OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Space X will soon be conducting their first flights. It’s estimated that orbital and suborbital space tourism will be worth $35 billion within a few years of the first flights commencing. The Russian Space Agency is also expected to re-commence its tourist program shortly, ferrying tourists to the International Space Station. The RSA has already taken 8 private tourists to the ISS. Perhaps the flat earthers could have a quiet chat to them about what they saw while they were up there.

Otherwise, I suspect that the flat earth people are currently nominating their representatives, pooling their money, grabbing their cameras and getting ready to book their tickets. I’m sure that they are extremely eager to finally be able to prove the rest of the world wrong.

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2. S&T Black & White / Armstrong SH-I 1.8 / TSP Curl P3 Alpha R OX

There's the tale of that rapper guy who was trying to raise money on a crowdfunding site to launch a satellite to prove the Earth was flat. Oh, the irony...



Agreed. I suppose, though, once in a while... As I tell my students, there was a guy who wrote a book in 1915 saying that the continents drift around on the surface of the Earth. The geologists at the time thought he was a crackpot. But it turns out he was right in the end and the German national oceanographic institute is named after him.. it just took another 50 years before there was enough evidence that everyone was convinced. Flat Earth? There's just too much evidence that it's WRONG for there ever to be a chance that this will happen to them.

Iskandar

About flat planets, the great A'Tuin and other supportive creatures, perspective and narrativium, and how it all relates to the human mind:

Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld universe, wrote:

People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.
...

Use it as you will, within or without the context of this thread. It works, not by science but by magic. Have a blessed Pentecost if you celebrate it, this weekend or the other, or another Quantum...

Now the discussion is on tv.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erA3WQE9Zes

So are The Simpsons, but I don't take them seriously either.

ROFL... "We live in an age of technology..." and they ignore what can be observed using this technology. The interviewers are pretty smart. The interviewees keep harping on the same silly old laser experiments and the same old "explanations" about why bases of tall objects can't be seen behind the horizon. Any evidence to the contrary becomes a conspiracy. When asked about people falling off the edge they move on to something else.

This isn't a debate or "discussion" - it's, well, an interview of some folks with a peculiar way of thining. Which is why it was done.

Iskandar

Speaking of technology.. just caught this.



Falcon 9 launch LIVE. Got to see launch, stage separation, first stage landing. Curved horizons all the way up. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's all supposed to be in a studio...

Iskandar

Hmmm... Maybe Mac would be posting this one next, since for some reason he's been posting videos that show the Earth is round.... It kinda encapsulates a lot of the stuff we've been discussing in this thread. Of course, he'd say it's all lies...



Iskandar

Boy, once you start looking, there are a TON of these things:



That flat-earther at 5:00 sounds like.. um, someone of low intelligence (if one wants to sound intelligent one wouldn't choose to use a doofus voice like that...). "In my reality a straight line is a straight line right..." This segment answers what Mac was talking about a few posts back, about airliners being unable to follow the curvature of the Earth.

Another one:



And this one shows the extent of the lying and misquoting involved - they keep saying that "scientists say" something when the quotes are selectively edited or no one ever said it at all.



It covers Mac's favorite subject about stuff that can be seen over the horizon. I mean, it's one thing to try to lie to another human being, but when you lie to YOURSELF by selectively quoting people, then you KNOW it's a lie. Gee. Makes you wonder.

Iskandar

More fake video... shot in some studio and photoshopped, no doubt...



Iskandar

Obviously fake. How would they get an orchestra up into space to play that music?

Poor deluded people. It's all fake - rocket going up, boosters landing, sonic booms - it's all a huge sound stage, they've got huge speakers and a HUGE projection screen a couple miles away. I mean, if they can fake a spherical Earth they can fake a rocket launch... right? Musk's Tesla Roadster's probably still sitting in the garage, they'll repaint it later, change the license plates and say it's a different car...



Iskandar

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Perth Table Tennis Club

When you look across the sea or ocean does it looked curved? Of course not as its dead flat. The video from NASA - shot through a fisheye lens - dah.

Yeah! "Fisheye lens" is the magical word to debunk every picture-supported claim one disagrees with. It usually also reveals that the "magician" knows absolutely nothing about lens distortion.

A fisheye lens has "barrel distortion". A straight line passing through the lens axis (usually corresponding to the middle of the image) will be rendered as a straight line. When it passes outside of the lens axis, it is rendered as a curved line "pushed away" from the axis. IOW, if the earth contour is a straight line, it should display as a bulb when above center and as a valley when below.

Don't take my word for it. Look it up!

Pincushion distortion is apparent in some zoom lenses, though to a smaller extent. That is the opposite effect.

Now watch some NASA footage again, and repeat the claim about lens distortion, if you can stomach it. My guess is, you are going to look stupid.

Of course you could claim that it is digitally manipulated. That claim would be harder to contest. Anyway, you didn't...