Is the earth flat?

[Alpha]

So alpha you think all bodies of water are perfectly level? Do you realize civil engineers are taught to build using mathematics that take into account curvature when building bridges and what not.

If it isn't level it will flow to find its lowest energy state. This is testable and demonstrable. And it's the very reason you refuse to agree with one of my first principles.

I worked as a designer engineer for a couple of years after completing my schooling, so I'm good. You do realize math is a formal science.

[Alpha]

Anyone interested take a look:

[walrus]

With a little thought you guys will see how wrong you are and the earth is perfectly level. Have you ever been to the top of the worlds highest mountain? I thought not, there are no mountains on earth

[walrus]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/metro.c...d-7269268/amp/

If the earth were round and spinning a helicopter could just hover and wait until the ground beneath him spins around and he could be at his location. Mount Everest doesn’t exist because the earth is flat. Have you ever been to the top of Everest? I thought not. If the world is spinning water would be sloshing around instead it’s level and calm. Well there is no such thing as level water but whatever. You guys are sheeple m
https://www.google.com/amp/s/metro.c...d-7269268/amp/

[walrus]

In the stew of false information and conspiracy theories that swirls online, perhaps no idea is as flummoxing as the belief in a flat Earth. Flat-Earthers believe that the Earth is a flat disc ringed by an ice wall. All those elegant models of a round Earth that perfectly explain seasons, eclipses, sunrises and sunsets? Lies and cover-ups, they say. Pictures of the round Earth from space? Government conspiracies. The fact that you can see ships disappearing hull-first over the curve of the horizon with your own eyes? Well, flat-Earthers claim to see something different.

It's been a big publicity year for flat-Earthers, who have gained celebrity backers, promised death-defying stunts in the name of their theory and held their first conference. Here are eight times the conspiracy theorists have gotten their names out there in 2017.

1. Shaq attacks Earth's roundness

Basketball player Shaquille O'Neal was roundly mocked online when he announced on his podcast in March that Earth is "flat to me." He went on: "I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity. Have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It's not. The world is flat."

A few days later, though, Shaq announced that he was just messing with everyone: "I'm joking, you idiots," he clarified. [5 Scientific Rebuttals of Shaq's Flat-Earth Claims]

But people who think the world is flat aren't necessarily primed to believe their ears when they hear a beloved celebrity saying he was just making a joke of their theories. A quick stroll through the Flat Earth Society forums suggests that some true believers now think Shaq was simply pressured into retracting his statements and that he's on their side.

2. Rapper B.o.B crowdfunds a satellite

The rapper B.o.B, also known as Bobby Ray Simmons Jr., is famous for having gotten into a Twitter fight with physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson over whether the Earth is round. B.o.B raised his profile further this year with an attempt to crowdfund his own rocket launch to carry a camera into space to look for the curvature of the Earth. Flat-Earthers, of course, don't believe in the Earth's curvature (which, for the record, becomes visible to the human eye at about 35,000 feet (11,000 meters) elevation, but only given at least a 60-degree field of view, according to a 2008 paper, making it hard to detect from a typical passenger airliner window). Two months after the fundraiser was posted, B.o.B had reached $6,883 of his $1 million goal, the first thousand of which he donated himself, according to his GoFundMe page.

3. Kyrie Irving gets on board

What is it with NBA players? Kyrie Irving of the Celtics has had a complex relationship with the flat Earth in 2017. As SB Nation breaks it down, the point guard declared the Earth flat on a podcast in February, and then returned to the same podcast in March to say he was just trying to start a conversation. In September, he was asked by CBS Boston what he really believed and said his original statements were just an "exploration tactic" and that people should do their own research. In October, he again floated the notion that the question of whether Earth is round is up for debate, saying he didn't know whether pictures of Earth from space were real.

4. Solar eclipse fuels conspiracy theories

Eclipses are moments when it becomes really possible to look up and remember that you live on a spinning ball. Well, unless you're a flat-Earther. Then, they're proof, duh, that the Earth is flat.

Flat-Earthers used the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse that crossed the contiguous United States as "evidence" of their beliefs. According to Forbes, they argued that the west-to-east eclipse path was evidence of something fishy, because the sun moves across the sky from east to west, right? (Actually, the moon orbits Earth from west to east, so the moon's shadow follows the path of the moon.) Flat-Earthers also argued, using flashlights and coins, that the moon's shadow should have been bigger than the moon itself. The problem with this argument is that the sun is an extremely distant, diffuse source of light, not a nearby point source, so the flashlight analogy doesn't fit. Instead, the moon is like a tiny speck against the backdrop of the sun's massive light.

5. Homemade rocket launch fizzles

In November, flat-Earther "Mad" Mike Hughes announced plans to launch himself 1,800 feet (550 m) above the Mojave Desert in a steam-powered rocket he made out of salvaged parts. His plan was to attempt to photograph the lack of curvature of the horizon to "prove" the Earth's flatness. The curvature of the horizon is subtle enough as to not be visible until at least 35,000 feet, so it's unclear exactly what Hughes hoped to prove. Nevertheless, his homemade rocket cost a reported $20,000, making it quite a deal compared with B.o.B's estimated $1 million rocket-launch scheme.

Unfortunately for Hughes, his launch was to take place on public land, and the Bureau of Land Management shut him down at the last minute.

6. Flat-Earthers hold a conference

The internet has undoubtedly expanded flat-Earth believers' reach. The Economist recently reported that, based on Google Trends data, interest in "flat earth" as a search term has risen significantly over the past two years. Flat-Earthers are now meeting in person, too. The first-ever Flat Earth International Conference was held this year in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was hosted by Kryptoz media and the Creation Cosmology Institute, both of which use religious overtones in their flat-Earth philosophizing. The organizer of the conference told Live Science that about 500 people attended.

7. Earth is flat; Mars is round

As founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk knows a little something about the challenges of launching rockets off an obloid sphere into space. So when he tweeted in November, "Why is there no Flat Mars Society?!" he probably didn't expect an actual answer.

Well, he didn't really get one, either. But he did get a response, straight from the Flat Earth Society itself (@FlatEarthOrg): "Hi Elon, thanks for the question. Unlike the Earth, Mars has been observed to be round. We hope you have a fantastic day!"

Why does the Flat Earth Society believe in direct observations of Mars' roundness but not Earth's? Who knows. But flat-Earthers tend to have complicated, often contradictory, explanations of how astronomy works in the absence of a round Earth. The Flat Earth Society pushes a view in which the sun rotates over the top of the disk of the Earth like a baby's mobile at a much closer distance than the 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away that it actually is. The other planets — which, in this theory, are also much smaller and closer than they are in reality — orbit the sun, the Flat Earth Society believes.

8. Another athlete asks questions

Whatever is in the water at the NBA is apparently affecting the cricket world, too. Former English cricketer Freddie Flintoff recently hit the tabloid circuit with his opinion that the Earth is flat, or possibly turnip-shaped (OK, sure). Flintoff discussed his belief on his BBC Radio 5 podcast in November, asking why the water in the ocean doesn't wobble if Earth is hurtling through space. (It's because Earth's rotational speed is basically constant, forgiving an imperceptible slowdown of about 2 milliseconds per century. The oceans move with this constant spin just as a passenger in a car traveling down the highway moves at the same speed as the car. Rotation does cause Earth to bulge at the equator, though, which is why the planet is an obloid shape rather than a perfect sphere.) Flintoff said he got his ideas from listening to a flat-Earth podcast.

Original article on Live Science.

[walrus]

flat earth map
If Earth were flat, you’d know it, because a lot of things would work differently. Photo: Pexels
By Doug Main

Welcome to the new year, 2018. The Earth has yet again made a revolution about the sun. But not so fast. If you subscribe to the idea of a flat Earth, then you’d believe that no such thing happened, because the sun rotates in a circle around the sky.

Humans have known for thousands of years that the planet is round, yet the belief in a flat Earth refuses to die. Members of the Flat Earth Society and several celebrities, including Atlanta rapper B.o.B and NBA player Kyrie Irving, claim to hold such beliefs. Let’s examine, then, how the well-known principles of physics and science would work (or not) on a flat Earth.

Gravity Fails

First of all, a pancaked planet might not have any gravity. It’s unclear how gravity would work, or be created, in such a world, says James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. That’s a pretty big deal, since gravity explains a wide range of Earthly and cosmic observations. The same measurable force that causes an apple to fall from a tree also causes the moon to orbit the Earth and all the planets to orbit the sun.

People who believe in a flat Earth assume that gravity would pull straight down, but there’s no evidence to suggest it would work that way. What we know about gravity suggests it would pull toward the center of the disk. That means it would only pull straight down at one point on the center of the disk. As you got increasingly far from the center, gravity would tug more and more horizontally. This would have some strange impacts, like sucking all the water toward the center of the world, and making trees and plants grow diagonally, since they develop in the opposite direction of gravity’s pull.

Solar Problems

Then there’s the sun. In the scientifically supported model of the solar system, the Earth revolves around the sun because the latter is much more massive and has more gravity. However, the Earth doesn’t fall into the sun because it is traveling in an orbit. In other words, the sun’s gravity isn’t acting alone. The planet is also traveling in a direction perpendicular to the star’s gravitational tug; if it were possible to switch off that gravity, the Earth would shoot away in a straight line and hightail it out of the solar system. Instead, the linear momentum and the sun’s gravity combine, resulting in a circular orbit around the sun.

The flat Earth model places our planet at the center of the universe, but doesn’t suggest that the sun orbits the Earth. Rather, the sun circles over the top side of the world like a carousel, broadcasting light and warmth downward like a desk lamp. Without the linear, perpendicular momentum that helps generate an orbit, it’s unclear what force would keep the sun and moon hovering above the Earth, Davis says, instead of crashing into it.

Likewise, in a flat world, satellites likely wouldn’t be possible. How would they orbit a plane? “There are a number of satellite missions that society depends on that just wouldn’t work,” Davis says. For this reason, he says, “I cannot think of how GPS would work on a flat Earth.”

If the sun and moon just loop around one side of a flat Earth, there could presumably be a procession of days and nights. But it wouldn’t explain seasons, eclipses and many other phenomena. The sun would also presumably have to be smaller than Earth so as to not burn up or bump into our planet or the moon. However, we know the sun to be more than 100 times the diameter of the Earth.

Removing Heaven and Earth

Deep below ground, the solid core of the Earth generates the planet’s magnetic field. But in a flat planet, that would have to be replaced by something else. Perhaps a flat sheet of liquid metal. That, however, wouldn’t rotate in a way that creates a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, charged particles from the sun would fry the planet. They could strip away the atmosphere, as they did after Mars lost its magnetic field, and the air and oceans would escape into space.

Tectonic plate movement and seismicity depend on a round Earth, because only on a sphere do all the plates fit together in a sensible way, Davis says. Movements of plates on one side of the Earth effect movements on the other. The areas of the Earth that create crust, like the mid-Atlantic ridge, are counterbalanced by places that consume crust, like subduction zones. On a flat Earth, none of this could be adequately explained. There’d also have to be an explanation for what happens to plates at the edge of the world. One could imagine they might fall off, but that would presumably jeopardize the proposed wall that prevents people from falling off the disk-shaped world.

map of flat earth
How some Flat Earthers map out the planet. The Arctic is at the center, and an “ice wall” around the edges supposedly prevents people from falling off. Image: Wiki Commons
Perhaps one of the most glaring oddities is that the proposed map of the flat Earth is totally different. It places the Arctic at the center while Antarctica forms an “ice wall” around the edges. In such a world, travel would look very different. Flying from Australia to certain parts of Antarctica would, for example, take forever—you’d have to travel over the Arctic and both Americas to get there. In addition, certain real-world feats, such as traveling across Antarctica (which has been done many times), would be impossible.

Falling Flat

Contrary to popular belief, it’s a misconception that many societies of serious, educated people ever actually believed in the flat Earth theory. “With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat,” historian Jeffrey Burton Russell noted in 1997. “A round Earth appears at least as early as the sixth century B.C. with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere.”

As the scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, the idea that many people—including the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus—believed the Earth to be flat was largely concocted by 19th century writers such as Washington Irving, Jean Letronne and others. Letronne was “an academic of strong anti-religious prejudices… who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth,” Russell noted.

In any case, while it’s fun to imagine counterfactual scenarios, science proceeds by coming up with theories to explain observations. When it comes to these theories, the simpler, the better, Davis says. The flat Earth idea, however, clearly begins with the idea that the planet is planar, and then attempts to twist other observations to its benefit. You can find odd explanations for individual phenomena under this framework, says Davis, but “it falls apart pretty quickly.”

[Alpha]

Walrus continues to prove himself a shill.

[walrus]

Look at the depths these shills go to in-order to hide the true shape from us. I will give credit that on the flat earth forum they do present models of the flat earth. Many with a dome around it. They won’t discuss the other side of the earth but it’s a good start. So they show the edges but I guess the dome keeps us from falling of the edges. So they are not presenting an endless body of land without edges. If somebody ever did fall of the edge it is covered up.