The Moonlandings were faked and other nonsense

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The Flat Earth Society

Yes, the Flat Earth Society still exists. And they have a web site which says amazing things like:

"Using the "round Earth" theory, setting an object on the earth would be like setting grains of sand on a beach ball. Certainly a few grains would stay - right around the top, the surface is nearly horizontal - but when you stray too far from the absolute top of the ball, the grains of sand start sliding off and falling onto the ground. The Earth, if round, should behave in exactly the same fashion. Because the top is a very localized region on a sphere, if the Earth were in fact round, there would be only a very small area of land that would be at all inhabitable. Stray to the outside fringes of the "safe zone", and you start walking at a tilt. The further out you go, the more you slant, until your very survival is determined by the tread on your boots. Reach a certain point, and you slide off the face of the planet entirely. Obviously, something is wrong."

Bwahahahahahahahahaaaaa!

Sorry, I'm back from about 5 solid minutes of laughter. I almost spit my water out across my monitor and keyboard when I read that! Are these guys that stupid? I'm hesitant to call someone stupid in public, but this competes with the ignorance of Intelligent Design for the stupidest thing to still be believed by more than one person.

Apparently, these guys don't believe in Gravity. Gravity apparently pulls at you from the center of the Universe, I suppose. Otherwise, you'd go sliding off the planet if you lived anywhere but at the north pole - wherever that is. Please ignore all the evidence and the understanding of the workings of the world that science has figured out over time - ignore the way a roughly spherical Earth (they keep using the term "round Earth" on this web page as if it were a 2D object) explains, along with gravity and all the other forces of nature, things like: the weather; magnetic field orientations; photographs of a roughly spherical Earth from space; they way satellites orbit the planet; the way Earth orbits the sun along with the other planets, comets, asteroids and so forth; the geological processes currently active on the planet like plate techtonics, volcanism, etc.; and the entire Universe we can observe going overhead around us.

I guess that all of you folks who live anywhere outside of a few miles from me must be falling off the Earth right now - oh, not because the Earth is flat. Because you're laughing so hard that you've bounced off the planet with a velocity of about 11.3 km/s.

A few other things that this particular flat earther believes is that space is filled with an ether (light has to have a medium to propogate through afterall) which would slow the orbital motion of a "round Earth" in much less than the billions of years we all claim it has been orbiting the sun so that it would stop and fall into the sun. Objects, according to "Efimovich's theory" (Efimovich is our leader, apparently, and is none other than Christopher Columbus!), posess a "gravitational charge" which presumably takes a long time to realign if moved. And then there's the problem of having "different downs."
Now imagine, if only for the sake of argument, that the person on top and the person on bottom can both manage to remain attracted to the ground "below" them. What would happen if the person on one side decided to visit the other? Since the man at the North Pole has a different idea of what is down and up (and in fact experiences an opposite pull from the Earth's gravity) than the person at the South Pole does, when the denizen of the frozen Arctic visits his Antarctic counterpart, they will experience gravitational pulls exactly opposite of each other! The human from the North Pole will "fall up", never returning to the ground, and will continue falling forever into the deep void of outer space!
Simply amazing.

Water. Regardless of which train of thought you follow, it covers over seventy-five percent of our planet's surface. And the atmosphere, also a fluid, covers the entire surface. The difference is why. While flat-Earthers know that the ocean is really just a large bowl, (with great sheets of ice around the edges to hold the ocean back), and the atmosphere is contained by a large dome, the backwards "round-Earth" way of thinking would have you believe that all those trillions of gallons of water and air just "stick" to the planet's surface.

Conventional thinking would suggest that the water would just run down the sides of the Earth (to use the analogy again, like droplets running down the sides of a beach ball) and fall into outer space, while the air would dissipate. Using the earlier mentioned idea of "gravitational charge" gives some credibility to the theory. If the fluids were static, then exposure to the gravitational field for a long enough period of time would allow their molecules to align themselves with and be pulled in by the field.

Wow. This website goes on and on with this type of nonsense. It's amazing how many things that would seem obvious to folks like me and (hopefully) you that this guy has to bury his head in the sand to ignore that provide counter examples to his claims.

This is really the definitive line in this entire website: "Why do we say the Earth is flat, when the vast majority says otherwise? Because we know the truth." They know the truth! Regardless of any facts or evidence that might get in the way, they know the truth.

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