Imagine how odd it would look if all the heavenly bodies we see are more or less round-ish, and only Earth was flat?
[ChatGPT image generation via Krea, and mjr.]
For the Flat Earthers Out There:
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Imagine how odd it would look if all the heavenly bodies we see are more or less round-ish, and only Earth was flat?
[ChatGPT image generation via Krea, and mjr.]
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I assume they have to believe on some level that humanity sits at the center of the universe and everything else exists for our convenience.
The thing is, though, these people do not actually believe, in any meaningful sense, that the Earth is flat.
They just like saying it is, because they know it pisses people off.
If they genuinely believed in a Pizza Planet, their watches would be set to UTC, because the existence of time zones requires a Football Planet.
They are just a by-product of a culture that fetishises debate. And the fetishisation of debate, in turn, is coming from people who believe every human interaction should have a clearly-defined winner and loser, reality is malleable and nothing is impossible if you have enough money.
We’ll need a more powerful and better-named telescope than the Webb to see the Great A’tuin.
I found Dan Olson’s take on the essential Flat Earth Question: “WHY???” most enlightening. Too long to watch? The answer (at 37 mins) is… Because QAnon.
Oh yeah, the other bodies are “round-ish”. It’s just that they’re not “sphere-ish”. Everyone of them is also a disk, but they’re always aligned to face the earth, because the earth (and the people on it) are the center of everything. It’s disks everywhere you look.
I think bluerizlagirl @2 is partly correct. “Partly”, because I suspect that there is a subset of flat earthers who sincerely believe this stuff. Granted, these are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. As I like to say, they couldn’t find their butts with both hands tied behind their back, but sincerity of belief and probability of said belief being true are not tightly correlated (e.g., see religion).
Frankly, I don’t think they really believe it. I think they just really want to believe it and they don’t entirely recognize the difference.
That’s why they’re so fundamentally insecure about everything. There’s some part of them that knows they’re bullshitting and their entire personality is based on not acknowleding that fact.
It seems they really believe it – I have seen quite agitated reactions in some videos when these folks are presented with naked-eye evidence and there could be some bizarre personality glitch as jimf describes.
But, planets? This just in: what planets, there are no planets (or stars), it’s all a lie.
It appears that things are evolving from round-Earth negationism to general space negationism. Some extreme cases are denying the existence of, say, the Moon and from there the rest of space (what pictures we get come from the evil scientists pranking us).
The justification? Well, the Moon appears a bit pale during the day, this “proves” it’s an illusion, or maybe a hologram contrived by those same evil scientists. Obviously, the space probe pics are all CGI of course.
Yes, a few of such people actually exist, and there’s no way to convince someone fallen into such a Sarlacc-deep pit of paranoia. A minority small in numbers certainly, but disturbing nonetheless.
I’m sure they believe the nonsense but see no reason to do anything but laugh at such credulous nonsense.
So… the sun is a sphere, the moon and all visible planets are spherical, every month the moon goes from crescent to full and back again, and if you drop water it becomes a sphere, never a pancake, but the earth is flat.
What stellar logic.
This thread, in particular those expressing incredulity that anyone sincerely believes this bullshit, is evidence of something I’ve observed many times: if you’re top 5% “bright” (however you define our measure that) your superior intellect has a weakness. It can’t, at a deep level, comprehend just how stupid some people are. It’s like a light-year – you know, intellectually, how far that is. But your monkey brain, your intuition, breaks down and nothing you can do can make you *feel* it.
So it is with idiocy.
You understand the*concept* of dumb people, but no amount of evidence will allow you to *feel* just how thick they are. Some people are *light-years* thick.
Just look in the White House.
Nah, they believe it (outside any possible grifters)
The reason things like other planets or timezones don’t bother them is because they have an emotional need to believe this, and not a need to have coherent beliefs. You can see this in their counter arguments: space doesn’t really exist or the planets are smaller and closer, ect. It seems they want to feel they know secret truths about the world, that there are powerful forces running things (it’s not all just a mess)
The rest of us do the same thing, just with different emotional motivations
Some of them believe it, some of them don’t. Some of the believers are just stupid, some are just really good at compartmentalisation, and some have constructed really elaborate rationalisations. Some are able to re-evaluate their beliefs in the light of new (to them) evidence, most are probably not.
There are a lot of people, particularly (it seems) in the US, who (a) don’t believe anything they haven’t directly verified by their own experience, and (b) have incredibly limited experiences by modern standards. They’ve never travelled outside their own state, (maybe not even to their own state capital). They maybe don’t even know anybody that has. They don’t read books (other than maybe the Bible, or at least selected excerpts of it). They’re functionally illiterate. They’ve never looked at anything in the night sky through a telescope or a pair of binoculars. Sure, they have access to TV, radio, and the internet, but nothing they see or hear through those media is real to them unless it’s validated by their own incredibly narrow experience. Time zones? Other planets? Yeah, they’ve heard of these things, but that’s as far as it goes. They’ve no direct experience of them, so they’re not really real.
On a similar note, I’ve be surprised a few times by apparently intelligent people who expressed surprise the first time they noticed the moon during daytime, and somehow made to adulthood before that happened.
I generally get away from wackos as fast as I can. Just don’t engage with them. Their position is idiotic and is a waste of time to address. Someone getting past grade school with these beliefs isn’t operating very effectively in the modern world.
Woo hoo! Twelve comments in the bin, and I am the first to comment on the dual Mars (Marses?).
And then there’s that ship that fell off the disc.
@9 sonofrojblake
So you’re saying that your wise don’t know how it feels to be Thick as a Brick ?
@14 Reginald Selkirk,
Yes, well, some are indeed geared toward the average rather than the exceptional.
If we are critiquing the image there are multiple issues besides the twinned Mars.
Since when did Jupiter have rings?
Where have Asia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica gone? Why is South America so tiny?
Why does North America dominate that pancake?
Why does AI exhibit the same biases and ignorance as the programmers?
Tehtys @16
Also, the image has the sun at the centre instead of the earth. A flat earth is incompatible with heliocentrism.
@Tethys
Jupiter does have a ring system, although I doubt that’s why there are rings in that image
Dangerousbeans @18.
You beat me to it.
Jupiter’s ring system was first detected by Voyager 1 in 1979.
Its not the only one. The rings of Uranus were first detected in 1977 during an occultation event. Uranus has 13 known rings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_system
There are many others including some exoplanets that have their own ring systems.
My take on AI is it is an idiot regurgitator with no way of verifying its utterances. It is just as capable as any human of disseminating bullshit.
Oh heck, if we’re going down that road, why is the moon farther away than Mars (both of them) and Jupiter? And what’s the deal with the label for Mercury- why is it halfway to Venus? I’m not even going to mention the sailing ship.
Genuine flat-earthers (vs. the trolls) can be the source of tons of inadvertent entertainment. For example, I saw one commentary that said water always runs downhill, so if the earth was a sphere, why isn’t all of the water in the southern hemisphere? C’mon, that’s so dumb it makes The Three Stooges look like a group of astrophysicists. I mean, I live at 43 degrees north latitude but all of the people and trees aren’t diagonal to the ground. Do they think this is a proof that the earth is flat? It’s like they have a child’s reference frame with an absolute up and down. I’m sorry but I can’t help but laugh at any adult who really believes that. They deserve derision, if for no other reason than to dissuade others from saying ridiculous things. You get to say things like that if you’re 6, but not if you’re 26 or 46 or 66.
Does anyone know how they explain why you can’t see Mt Everest from Mt Washington?
Or why you can’t see the Empire State Building in NYC from the Hancock tower in Boston?
@2 bluerizzler, @20 markmckee
The small near solar disc displaces the dark around it, so if you’re in a different time zone there is too much dark around you to see the light.
Refer back to @9 sonofrojblake if you’re having trouble with this explanation.
also #20, they like to say “cuz refraction”
all the flat earthers i follow seem to have a deep mistrust of science and tell you to “do your own research.”
many have religious reason’s and also are creationists.
can’t say for sure, but only a few prominent ones seem to be grifters, doing it for the money, like Mark Sargent.
“Behind the Curve” is a documentary about flat earthers. it was entertaining. a couple flat earthers tried doing experiments to show a flat earth, but actually showed the curvature or the rotation of earth.
Also look up “the final experiment”
some flat earthers and globers went to Antarctica last december to witness the 24 hour sun. The 24 hour sun is not possible by flat earth proposed maps. but yet, there it is, going around 360 degrees without setting.
one flat earther actually changed his mind, a now agrees with a sphere earth orbiting the sun.
… and another thing! Those ain’t orbits, they’s spirals. TWO spirals… Were doomed!
That’s where Space Is Fake comes in.
Also, what’s the 2nd Mars doing there?
@25
Circling for a sneak attack in a pincer formation.
I can mostly only speak for the one flat earther I had the misfortune of working with for an extended period, but the common worldview isn’t a flat earth and the rest of the cosmos intact. It’s full heavenly spheres stuff, and various other miscellany I can confirm from dealing with this one guy (which may or may not extrapolate further) includes: The moon and the sun look about the same size in the sky because they’re the same size, gravity isn’t a real thing, and the disingenuous fallback positions when called on your shit can include, verbatim, “I just don’t trust that government math”.