721

Flat Earth Media / Re: How High Do You Have To Be To See The Curvature?

« on: September 30, 2020, 05:00:23 PM »

But Pete, you're the one who made the claim that the only way to see anything beyond the horizon is to see through the earth. A claim that is completely untrue given the examples listed above and the diagrams that accompanied them.

Everything in this thread after reply #6, when that re-framed the discussion, has been a bit of a trainwreck :s

722

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Terrible Political Memes

« on: September 30, 2020, 03:45:07 PM »

723

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Tucker Carlson shouldn't be believed - Fox News Lawyers

« on: September 30, 2020, 01:46:26 PM »

Yep it's a common and (somewhat) fair defense. The problem is that too many of his viewers dont know that he's not a real news source and take his word(s) as truth. The same goes for some of the more vocal personalities on the left...

724

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Geology on a flat earth

« on: September 30, 2020, 11:52:58 AM »

Hey Jack, what kinds of science do you like/trust? I'll see what  can dug up as far as geologic investigations that use those principles.

Regarding earthquake locations one of the main reasons they dont always have epicenters at plate boundaries is because over geologic time, the continental plates have grown. North America for example has undergone three major mountain building events which have added fragments of new plate onto the old plate margins. The grenville progeny a billion years ago, the Appalachian progeny, and the cordillera orogeny, which built the rocky mountains. 

The first two are now thousands of miles from the plate boundary in the Atlantic, but are still zoned of weakness compared to the rest of the crust. On top of that, in eastern north america there are two failed rifts - the mid continent rift and the Ottawa-Bonnechere graven. Stresses that build up within the plate has it is pushed westward can trigger failures in these regions because there are so many faults that remain.

Plate tectonic theory explains earthquakes very well if you understand a lot of earths history and no where all the boundaries are, and where they used to be.

725

Flat Earth Community / Re: Round Earthers would like to censor the Internet

« on: September 29, 2020, 11:57:16 AM »

Have to agree here - banning this is universally ineffective.

The utopian view of having a perfect internet where only the truth exists is never going to happen, and any attempts at getting there involves a huge amount of risk that the motives of the censors will outweigh the needs of the people to have access to unbiased information.

The education system is long overdue for an update for a shift from memorization to learning different learning skills and finding / evaluating information and data. It's too easy to find something related to what your looking for these days, the problem is that no one looks into the data that is being shown to see what information is actually there. Critical thinking needs to come a long way...

726

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Terrible Political Memes

« on: September 28, 2020, 09:33:29 PM »

727

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Why? To What End???

« on: September 28, 2020, 02:33:44 PM »

I don't want to take anything away from any religious beliefs you have, but why couldn't Darwin be a Christian AND a scientist? These do not need to be mutually exclusive labels by any means.

I know a geology professor who is a leading expect on an ancient mountain belt, one that formed 1.2 - 1 billion years ago and was completely eroded by 700 million years ago. He is a devout christian and has published many books about how he reconciles scientific evidence and biblical teachings and descriptions. I've always admired him a great deal for that, and hes also just one of the genuinely nicest people I've ever met.

728

Flat Earth Media / Re: How High Do You Have To Be To See The Curvature?

« on: September 28, 2020, 01:51:01 PM »

This thread has devolved to a painful level. If you watched a 'sinking ship' to the point where all you saw was the mast, regardless of your world view, you would know you were seeing something beyond the horizon - whatever 'horizon' means in your world view. The boat's hull has disappeared behind it, but the mast is still visible, but since we know the mast is part of that boat we watched disappear, the mast is clearly beyond what we perceive as the horizon.

In RE we argue that it is the curved surface of the water that is obstructing view of the bottom of the boat, in FE, its perspective, attack angle, angular resolution, EA, a fat morgana - whatever.

I'm not sure how we got to the point where we're arguing about the definition of 'beyond'

729

Flat Earth Media / Re: How High Do You Have To Be To See The Curvature?

« on: September 27, 2020, 02:09:53 PM »

Many photographers have done just that - any time they sell a print of those city skyline pictures from across lakes on certain days. Making money off pictures of things beyond the horizon.

730

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Antarctic fossil finds

« on: September 25, 2020, 05:03:22 PM »

We can disagree on how much information we have on the characteristics of Antarctica, but I'll admit the way I had written things at the end of the original post wasn't a fair representation of what is argued by FE. I dont think it changes the substance of the questions, but it was definitely fair to call that out - sometimes a few words make a difference, I hope the edited version is better.

731

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Antarctic fossil finds

« on: September 25, 2020, 01:34:28 PM »

A fair point - I didnt word that properly. Should I change to
"the Antarctic is an ice wall that contains minimal amounts of rock"
I'll take suggestions to improve the wording and edit the original post. Was not my intention to to misrepresent things there.

732

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Antarctic fossil finds

« on: September 25, 2020, 01:09:05 PM »

We'll have to agree to disagree about the fossils, but what I would add is that rocks dont generally form beneath ice sheets (rocks are eroded, sediment mobilized, and deposited, then is liquified later) and the rocks that host the fossils (regardless of whether they're real or not) dont form in glacial environments. Combined this indicates that the magnitude of climate change in Antarctica is much greater than anything weve seen in human history, and it doesnt matter how much time you ascribe to it.

In RE, that magnitude of difference is generally explained by the southward movement of the Antarctic continent to it's current position at the south pole, where average temperatures are always cold.

The follow-up question to the initial would then be: what process can explain the magnitude of climate change that is documented between the rocks in Antarctica, to the permanently frozen ice sheet we know today?

The two implications this has for FE are that 1. The Antarctic continent didnt always have an ice sheet, therefore what was holding our oceans up in the past? And 2. The only thing I can think of (there could be other possibilities thougg) to explain the enormous climate transition for Antarctica is movement to increasingly southern latitudes where it would receive increasingly less heat from the sun - both in FE and RE models.

733

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Questions from a glacier guy - not on FAQ or the wiki

« on: September 25, 2020, 12:33:16 PM »

Hey Jack,

Thanks for adding to this (I thought the thread had died, so it was good to see another contribution)!

To your first point, you're right I had initially misunderstood Tom's point about pseudoscience, but I do think I clarified some of the issues around the classification of geology as pseudoscience by listing several examples of controlled lab experiments that are devised to constrain the results of the natural experiments and observations that lead to our understanding of earth systems. I might not have done a great job with it, but I'm not a great writer sometimes, so we'll just leave it there.

Thanks for your answers to the Antarctica questions. It's something that has bugged me since I first started familiarizing myself with FE ideas, and learning the diversity of opinions is helping to a degree.

My hopes are that some of these ideas can be used to add some completeness to what's provided in the wiki, as there is generally fairly limited material on major geologic phenomena. Though they don't directly tell us anything about the shape of the earth, my thinking is that the known behaviour of ice sheets, volcanoes, age of geologic events, fossil distributions etc. each add pieces of evidence that constrain the possible interpretations one way or the other. Obviously I lean pretty hard one way, but my main argument is that any model of a flat earth needs to be able to account for all of these things (though the wiki does cover several aspects, like volcano distributions, gravity, earthquakes, mountains).

Thanks again though!

734

Flat Earth Community / Pre-NASA space conspiracy

« on: September 23, 2020, 09:17:02 PM »

In the historical figures section on the wiki, a long quote is given from Winship, where he delivers a scathing review of his contemporary astronomers in 1899.

I tried reading further, but theres not a lot of discussion about the motives or reasons for the doubt of the shape of the earth and findings of astronomers until the space flight era. These more modern reasons I can totally understand. There is a valid argument that having dominance in space provides geopolitical power (the US has absolutely achieved that).

I'll stay completely out of the thread after this question, I'm just trying to understand more about the origins of the skepticism surrounding pre-NASA astronomy and the shape of the earth.

735

Flat Earth Community / Re: Why doesn't the atmosphere drift off into space?

« on: September 23, 2020, 06:06:39 PM »

A few basic ideas need to be understood to look at the question. I'm not an expert, but consider looking into some of these:

- gravity is the main thing holding our atmosphere in place. The 11km/s quote is the speed required for something to leave earth's orbit.

-gases can only push. They flow from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure

- gravity exerts a force that stratifies our atmosphere into different layers, but generally speaking, more atmosphere is held closer to the earth than high up above it. Atmospheric pressure is greatest at sea level and gets exponentially lower as you gain altitude. This means that the higher up you go, the closer the atmospheric pressure gets to zero. At the boundary between earth's upper atmosphere and "space", atmospheric pressure is almost zero. This means that there is no pressure gradient to cause the gas to be lost to space

- earth is constantly losing parts if its upper atmosphere to space though, from interactions with the solar wind. If it wasnt for our magnetic field, we would lose atmosphere at a much greater rate (mars no longer has a magnetic field, which is believed to be a major cause of why it has such a thin -low pressure- atmosphere). Despite losing little bits of atmosphere, were constantly gaining 'new atmosphere's through volcanic eruptions, weathering processes, and biosphere interactions.

Again, dont take my word... I've undoubtedly oversimplified things. But dive in to some of those concepts and come up with an answer for yourself!

736

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Gravity - measurement and applications

« on: September 18, 2020, 11:40:36 AM »

I'm not saying anything specific about the mass distributions beneath mountains.... but you seem to be claiming it would be a mirror image of the surface profile, but also has a unique mass distribution to one side.

I don't like using examples of floating things, but the do demonstrate clearly that the weight of non-dense things can induce deformation of underlying denser material, which seems the be the main issue you disagree with here ( I hope that doesnt over simplify your stance). In the case of that ice Berg, if the surface or subsurface morphology changes enough, the uneven mass distribution will cause the ice very to roll over, to find a new equilibrium.

Duncan's right though Tom, all this recent stuff should be on a different board, and we should go back to the examples of local-scale changes in measured pull over buried valleys, the references I provided, and whether UA can address those spatial variations.

737

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Gravity - measurement and applications

« on: September 18, 2020, 04:09:27 AM »

I never said it was wrong, I said there was no scale. I have no issue with Bristol  - tons people there smarter than I am!

The conceptual drawings demonstrate plate tectonic theory accurately enough ( the second one you added later is probably better than the first one you had originally, but that's just my opinion). The maximum amount of downward deformation of the mantle contact will occur beneath the area that has the thickest accumulation of continental crust (your purple oval in the first and orange circle in the second).

I feel like this would be easier if, instead of pulling out individual slides from things, you read the whole documents. You could then include some references on the mountains and volcanoes page which currently has none.

738

Flat Earth Community / Re: Thoughts on updating the FAQ

« on: September 18, 2020, 01:17:47 AM »

Regarding the EA page I would make two recommendations, from an RE perspective:
1. Clearly define and describe the terms used: especially dark energy, as this was confusing for me, coming from numerous physics and astronomy courses in university. Does the theory provided have the ability to quantify light ray path curvature at sunset to explain clouds lit from the underside?
2. Explain how the EA hypothesis fits within/ was developed from the scientific method

Other than that, keep it going. I might not agree with a ton, but the wiki is nonetheless an impressive compilation.

739

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Gravity - measurement and applications

« on: September 18, 2020, 01:11:20 AM »

We might be getting closer here, cause yeah that's exactly what isostacy says. And it's not nonsense at all... put enough mass of something and it will start to do work to something beneath it, regardless of their relative densities.

Think snowflakes slowly compressing underlying snow into denser glacier ice, sediments slowly compacting and lithifying underlying layers into rock, and ice cube in a glass of water, or a bunch of colliding low density continental crust deforming the contact with the underlying denser mantle (pictured above and circles in purple in your post)

I would just caution that the diagram is a 3D conceptual model and is no way drawn to scale, so in this case your blue circle isnt really meaningful.

740

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Gravity - measurement and applications

« on: September 16, 2020, 08:15:55 PM »

You're right, not all mountain chains form in the same way.
This site is the only place I've seen the term 'fold mountains'
The upper mantle has high (not low) density material.
You "would expect..." what are you basing your expectations on? Logic? Common sense? Willful optimism?
That quote from quora(?) Mixes up continent-continent orogenic belts with subduction belt orogenies.
Those negative anomalies exist because when you pile up a bunch of low-density material, it pushes down the underlying high-density material, making the dense stuff relatively further away from the measuring device, creating a weaker observed pull.
It's not coincidence - its correlation.