I wasn’t sure if you were a trolley or not at first, but now I’ve pretty much made up my mind. Good day.
(And if you’re so concerned what’s “beyond Antarctica”, why not go and find out already?)
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The Elder Things and their shoggoths at the mountains of madness, right?
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So, again, how do you explain time zones with a flat Earth?
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These people obviously all live in the Northern Hemisphere, don’t travel far and never, ever think about anything South of the equator, because that’s always seemed like a pretty obvious stumbling block to this idea (in addition to all the other stumbling blocks). Little things like the sun completely fail to work on a flat Earth the way they do in the real world. Day length and seasons would be totally wrong. I really don’t get how the fuck they think the sun works.
But that’s just what “the man” wants you to think!
Ah, but if you see the Azimuthal Equidistant map above, they’re clearly along a straight line! (So obviously the airlines are part of the conspiracy, along with, but not limited to: NASA, astronomers, telecommunications companies and everyone else who works with satellites or their output - including GPS, sailors, climatologists, geologists, globe manufacturers…)
Something something George Soro’s money.
“Intelligent falling,” obviously.
Oh man, I wish. People arguing about how many elephants there are would be so much better than this flavor of nonsense.
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That and seasons are super tough to deal with - most flat earth models I’ve seen have the Sun as a small, local light that moves around in the sky (they often have the Earth as a dome with the Sun and Moon at the top). No idea how the heck time zones or seasons are supposed to be possible with that. Also, in a model like that you’d be able to see the light from the Sun coming up ahead of you when it was dark, and we can’t.
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Wow, I wonder how they explain this one away? God just has a big lighting rig or something? How does GPS work on a two dimensional plane? How can there be weeks of light in the Arctic circle and normal day/night patterns further south? So many questions, so many answers I really don’t care about.
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You don’t know how gravity works or how HARD it is to have a STABLE orbit.
Here is a gravity simulator based on real math. Try to get any asteroid in to circle the earth and not the sun. Hell getting one to orbit the sun in a stable manner is next to impossible.
Wait - what am I saying y’all don’t believe in the basic, measurable forces in action that we have had a decent grasp of for 500 years.
I gotta go to bed. Night. Don’t break him.
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While I was in the community,I found it a fascinating look into insanity, and I did actually learn a lot about real physics when looking for answers to some of the tougher questions. The beliefs and believers themselves are just bonkers, and none of it works without other conspiracy theories (‘They’ don’t want us to know what’s on the other side of the Antarctic wall!!’). The true believers (which there actually are) are all totally unreachable, but like I said, sometimes finding a counterargument can be a learning experience about actual science 
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Yea, that midnight sun and the winter dark period is a hoax you see.
I better call my dad who lives in Tromsø and inform him that the charade is up.
All us Norwegians are in on the conspiracy of course.
I am actually going there next summer and going to see the midnight sun for the first time myself, I have only visited there in winter previously. We are going to climb* a mountain called Balsokken which peak is at 458 metres above sea level. Can wait
*No actual climbing, but it is a pretty mean hike 
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But what part does sea level play in the Spherical Earth Conspiracy?!?!??!?!?
I can only assume that global,err i mean disc warming is real and soon the Antarctic Ice wall is melting.
Which is wierd, I cant quite figure out how or why ice ages work on a disc… or do I?!? :suspicious
smiley:
@Mrgto Send me a your skype info and I will show you the midnight sun next summer, I am serious
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Except, you know, you’ve added a bunch of enormous fucking spaces into the map that don’t exist in the real world. That’s pretty damn different. You don’t think anyone lives in the Southern Hemisphere, who might have noticed that there are tens of thousands of miles of extra distance between locations that don’t show up on the globe?
Dude. Gravity isn’t rocket science - you can literally figure it out using junior high school mathematics.“Rocket science,” on the other hand, is quite difficult because the degree of precision needed to deliberately put something in orbit is extreme. But since we’re on the subject - what the hell do you think satellites are? We use them on a daily basis now (e.g. GPS), so they obviously exist, and they’re obviously in the sky.
Does that mean “ignoring what they said”? Because your objection seems to do that. If you throw a paper airplane on a bus, does it zoom backwards at the speed of the bus? Obviously not, for the same reason.
Yup, basically. This has vexed me about Flat Earthers - they just completely ignore all the issues around the Sun, daylight and seasons. I was trying to figure out how this could work, as I was writing a fantasy that took place on a flat Earth. Eventually I gave up, because there’s no way to make it work that doesn’t just become insanely complex and arbitrary. The Sun would have to be a spotlight (otherwise you’d see it all the time, albeit more dimly), which is, moreover, masked - and the shape of the mask would change constantly, on top of that, in really arbitrary ways. Also light would have to travel in weird, not-straight lines in the atmosphere, otherwise you wouldn’t get sunsets, etc. The whole thing is a nightmare headache. It’s much easier to say, “here’s a flat Earth, so what are the consequences?” and then accept that the result would be completely and utterly unlike our own Earth. But what that world would be like is so alien to lived experience that it’s still difficult to get your head around it, making it not a great setting for a fiction, really. Terry Pratchett made it work - as a joke - with his own set of humorous physics that he developed over years, and there was still a good bit of hand-waving and sleight-of-hand to get you to not examine the premise too closely. The irony that Flat Earthers prefer their simpler model because the reality is too complex for them, but they end up creating problems that require ever-more absurdly complex explanations that make reality elegantly simple in comparison (or would, if they acknowledged them). It’s the same with Creationists.
This is part of why I’m convinced that these people are all Northern Hemisphere - their projection map, centering on the North Pole, allows for Arctic summers (inasmuch as their model of the sun works at all), but fails utterly for Antarctic summers. (But the flat Earth model just generally fails the Southern Hemisphere entirely, on multiple levels.)
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With Flat Earth Theory, the Sun is a spotlight, yes?
Please explain to me how, with your “United Nations” disc and a spotlight:
- How the sun can be the closest to directly overhead at noon in each time zone
- How equinoxes (~12 hour day for the entire globe) work
- How the entire ring making up the Antarctic Circle can have Midnight Sun (that is, 24 hours of sunlight) in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer (Northern Hemisphere’s winter).
Spotlights don’t work like that.
Or, how about this:
GPS works on math. Specifically, geometry.
When you receive a signal from one GPS transmitter, the delay from the time signal, which is encoded into the transmission along with the transmitter’s location, will tell you exactly how far away the receiver is, limiting your possible locations to a hollow sphere, most of whose surface doesn’t intersect the surface of the earth.
A second transmitter will create a second hollow sphere, and the overlap between the two will be a circle more-or-less perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, intersecting the surface in (probably) two places.
A third transmitter will create a third hollow sphere, and, at this point, there are only two possible places that could be that precise distance from those three transmitters (the other being in space, exactly the same distance on their other side).
You can pick up GPS transmissions. Most smart phones have GPS receivers. The math, the trigonometry, is so simple that you could work it out by hand, and calculate how far away the GPS transmitters are.
And the simple, mathematical fact is: if the GPS satellites lie about where they are, they don’t work. The spheres don’t line up properly in order to find that one position that you can possibly be occupying.
So, either everyone who has ever coded a GPS app (and, as I said, the math is really easy, you can probably code one yourself) is in on the conspiracy and is hiding the fact that the GPS transmitters are wherever they’d have to be to work with a Flat Earth…
Or the GPS transmitters are arrayed in a sphere, around a spherical(-ish) globe, exactly as they say they are.
And there’s an easy way to test this: get (or code) a GPS tester app, and start asking satellites where and how far away they are.
If the altitude reported is about 20,000 km and the time differential is about .0667 seconds (the time it takes light to travel that distance), then the GPS transmitters are telling the truth about where they are (which makes sense, because they wouldn’t function otherwise).
And if they’re telling the truth, then you just have to go around the world making records of where each GPS transmitter says it is, and its distance, and you’ll either end up with a round world or you won’t.
Since there are tons of people, many of them amateurs, who have coded GPS apps all around the world, I consider it but extraordinarily unlikely that one of them hasn’t noticed the math not lining up with that of a round globe.
Or, just for shits and giggles: if the Earth is a disc, how does Polaris always point North in the northern hemisphere and the Southern Cross always point South in the southern hemisphere?
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How about if we go way, way, way, way old?
There was this dude called Eratosthenes. Lived in hellenic times, librarian of that library in Alexandria. He read in a book that said there was a certain town in the south of Egypt where the sun shined directly downward on the summer solstice at noon. That is, a stick put into the ground cast exactly no shadow. Now in Alexandria, and in most places in the world, a stick does cast a shadow at noon on the summer solstice. You can actually verify yourself with a friend: pick a friend a good bit further north or south than you, go out (this should work on december 21st too by the way) and put a stick on the ground. Measure how long the shadow it casts is. You can use your two different measurements to calculate 1: that the earth isn’t flat (if it were, your shadows would be the same length, unless you don’t think all the sun’s rays are parallel by the time they reach us), and 2: how big the earth is by calculating the angle between the lines you’ve created and the as-the-crow-flies distance between you and your friend. That’s what Eratosthenes did and got less than 20% error. Someone reused his calculation method with our modern data and things are looking good for you: you should have the earth’s circumference to within less than 1%.
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LIES.
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Last I heard, Amundsen–Scott was rapidly being buried under snow and ice due to internal heating and precipitation, so I think she is safe for a while.
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This thread is a hoot.
And some of you are really nice, patient people.
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