Flat Earthers lied to you and Neil did not say what they claim. If you want to speed it up go to like 2 minutes 40 seconds in for the infamous 'Pear Shaped" quote and watch the part after that. He talks about how you couldn't even feel the mountains if you had a hand that could hold the earth, the point of that is that the earth is only slightly 'pear shaped' in that there is this tiny bulge below the equator that you could only find out about with scientific instruments not the human eye.
"Cosmically speaking, we're practically a perfect sphere"-NDT

I wouldn't know much about your video where hawking supposedly admits Ptolemy had a good model but it isn't proving anything really.

The distance to the sun wouldn't do anything, other than maybe the atmosphere thinning out a bit higher up in the mountains and allowing more sunlight to directly hit you. Maybe that does something, I wouldn't know.

[gsjackson]

@gsjackson

I don't know what "see over a lot more curvature" means.

The higher your elevation the less of the earth is in your way. The most extreme example is being in orbit, then you can see a vast amount of the earth at once. The same principle applies when you increase elevation to lesser degrees, you get a broader view of the earth.

So when you get in orbit you can't see any curvature? OK.

I don't know what you're saying either when you say the horizon always rises to eye level. There's no reason it would.

Hmmmm, seems pretty self-evident. Well, maybe you can understand why it wouldn't -- you know, because it's curving downward, so you would have to look downward to see the horizon.

Dude you should know what he meant by Pear shaped if you watch the video where the quote is mined from. He clarifies what it means. No NASA didn't have to tell him anything. Since i don't think you're going to make the effort to look up the video on your own i'll do it for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeWTrEA5fE

Yes, he clarified it. So? That arrogant buffoon is an actor and a poseur, who has no better idea about the shape of the earth than you or I do, and I don't care what he has to say about anything. The only "argument" I've ever seen from him is to drop a ball and say "that's gravity." Wowww. How could I have missed that? And please don't share his credentials with us. You don't get credentialed unless you accept the prevailing paradigm.

[Aron]

@gsjackson

So?

So it was a cherrypick by the Flat Earthers who were deliberately lying.

I agree he doesn't have a better idea than me about the shape of the earth. At least he doesn't have a better idea than most people do, since most people believe the same idea as him: that the earth is round.

Anyway all you're doing right now is saying that your personal experiences contradict what is supposed to be true. That you saw something that you're supposedly not supposed to be able to see on a round earth. It's not like you have a photo that lets me see what you're talking about. It would be more productive if instead of talking about a personal anecdote you can't really prove to me anyways, you talked about how a Flat Earth cosmology makes fundamental sense and isn't an ad hoc explanation of things that are observed in a way that is supposed to fit a pre-existing paradigm. Although historically it is ad hoc as has been the case for centuries with the flat earth society saying this stuff to support Christianity which in the bible describes a flat earth.

Like what is the flat earth explanation for shadows like this:

showing up on the moon? Circular shadows come from Spherical objects so that means the earth is round.

[gsjackson]

Please, if you're going to go after the flat earthers at least find out what they're saying. Actually listen to Dubay's 200 proofs, or any other reasonably comprehensive FE video, and you will hear eclipses and everything else addressed. But you really do need to try to grasp the concept of the horizon always rising to eye level as you go higher, which you can prove to yourself.

And yes, the FEers shouldn't waste any time trying to help Tyson make even more of an ass of himself. He's got it covered.

[OutWest]

Please, if you're going to go after the flat earthers at least find out what they're saying. Actually listen to Dubay's 200 proofs, or any other reasonably comprehensive FE video, and you will hear eclipses and everything else addressed. But you really do need to try to grasp the concept of the horizon always rising to eye level as you go higher, which you can prove to yourself.

And yes, the FEers shouldn't waste any time trying to help Tyson make even more of an ass of himself. He's got it covered.

Navigational computations clearly confirm that the earth is a sphere. Were the earth flat, navigational computations would begin to deviate as you progressed from the north pole and would be wildly different by the time you reached the equator. Known distances between points based on values per minute of travel in an East - West direction are based on computations for a sphere requiring smaller values between longitudinal lines as one progresses south from the equator. Trying to impose a flat Earth model on this reduces known and vastly practiced navigational techniques to nonsense and adds mollions of square miles to the surface area of the earth that do not exist with the globe earth based computations- computations that are very accurate with the globe based model of the earth.
.

[Aron]

@gsjackson

I already saw debunking of many of the proofs listed in the 200 proofs video before, it was all very convincing. I don't need additional convincing of the falseness of Flat Earth. There's convergent evidence from all over. The rock cycle, carbon dating(much of which shows objects to be older than 6000 years), various astronomical evidence like supernovas and so on, which were not invented recently as even in old times people sometimes recorded the disappearance of a star from the sky. The shadow on the moon, eclipses, Evolution, the circumnavigation of the world which does not make sense on a flat earth since it would require Magellan to constantly have turned to not hit the antartic, meteors, dinosaur skeletons(convergent evidence with meteor impacts), the visible spherical planets in the solar system like Jupiter, all sorts of things. It's totally obvious. Honestly I believe if a perfect lie detector was ever invented and any flat earther was continually questioned about their beliefs they would be shown 90% of the time to be lying when they continue to defend it after certain proofs are shown to them. The other 10% of the time they are too stupid to understand somehow.

[Cornfed]

If we can put the dating and speculative stuff aside, how have you offered evidence of anything?

[gsjackson]

If we can put the dating and speculative stuff aside, how have you offered evidence of anything?

Corn, please, he just needs to declare victory, and look down upon the ignoramuses from the lofty perch of superior(19-year-old?) intellect. Kind of like when the U.S. military gets bogged down in a Zio-adventure -- declare victory, proclaim moral superiority, and get the hell out of Dodge.

[Aron]

@gsjackson
@Cornfed

Cornfed you didn't mention me in your post. When you don't do this i get no notification and have no reason to believe you responded. Since i happened to check it today I got to notice your response. Next time, put an @Aron in there. The same goes with you gsjackson when you mention me as otherwise i have no way to answer your claim about me when i have no knowledge of it.

If i wanted to just declare my opinion to be more true than yours i wouldn't have spent so long in this thread, I would have made maybe 1 or 2 posts. I am trying to convince you but it is difficult when you will not respond to any specific points.

Cornfed, for starters you could read my response to the facts Winston thought proved Flat Earth. You want something that requires zero speculation so i'll just use the Flat Earth model of reality and observational data to disprove it for this one:

Flat Earthers say crepuscular rays prove the earth is flat and the sun is close. If that is true, we should only see crepuscular rays near the few places on Earth the physical sun is supposed to pass directly over as it travels around the flat earth on its floating sun circuit. This is not the case. They occur all over the place. Do you have an answer for this contradiction?

Gsjackson, your analogy makes it look like i purposefully left the conversation which is misleading when you know full well you and Cornfed didn't notify me of any new replies. It's not at the top of this subforum anymore, it's not going to show up when i look at the main page. The other issue with it is that you are just framing the conversation as a competition where i want to 'win'. "Winning' an argument doesn't achieve anything, what 'winning' an argument usually means is one side runs out of things to say and stops talking since they can't prove they're right, but still believes what they argued in general. I'd rather just persuade you that the Earth is not Flat than 'win' an argument and get you to stop talking because you can't prove me wrong or justify your beliefs to me. Even if i'm right it doesn't really matter since i'd rather have you be convinced and come to a more true conclusion about the earth. It's doing you a favor if anything, you're going to just look stupid to other people if you tell them you think the Earth is flat, so you have a lot of reasons to take my argument into consideration instead of ignoring me.