Ah! And some actual response! Genuinely, thank you for taking the time to address some of what I said. Let's get into it, this is fun!
I'll make one more point and then I'm done for the night.
Sphereicult asked: where is the flat earth technology, round earth theory has given us this, that, got us to space, which flat earthers and others dispute, and so on.
But how much earthbound technology is really dependent on round earth, I suspect very little of it, I've heard round earthers say long bridges, canals, tunnels and their ilk have to be built on round earth principles, and honestly I've yet to look into this sufficiently to formulate an opinion.
Kind of a lot actually.
There's GPS for an obvious starter. If GPS systems were designed with a flat earth in mind, when I asked my phone how to go from say, Australia to North Africa, it would give me two options: To cross the middle of the arctic or go the long way around the outer perimeter of the disk of the world. One of these options adds a massive climate obstacle in the middle of my travels, and the other adds literally tens of thousands of miles. Of course, if the world were a globe, it would just tell me to go east instead of north to get there, and because the earth is round, that would only require me to travel roughly the distance of the united states, a six hour flight, 10,000 km. Now if you want to make such a journey, you can either assume the GPS is lying to you as presented (with a "Globular" assumption in "Global Positioning") and take one of the two harrowing routes flat earth presents to you...or you can do it the easy way, because the science works, the plane flight times line up (six hours instead of 18) One example of many.
How about space flight? Without a globular earth, launch times wouldn't matter; the moon is always going to be in roughly the same position on the disk, and any direction the rocket launches from will still be pointed in a vaguely moonward direction. Only because the earth is round, if Space X or NASA chose to fire a rocket when the facing of the earth was away from moon, it would launch and literally never even pass the same plane as the moon, only get forever farther away.
How about all computing technology? Data storage is still based on systems that rely on electro-magnetism. Without magnetic poles, and therefore magnetic polarity, a flat earth couldn't support predictable electrons that flowed where they were supposed to, especially if magnetic "north" is really just the center of the planet; depending on where you were in relation to that center electrons would behave in radically different ways around magnets and therefore be totally unreliable as consistent data.
There are others, but you left more to respond to.
Round earth and the standard model have been mainstream for a long time, the former for millennia, the latter has been a work in progress for the last several centuries, so naturally many technologies have sprung up around them, just as many technologies sprung up around the Ptolemaic model and the physics, chemistry and medicine of its time.
Ah, that's a very interesting point, but I'd counter that sometimes we come to the correct technologies in *spite* of an existing model, not because of it. For example, long before we understood why it worked, celestial astronomy was still fairly accurate from the standpoint that even though stargazers did not realize it was we that were moving and not the stars, they could still chart the movement.
GPS however, is not an example of a technology working in spite of a flat earth that is the "real" truth; in fact it simply wouldn't work at all if the earth were flat, and we can verify that it works because it gets us places we want to go with impressive accuracy.
It's important not to confuse the two categories of invention. Another example would be "The Greeks believed things contained fire, and you coaxed fire out of them by holding fire next to them." That's not true, but you can still light things on fire in spite of that mistaken belief. However, you could not, based on that mistaken belief, design a super-long burning log. For that, you'd need to truly understand the nature of combustion and work FROM that understanding around to your invention, the Miracle Log.
Even a half baked or incomplete model of the cosmos, physics, chemistry and medicine, will often still allow you to derive some technologies from it, or in spite of it if it's really bad.
See my point above. Yes I agree this happens, but it doesn't preclude the advantage of having correct information in designing such advances, only works in spite the misunderstanding.
And here's the thing, when we DO get a grip on how a thing really works, that's when inventions with real purpose take OFF. For centuries we believed in anything from the Four Humors version of medicine to the Miasma theory of disease. When we finally started applying the scientific method to medicine, and keeping an ever-growing storage of proven medical knowledge, our capacity to improve and save and prolong life took OFF, and mostly just in the last hundred years or so. We went from no surgeries being more than a fifty-fifty chance of survival to having literally hundreds of different kinds that accomplish specific, achievable things with mortality rates in the one percent range. That's nuts when you stop and think about it.
Now, in the same spirit as Flat Earth, would you tell doctors to dispense with their sheep-like scientist approved methedology and to start treating alternate theories with equal validity because we can never really be sure? I would hope not, that would get a lot of people killed.
And I will back off and say that there is no science for which I believe we have perfect knowledge, that's not the point, but we do get to weight the theories that have payed off thus far much more heavily than the ones lobbied for without any track record to speak of. FET has zero notches in its favor. Man has gained nothing, can use nothing, profits in no way from trying to pretend the earth is flat, and he would have much to lose. The Four Humors by contrast, as wrong a theory as it was, at least in very rare cases might actually help alleviate someone's Edema or help to purge a bacterial infection if it was localized. That's a couple of notches versus the literally thousands modern science-based medicine has in its favor, but that's still more than FET, which again, has none.
Sometimes two models differ only in their explanation of phenomenon, not in the phenomena themselves, and so one will work just as good as the other.
Sure, I think that lines up with astronomy example above. It WORKED as a way to track star positions, and believing the earth was moving rather than the stars wouldn't have changed the results they were working with at that level.
But I would challenge you to find two belief systems with real-life consequences that are truly exactly equal in all ways. The "moving stars" theory of astronomy might have worked for making star-charts and tracking seasons, but until you accept the "moving earth" theory, you can't do bigger better things, like navigate more accurately, or gauge temperature in relation to the earth's distance from the sun. I can think of no case in which believing the wrong model doesn't eventually cost you something in technology or understanding. But I could be wrong about that, if you have an example I'm absolutely willing to listen.
Perhaps the quantity of technologies has increased as of late, and perhaps this is due in part to round earth and the standard model, perhaps other things as well, say ideologies like humanism, capitalism, consumerism and materialism, which value productivity and technological and other form so progress, perhaps these ideologies are equally or more to praise, or blame than science.
Oof, that's definitely a bigger discussion than we can have here, really. I guess my short answer is that these phillosophies certainly might help technology to proliferate and develop at a greater rate, but you could take away the phillosophy and the potential for the technology would still exist, wheras if you took away the technology and just left the ideology you wouldn't arrive at the same advances by some different means. There's kind of only one path. Call it Moore's law if you like.
Some of our inventions have come about in spite of mainstream science, like the Wright brothers did away with the science of their day and just did their own experiments in order to fly.
I'm not certain mainstream science had said anything about human flight being impossible. Remember that prior to the airplane people were already using hot-air balloons. But I guess, supposing it had, that doesn't really justify the value of bad ideas like FET, only alternative ones that people haven't considered yet. As FET is pretty old, and has failed the scrutiny of a lot of testing, unlike flight, I don't think the two are especially comparable.
Quantitatively technology has increased, but qualitatively?
Yes. Both. We save lives through medical science breakthroughs year-by-year. We now live in a world of digital immortality so advanced that no human knowledge need ever be totally forgotten until the universe itself grows cold. We communicate in a sort of modified telepathy, instantly beaming our thoughts person-to-person around the globe as we see fit. We can make objects from an almost molecular level. We can walk on the moon. I just... what qualities are you looking for technology to have exactly?
And I need you to stop and consider something: If the defense of FET relies on the idea that all science and technological advancement is bad in order to support it, maybe it isn't something worth supporting. That's just odd on the face of it.
Qualitatively thanks to modern science and tech, so many unintended consequences have come about, that perhaps it'd've been best had we never invented them.
So let me get this straight. We split the atom, and while it gave us the potential for limitless energy, it also unleashed the horrors of the atomic bomb and nuclear waste, therefore we should believe untrue things in the hope that it will slow technology down?
I'm even fine if you want to take the stance that technology is a net bad; there's certainly a powerful argument to be made there, but at no point does that argument get anywhere near "Technology is bad, therefore we should believe our shadows to be made of cheese to stop science from harming us further." Huh?
How smart can modern science be, if it's made such a mess of things in so many regard, it seems to me awfully stupid in many respects, perhaps we should be listening to Shaman instead, the society around their cosmology and medicine and ways of thinking sustained humanity and life on earth for, if the science can be trusted on this, tens of thousands of years, where as our civilization seems completely unsustainable, and may be a mere blip, before a great fall from which we, indeed all life on earth may never recover.
Well again, I'm not going to bother trying to argue that all technology is good. If you want to start a society devoted to truly weighing the consequences of scientific advancement, and getting people to really reign in our leaps and bounds before AI or Fusion technology kill us all, knock yourself out, there's wisdom in that.
But you aren't going to make anything better by saying "Technology is a net bad...Also the earth is flat! I have no evidence of the latter point and it doesn't really relate to the first, but it's important that you all agree it's a possibility!"
if flat earth ever becomes mainstream, technologies will be based on it.
And here's the crux of the problem in the FET perspective. It's not like there were a bunch of equally valid ideas about the shape of the earth floating around, and some opportunistic fucks said, "It's round! Everybody agree with us! We'll kill those who don't!" and then round earth "became mainstream". The way it "became mainstream" is that it was theorized, and then tested time and time and time again and proven true.
1. We tested it by circumnavigating the globe.
2. We tested it by launching into space and looking back at the earth.
3. We tested it by making maps and globes that relied on it and they WORKED.
4. We tested it by basic astronomical observations, like you can't see the North Star and The Southern Cross at the same time.
5. We tested it by having someone at night call someone on the opposite side of the planet and go, "Is it day there? Yup? Okay, guess it's round then.
6. We tested it with magnetism.
There are countless other tests, proofs, and pieces of evidence that point over and over and over again to the earth being round. Flat earth has yet to produce a single confirming experiment in over ten thousand years of people believing it could be, and over sixty years of this specific organization. With modern technology, the scientific method, and lots of people, that's an eternity to have no results alone.
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