Tag: Flat Earth

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More Flat Earth

In reality Flat Earthers usually aren’t grounded in whether or not the Earth is flat. They’re grounded in one of two points: the government is lying to them or the government/science people think they’re stupid.

If the government is lying to them, they just disbelieve everything the government says. Republicans did this under Obama, and Democrats are doing it under Trump. It’s the same kind of passion, only even more extreme. The Flat Earthers are just against whatever the government says, and NASA does say the Earth is round. Therefore, the Earth is Flat, QED. It’s not a cosmological theory; it’s a social theory. “Those people are lying!”

The other one is that science people called them stupid, so they just don’t believe anything. People do this all the time. If you tell someone smoking is stupid, the smokers will keep smoking just to show you. This is why people roll coal. A lot of people think sciency types told them they’re stupid, so they just refuse to agree on principle. This also happens a lot with vaccinations and GMOs. Like FE, they sorta feel right if you don’t explore the notion much. Again, social theory not physical.

You can argue physics and explore physics. You can’t argue that someone shouldn’t distrust the government or be insulted by physicists who call them stupid.

Anyway, imagine you have a boat and you go to the Pacific Northwest. You can sail fifty miles out to sea and see the mountains near Puget Sound. But you can’t go thousands of miles out to sea and see them. You should be able to if the Earth was flat. What’s more, again, when sailing east towards Puget Sound, the mountains will appear to rise. IF the Earth was flat, they’d just sort of appear out of darkness. This is not the case. They rise.

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The Flat Earth

I legitimately can’t figure out if @FlatEarthOrg is trolling or not.

Driving westbound from Kansas into Denver there’s a stretch of I-70 that is almost perfectly East-West. It’s also almost dead-aimed at Pike’s Peak. The road itself is a little north, so Pike’s Peak would be straight ahead and to the left, but there’s about 100 miles of straight where you can see the mountain.

Now eastern Colorado is just western Kansas in terrain. Almost perfectly flat with little hills with shallow sides. About a hundred miles away, around Burlington, CO, you come over this low hill and see Pike’s Peak. The crest of it stands above the brown horizon. The peak itself is dark blue against a dark blue sky. The peak is perfectly triangular. My phone is garbage, but I’ll get a shot when I get a new phone.

As you continue to drive west, the peak grows. It gets taller. What’s more, features appear. The shoulders of lower peaks, subordinate summits, and nearby mountains in the front range rise into the sky. They don’t come forward; they come up. By the time you get to Limon, I-70 shanks north to head towards Denver, and by then Pike’s Peak is alone and tall. You can see its white head and beard. Lesser summits are not only visible but distinguishable from the central prominance. It’s magnificent.

People, I moved to Colorado for the scenery. This stuff does it for me.

But Pike’s Peak clearly rises. As one drives in the opposite direction, the mountain sinks in the rear view mirror. It gets lower. It crouches, and the subordinate summits are lost first.

I’ve seen pictures of ships go over the horizon, and they do sink from the bottom up, but I find those pictures blurry and hard to see. There’s none of that in Pike’s Peak. Giant hill rises from behind the horizon, and it can’t do that if the Earth is flat.