[codebook]

Just curious, do Flat Earthers never fly the earth a round to confirm? I mean, leaving from America to go to Europe then Asia then America. Doesn't have to go to the space to see the shape of the earth but just keep looping the round earth should be sufficient. Will they think it may be another continent? with same wife, kids, street names, etc?

[aqme28]

What I've heard is that it's very difficult to fly straight. GPS will lie to you and tell you that you're flying straight when in "reality" you're flying in a circle.

There's an (insane) explanation for absolutely everything.

[Jeema101]

Speaking of GPS, I've always wondered what their explanation is for how GPS works if there's no globe to speak of. Are the satellites in orbit around the flat earth? :)

[felipemnoa]

Just make up whatever you want on the go. i.e. If I were to make something up I would say that the GPS satellites really are going around the flat earth. Also, the GPS satellites were really invented to monitor the underside of the earth where dinosaurs still exist and where the real location of Atlantis is.

This is the real reason governments do not want you to discover that the earth is flat. They are hiding Atlantis. The whole city is covered by a forcefield and we have not yet been able to penetrate it. It is apparently uninhabited, long since abandoned. Once we are able to get inside it we will be able to obtain Star Trek level technology. And by we I mean an Illuminati like group that controls all the governments of the world.

They want to keep all that technology for themselves. Q'Anon is actually a defector of that group and it will eventually help us find Atlantis so that we can all share its technology. etc. etc.

This stuff almost writes itself. You can never loose.

[wolfgke]

> Q'Anon is actually a defector of that group and it will eventually help us find Atlantis so that we can all share its technology. etc. etc.

Is QAnon a Flat Earther? (serious question)

[felipemnoa]

No, just made it up. I think that when you are a Flat Earther the more unbelievable something sounds the better.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

I would actually buy and read a novel that had the plot you described.

[felipemnoa]

Yeah, I actually found the plot interesting as I was writing it, which kind of surprised me. If I were a writer I would write a short fiction about it. But I'm not. I wonder if it would make an interesting video game, though.

[wolfgke]

> I would actually buy and read a novel that had the plot you described.

Come on, write some fanfiction. ;-)

[wolfgke]

> Speaking of GPS, I've always wondered what their explanation is for how GPS works if there's no globe to speak of.

The common explanation seems to be that GPS is in reality some ground-based system (think some kind of a modernized LORAN):

Sources:

https://www.quora.com/How-do-the-flat-Earth-theory-believers...

https://www.quora.com/How-do-the-flat-Earth-theory-believers...

https://www.quora.com/How-do-the-flat-Earth-theory-believers...

According to the first link, there also exists a minority opinion among Flat Earthers that satellites might exist: "being swept along by whatever “cosmological current” it is that moves the sun and moon around in the complicated spirals needed to precisely reproduce the effect that’s so simple if the Earth is round. They won’t be able to explain why those currents do what they do - or why they move some satellites in one way and some in another…but that rather weak argument seems to suffice for their own benefit.".

[PaulAJ]

In comments on a Youtube video (which I cannot now find) the flat earthers didn't know the difference between GPS and radar, and thought that the limited range of oceanic radar for air traffic control somehow proved that GPS satellites didn't exist.

[LyndsySimon]

The ones I've spoken to mostly seem to believe that satellites don't orbit. The most detailed explanation I've heard is that geosynchronous satellites are balloons and that LEO satellites are autonomous long-range aircraft that are kept aloft 24/7.

[codebook]

Wow... I never thought about the theory... just wow...

[btilly]

Flat Earthers look for ways to confirm what they believe.

My favorite demonstration goes like this. Get into a plane. Sight down the spine of a magazine at the horizon then look at it. You'll see that it is tilted a few degrees. Do the same out the other window. It is tilted a few degrees the other way.

Can we work out by how much it should tilt? Why yes! If the Earth is a ball, then you, the horizon, and the center of the Earth make a right angle triangle with the right angle at the horizon, one leg being the distance from you to the horizon, the other being from the center of the Earth to the horizon, and the hypotenuse is the distance from the center of the Earth to the ground below plus your height. Furthermore if you draw the picture, the triangle from you to the horizon to a vertical line up from the horizon to horizontal back to you is a similar triangle to the first, so the angle that the horizon is below horizontal is the same as the angle at the center of the Earth of this triangle.

The distance from the center of the Earth to the ground is approximately 3950 miles. Your plane is usually 6 to 7 miles off the ground, let's say 7. By Pythagorus that puts the horizon at sqrt(3956^2 - 3950^2) which is roughly 235 miles away. Apply basic trigonometry, and it should be about 3.4 degrees below horizontal.

I've done this. You've seen that the calculation is easy. The measurement is easy. Running in circles to avoid this conclusion is a sign that you aren't interested in knowing the real answer.

[wolfgke]

> Just curious, do Flat Earthers never fly the earth a round to confirm? I mean, leaving from America to go to Europe then Asia then America. Doesn't have to go to the space to see the shape of the earth but just keep looping the round earth should be sufficient.

If you look at the picture at

https://wiki.tfes.org/Flat_Earth_-_Frequently_Asked_Question...

you see that what you call "fly around the earth" is simply flying some giant "circle" (perhaps not a perfect circle in the geometric sense, but you get the idea) in the Flat Earthers' model.

[codebook]

If they have only one flat model, then probably pole-to-pole might be the best to explain... the plain cannot suddenly go to the opposite continent, for instance goes to Australia then south pole then south America...

[jtbayly]

Or challenge them to a race between those locations.

[munk-a]

Ah, so that's why it takes as long to fly from San Fran to Tokyo as it does to fly from Santiago to Sydney - because the government purposefully slows down plans between San Fran and Tokyo...

I feel like it'd be pretty trivial to charter a flight from Punta Arenas Chile to Melbourne Australia and blow the minds of some flat earthers... but, eh, willfully ignorant people are going to be willfully ignorant.

[tasty_freeze]

Airline flights can be tracked online, eg at https://flightaware.com

For parts of the Pacific there is no coverage, not because GPS doesn't work there, but because there are no ground stations to pick up the telemetry from the airplanes. Such flights take off, fly over the ocean, then "disappear" for a few hours, then reappear when they approach Australia.

Flat Earthers take this to be evidence of the cover-up.

[munk-a]

I am assuming (probably falsely) that if you assume the earth is flat then you assume there is an edge somewhere - not anywhere but in some particular spot. If the assumption is that it's around the south pole (as per the map in the linked page) then a flight from Chile to Australia would be among the longest flights possible, it would be hard to argue[1] against a round earth when that flight took a few hours when Bejing -> Melbourne or even London -> Melbourne is a clearly shorter according to their flat earth map.

As per my general ambivalence to disproving their ignorance though - at this point they might suspect... anything really, maybe they were secretly drugged during the flight to feel like it was really quick and their watches were adjusted or maybe the lizard people used their warp technology to teleport them part of the way. Honestly, willful ignorance gonna willfully ignorant - a conspiracy theorist that's in deep can always find a new excuse.

1. Argue logically that is... willfully ignorant people gonna willfully ignorant as mentioned in the comment above

[Thrymr]

It's a nice touch that that image of the flat Earth seems to have been generated from satellite imagery of the continents.

[antisemiotic]

Well, if Earth was topologically a torus (like the game area in Asteroids) it would be still possible to circumnavigate it in any direction. One would have to tie a string around it and try to contract it to tell the difference, which would be significantly harder.

[jacinabox]

To steelman what you said, you could fly a polar route over the south pole (say from the Horn of South America to the Cape of Good Hope) and time it out, then fly a polar route over the North pole and time it out. Both flights are short on a round earth.

[saagarjha]

You're just going in a circle.