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Flat Earth Theory / Is there any work being done by the FE community to draw a map of the Earth?

« on: March 21, 2018, 02:16:02 AM »

(This thread is sort of part 2 to this thread here: https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=9253.0 , which served its purpose and then devolved into arguing about solar eclipses.)

For about four to five hundred years, mainstream science has been in fairly unanimous agreement on a globe model that would look familiar to the one in your 3rd-grade classroom. Obviously things like the size of the Earth were discovered millennia before that and the shape of the New World and far East hadn't been totally ironed out yet, but by 1507 Martin Waldseemüller had a globe that looked like this:
Clearly, by that point all the major elements were there. By the 18th century it was only the far north and Australia that look a bit off to modern eyes:


The flat Earth hypothesis, strangely, doesn't appear to have a universally-agreed-upon map. The most common one, based on the North-azimuthal equidistant projection of a globe (the one on the U.N. flag and logo of the F.E.S.) has been pretty clearly proven false. It can't explain relatively simple things such as seasonal day lengths, the southern celestial pole near Sigma Octantis, or flight lengths between destinations south of the equator.

The only other possible model I've seen, the bi-polar model, still seems pretty niche even among the community, and I've only seen it brought up as sort of the token "other possible model" rather than as a real hypothesis.


Is there any on-going effort by FE researchers to discover what a map of the Earth should look like under their model? If the Earth is flat, it should be easier to develop than a map of the globe model as they wouldn't need to accept the distortion inherent in making a 2D drawing of a 3D object like the RE cartographers have dealt with throughout history. So where is it?

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Flat Earth Theory / Why do Flat Earth believers decline to engage with certain FE debates?

« on: March 18, 2018, 04:59:52 AM »

@Junker: Sorry if this doesn't go in this forum, but this is something that's been frustrating me and I believe has been really detrimental to the quality of debate on this site.

I've been posting here for a month, and at first I was really excited about this forum. At the offset it seemed like one of the few places on the internet where people were actually looking at the evidence and attempting to test hypotheses scientifically on this subject rather than just scream past each other like on Twitter and Facebook.

However, there seems to be a pretty alarming trend here that's hurting discourse, and that's that while every single thread has its fair share of heliocentrists arguing their case, many FE believers seem to completely avoid certain topics of debate.

If it were just random threads it would be one thing, but it appears to always be threads where Rowbotham/ENAG/other standard FE beliefs don't appear to have any explanation for the counter-argument brought up.

The best example are the two recent threads asking about the discrepancy between the FE model's predicted daylight-hours for the Southern Hemisphere versus actually observed hours:

https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=8995.0
https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=9178.0

The first got only a couple responses from FE believers with no follow up, while the second didn't even get a single FE response.

Why are certain topics not being discussed? Shouldn't an apparent weak spot in the FE model be the most interesting new topic to debate and hash out? If someone showed me a large inconsistency in my worldview, my first priority would be to closely examine it and experiment until I figured out the problem or changed my view to something that works, but here many FE believers seem to be avoiding these topics. Is there a reason these aren't being discussed?

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Flat Earth Theory / How does the "spotlight" sun FE model explain long summer days in Australia?

« on: February 24, 2018, 08:15:38 AM »

I've lurked these forums for a while and crawled through the wiki, but I've never seen this pretty obvious question addressed.

Today in Sydney the sun will rise at 6:38 AM and set at 7:38 PM. The source is https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/australia/sydney and if that were drastically wrong I'm sure one of the 24 million Australians would have noticed by now.

However, every seasonal diagram shown on the wiki looks like this:



Notice in the south they seem to only be getting at most 8h days despite the Sun being over the equator. In order to accurately recreate the info on Time and Date, the spotlight would need to look something like this:



How is this possible? How does the Sun shine around a dark spot and light up the other side in December? Especially when the given explanation for sunsets is the Sun moving too far away to see anymore.

For the record, the heliocentric model explains seasons like this:


In the RE model, the Sun always lights up half of the spheroid and seasons are determined by which pole is angled towards the Sun at a given point in the orbit.