Antarctica seems a bit much when they could just go to Alaska or Canada if they’re from the US or Norway, Sweden, Finland or Siberia if they’re from Europe. Or are they Southern hemisphere based?
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I could claim that all dog shit is chemically composed of gold and that would be as valid and useful as anything these people have to say.
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snacks
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The flerfers will claim the panel is rigged.
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Can I have the big cash prize if I say the answer is the unholy union of fundamentalist religion and Facebook?
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Their thinking - sorry ‘thinking’ - is that because the Sun circles the North Pole in their flat model of the World, it is perfectly okay to have permanent day during the Northern Hemisphere summer; but that can’t possibly happen in the South six months later.
Dave McKeegan on YouTube is the rationalist going on the trip. He’s done a video explaining the flat Earth pov, how he plans to work, and goes into some detail how the flat earthers are trying to worm their way out of it:
(He’s a lucky devil - I’ve always wanted to go to Antarctica).
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A huge part about being a flat earther is that you have to believe there is the largest conspiracy ever. Pretty much every scientist, students of the sciences, people who work in aerospace, aviation, shipping, etc. all have to be “in” on it. And what is the motivation for this conspiracy? Why would people want to conceal the true shape of the earth? How has this billion-member conspiracy not had any defectors?
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You’re exactly right – if you have more than two brain cells to rub together. But if you’re a flat earther (or “flerf”) then of course you broadly believe that the Gleason azimuthal projection map is not a projection of a sphere, but instead an actual Cartesian map, showing the ice wall around the flat earth. Therefore going to Antarctica is impossible; or if it’s not impossible to go there, then it’s definitely true that there’s no such thing as 24-hour sun there.
THAT’S why it has to be Antarctica.
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The object is what? To shame these people? To follow their eventual transformation from ignorance to MIT grad? Is this about educating the country one family at a time?
Why just Flat Earthers? Climate Deniers, Crisis Actors, Vaccine morons, Election deniers… gravity unbelievers - casting potential is huge.
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If they’re going to humour the delusions of people attention-hungry enough to go on a TV show (to be clear, I’d prefer they didn’t at all), then mockery and shaming them is the only appropriate approach. It doesn’t matter if they’re evangelisers or run-of-the-mill, because they’re normalising pseudo-science and woo and because flat-earthers almost always believe in and promote far-right and white supremacist talking points as part of their conspiracism.
Whatever one thinks of organised religion, the non-fundie varieties do bring real and substantial value to the lives of a lot of believers. Flat-Earth delusions offer nothing except empty, attention-seeking contrarianism.
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I’ve seen enough flat Earther videos to know how this goes - they do some reasonable experiments whose results they ignore because they don’t show a flat Earth; they travel somewhere where atmospheric refraction causes laser beam measurements of level over a body of water to be wonky (QED flat Earth, or something); they do totally irrelevant and/or completely nonsense “experiments” that can only cause the entire panel to face-palm in response.
The only saving grace here is that it’s families of flat Earthers, so presumably there’s one or two real flat Earthers, and a bunch of people being pulled around by them who will actually be moved by real evidence. So there’s a chance somebody will be reached by this, and it won’t just be an exercise in futility.
I suspect they’re outnumbered by the flat Earthers I see on Youtube devising experiments that are incomprehensible nonsense, though.
It’s enough money that they could prove, in very straightforward, hands-on, personal experience ways, that the Earth is round by e.g. traveling around it.
Flat Earthers really go out of their way to avoid describing how the Sun works. (Because based on their model, it must be a giant spot light, and someone keeps swapping out various gobos and filters for it, so the shape and quality match what’s observed in different parts of the world over the course of the year. And that’s presuming the coherent flat Earth model - it ignores the flerfers who claim everyone has their own local Sun, somehow.)
Presumably from the flerfer’s perspective, the conspiracy exists to create even more conspiracies. (I.e. if you have a conspiracy large and successful enough to pull this off, they’re capable of pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes on anything.) But I think a lot of flerfers don’t even realize it would require such a large conspiracy - for them, everyone else is deluded/brainwashed. They may think that’s enough to explain all or most of the people whose jobs/lives would provide constant proof of a supposed flat Earth.
Flat Earthers are the lowest of low-hanging fruit, though - we’ve had the science to show a round Earth for thousands of years. The rest is incredibly complicated in comparison.
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This sounds like the set-up for a logic problem. What is the shortest airplane flight that leaves a certain location before sunset, returns to that same location after sunrise, but has a path such that the people on the plane never see the Sun set? E.g. Maybe on the summer solstice, you take off and fly from south of the arctic circle into it and then back out? When you arrive back, a trusted person will tell you that they definitely saw the Sun set and rise again (This will be clearer the further south you start), while from your point of view the Sun remained above the horizon the whole time.
Or, generalizing: On any day between the spring equinox and the fall equinox, you fly north until you’re just north of the latitude where the Sun remains barely above the horizon all day on that date, then you see the midnight Sun, and then you fly back south and talk with someone who did not have midnight Sun.
Ideally there is a large body of water to the north of the observer who stayed behind, so they can’t claim that the Sun went behind mountains or something.
Edit: If a jet travels at 500mph, that’s about 7 degrees per hour. A four-hour flight (two hours north, two hours south) would take you 1000 miles north/south, i.e. the Sun’s position above/below the horizon would differ by 14 degrees between the two observers. Six hours (leave at 9pm, return at 3am) and that difference would be about 21 degrees. If the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon, that’s enough for it to be dark as night, i.e. it would be daytime (“just before sunset”/“just after sunrise”) for the people on the plane but actual night-time for the people who stay back.
Edit 2: And I know this could work near the south pole too, pardon my northern-hemisphere bias.
Wait, what? I’m almost afraid to ask, but… Where can I find more details about this insanity?
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I am mostly interested in the flat earthers answering one simple question: If the earth is flat, why has nobody ever found the edge? (Or did they all fall off?)
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Around the World with Eighty Flerfs.
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If the earth is flat, why haven’t cats pushed everything of the edge yet?
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Yep, and the cone of light is not only not-round, but has to change shape constantly (and differently for North and South, too). So someone is messing with gobos and filters.
I sometimes start doing some world-building starting with the premise that the Earth is flat, and what the world (daylight, seasons, distances between continents, etc.) would actually look like if that were the case (i.e. completely alien to our lived experience in reality), but then I start getting a headache and need to lie down.
There’s all sorts of Youtube and presumably Tiktok channels, flat Earth forums, etc. whose rabbit holes you can get lost down. I don’t recommend it, though. (I find debunking videos are as much as I can take, and often it’s just snippets of flerf videos so ridiculous the flat Earth debunker can only do the verbal equivalent of a face-palm - or an actual face-palm.) There’s no coherent worldview there, it’s just various people, with varying levels of disingenuousness, trying to poke holes in the round Earth arguments. Sometimes it’s quite complicated (selectively using relativity to side-step the need for gravity), sometimes it’s just some guy with a video of the sky saying, “Look, the clouds go behind the Sun! It’s actually really close!” without for a moment considering what that would actually mean (i.e. that airplanes can travel higher above the Earth than the Sun?!). Sometimes they propose actual counter-models (Earth as an infinite plane constantly accelerating), mostly it’s just “they say the Earth is spinning, but I don’t feel it, QED!”
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That’s always the case with conspiracy theories. Anyone who has ever tried to organize so much as a surprise birthday party knows that people screw stuff up All. The. Time. We drop clues, we make mistakes, and even for those sneaky people who do know how to run stuff supremely confidently, they still have ordinary people working for them who screw up anyway.
And they’re trying to convince me that a million Democrats, who are by their very definition “stupid”, “incompetent”, “corrupt”, etc., are able to hold together a vast secret Deep State Government that silently runs the country? And that they never make a single mistake?
I mean hell, if anyone can organize 10 million Federal employees to silently run the entire country without one single mistake, then I’d say “pay them more, they’re doing a helluva job!”
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That’s a long trip. You should probably include budget to hire an extra hand to help with boating duties.
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