[3DGeek]

The FE'ers claim that they don't know the actual map of their Flat Earth world.

Let's fix that for them!

As you may know, the PVoutput.org web site provides the amount of energy output for about a million solar power plants around the world...it provides it in real time - and historically.

This turns out to be a surprisingly useful resource.

One thing it tells us is the time at which each power plant starts generating power (usually a short time after sunrise) and when it stops (a short time before sunset).

In FET - and presuming that Tom's "magic perspective" works (*cough*) - we should be able to take advantage of this information to make a map.  Perhaps not a very precise map...but at least we'll know roughly where the continents lie...stuff like that.

Here are the steps:

1) Pick a time and day...any day.  Let's pick noon (GMT) on the spring equinox (March 20th).  It doesn't *have* to be the equinox - but it makes life easier.

2) Since we chose noon on the equinox - we know that the sun was vertically overhead on the equator and the zero meridian - just off the coast of Accra, Ghana in west Africa.

3) At that moment, we should be able to find the set of solar power plants that have *just* turned on - or *just* turned off.   I'm sure Tom will complain that we don't know for sure whether this was at the instant of sunrise/sunset - or a little before or a little after - but actually I don't care.  So long as it's about the same time before or after - I'm good with it.   These points of "equal solar azimuth" need a name - I'm going to invent one to save typing: "equisolar points" - locations where the sun is at some small angle relative to the horizon.

4) In FET, what makes the sun touch the horizon is a consequence of some screwed up notion of how perspective works.   Rather than argue about that - for the sake of this discussion - let's just accept Tom's explanation.

5) Since that's just a matter of distance from the sun - the equisolar points (power stations we found in step (3)) must lie on an approximate circle, roughly centered around Accra...all of them being at the same distance from the sun at that moment.

6) So now we have a kind of map - Accra in the middle - and a circle of equisolar points around it.   We don't yet know the radius of the circle - but that's OK.  We'll have a map, we can figure out what scale it's at later on.

7) OK - so let's repeat the process for noon at the autumn equinox...this time, in RET, the sun would be over a point somewhere South of "Baker Island" in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  The "bipolar" FET map that is often posted has this location simultaneously on the left and right sides of the map?!?  But nobody knows whether this is the "right" map or not...so let's not worry about that.

8 ) Now we have another set of equisolar points that must lie on a circle centered on...someplace...wherever the sun is at that time.   Hmmm...need another new name "equisolar circle" - the circle of places where the sun is at that particular angle relative to the horizon.

9) Why stop there?  Let's find the equisolar circle for every hour of the day of the equinox - we'll have 24 approximate circles!  Let's number them according to the GMT time offset:  -11, -10...-2, -1, 0, 1, 2....10, 11, 12.   (12 and -12 are both midnight GMT...so they are the same).

Remember - the center of each circle was the place where the sun was overhead at noon that day...the points on the edge of the circle represent places where the sun had either just risen or is about to set.

So all we have to do to construct our FE map is to decide how these circles of known locations lie with respect to each other...if we can to THAT then we have an imprecise - but fairly reasonable map.   If we're "off" in our power-on/power-off times by (say) 15 minutes - then that location will be misplaced by as much as 250 miles - so this will be an admittedly imprecise map...but not disastrously so.  Certainly it'll show us where the continents are placed to within a precision of 250 miles...which is a hell of a lot better than "WE DON'T KNOW".  With a million power plants - we'll have a million locations - and that's enough to do some statistical sampling.

However, there is a problem.   Let's just think for a moment about these circles.  Remember that they are all taken at different times of the day or night?

They can't be concentric circles because that would mean that the sun stayed at zenith thoughout the day...and that, we know, never happens.

If they're not concentric - they can't not overlap at all...that would be insane.   So these equisolar circles MUST overlap.

Now that's an odd thought.  If they overlap - then at the point where they cross each other - the sun stayed at the same angle above the horizon for two or more hours!

How could that be?   Well, in RET - this happens at the North and South poles.   Recall that on the equinox days, the sun at the poles just skims the horizon - it's angle above/below the horizon doesn't change...which is what we said would happen.

This produces a rather beautiful RET map - imagine these circles all crossing at the poles - arranged like the segments of an orange...describing a sphere!  Wow!  We made an RET map from PVoutput data!

But we're unfortunately stuck in FET land.

So you have to have the circles intersecting in a couple of places.   In the unipolar map we only have one place that works - the North pole.  There isn't a south pole...this make it extremely difficult to make a map...in fact, it's impossible.

But in the bipolar map, we'd have to have circles that intersect the arctic and the antarctic.  They would have to get progressively larger:



Now - it would take some effort to do this in reality - but since we "really" know that these equisolar circles are really just lines of longitude - we can assume that the result will be that continents will get larger the further away they are from the prime meridian - which is going to turn out to completely FAIL to match real world distances over land - places where people can drive their cars and say "THIS MAP IS BULLSHIT".

But the process of constructing it is irrefutable...and in fact, we don't even need the PVoutput.org data to do it.  We can just ask, where are the places where Tom's Magic Perspective predicts that the sun will rise or set?   Those are still equisolar circles.

So using nothing but Magic Perspective - we arrive at a completely bullshit map.   Either magic perspective is wrong (in which case - no sunrises and sunsets) - or FET is wrong and the world is Round.

Come to think of it...the world must be round either way.

[gizmo910]

Is there maybe a tl;dr post you could do for this? lol

I do concur though.

[3DGeek]

And that map has a name:  It's a "Conformal Eisenlohr" projection:



The problem with it is that we chose our "GMT" arbitrarily - and if we'd started with some other meridian - all sorts of much weirder things would have happened.

[3DGeek]

Is there maybe a tl;dr post you could do for this? lol

I do concur though.

Not really..."I made an FE map and it's bullshit"...doesn't really cover it.

Perhaps:

* Magic perspective predicts that sunrises and sunsets occur in a circle around the sun.
* If we plot those circles for every hour of the day, we have a bunch of circles describing where it rose and set.
* Those circles have to intersect...if we think of the equinox, they'll intersect at the poles, where the sun doesn't set on that day.
* There isn't a good way to plot those circles on a flat map for...reasons.
* Ergo there is no flat map - or magic perspective doesn't work.
* Either way is fine by me because without either, the world isn't flat.

[devils advocate]

And that map has a name:  It's a "Conformal Eisenlohr" projection:

The problem with it is that we chose our "GMT" arbitrarily - and if we'd started with some other meridian - all sorts of much weirder things would have happened.

Well the Ozzies are screwed on this one, sure they would have noticed the spilt up their middle     not to mention the folk who travelled between Russia and North America.....

This idea of the map (or lack of one) fascinates me. Time and time again you and others offer proof that make the flat earth IMPOSSIBLE and yet still the "debate" continues (admittedly it's withered to mainly Tom desperately clutching at straws asking for proof that the sun lights up bits of the world he can't see or that that two parallel lines will continue for infinity without ever touching-as if that is relevant to anything).

 I would have thought that once one had admitted there is no possible map it would be time to move on to the next conspiracy theory, this one is dead.

[3DGeek]

And that map has a name:  It's a "Conformal Eisenlohr" projection:

The problem with it is that we chose our "GMT" arbitrarily - and if we'd started with some other meridian - all sorts of much weirder things would have happened.

Well the Ozzies are screwed on this one, sure they would have noticed the spilt up their middle     not to mention the folk who travelled between Russia and North America.....

This idea of the map (or lack of one) fascinates me. Time and time again you and others offer proof that make the flat earth IMPOSSIBLE and yet still the "debate" continues (admittedly it's withered to mainly Tom desperately clutching at straws asking for proof that the sun lights up bits of the world he can't see or that that two parallel lines will continue for infinity without ever touching-as if that is relevant to anything).

 I would have thought that once one had admitted there is no possible map it would be time to move on to the next conspiracy theory, this one is dead.

(Actually, the split is in antarctica...but by choosing a different place to start your experiment - you get the split happening someplace else.)

The problem actually goes even deeper.   Since the distance from the sun to the eye at sunset (using the magic perspective explanation) should be a constant...maybe 6000 miles or something.

That would mean that the circles that describe the location of the sunset for every hour of the day would all have to have the exact same radius.

So the equisolar circles would have to all be the same size.  You can't have a bunch of circles, all of the same size, that all intersect at the same two points (the North and South poles).   Well...not on a flat map.   The ONLY way to do that is to have a spherical Earth and have them intersect at the poles.

[Mark_1984]

It makes sailing across the pacific 'interesting' as well.  I've done that, and I can promise you, I didn't fall off the edge 

[3DGeek]

It makes sailing across the pacific 'interesting' as well.  I've done that, and I can promise you, I didn't fall off the edge 

The "bipolar" map is batshit crazy when it comes to anything involving the "international date line" because it runs up BOTH sides of the map.

Asking yourself how your ship (or the sun at 00:00 GMT) gets across that line from the far left of the map over to the far right is an interesting problem for the FE'ers. 

How the sunrise would appear on the east coast of Asia or Australia when the sun does that is kinda mind-bending.

The "unipolar" map is the only one I've seen that makes sense for that...but crossing the southern oceans with the aid of celestial navigation, using the Southern Cross and a compass...that would be "interesting" when the direction of southern cross is...um..."poorly defined".