[jimster]

So if the earth is flat and space travel is fake, there must be some who are doing the fakery. Spacex, scientists, NASA, the actual astronauts, operations technicians. There must be either a giant conspiracy (thousands of people, billions of dollars), or most of the people involved have things faked for them. I have tried to think through the details of how this could work, but I keep having problems with plausibility. For instance, consider the passengers on Spacex Inspiration 4. EIther they are in on it and paid millions to not go and do a masterful job at lying about it, or "they" put together a way to have them in 0g and looking at a fake RE. Lots of people saw them get in and blast off, did they go down a chute instead of being in the rocket and went somewhere to wait to reappear, and act as though they really went? Or was there some way they went to a 0g simulator with fake video screens they thought were windows? Either way, many people know.

Is there an ever increasing supply of actors pretending to be astronauts, or do they have some amazing tech to make them think they were in space?  Perhaps it is impossible to know anything about what is really going on with space travel, one can only know the earth is flat and so space travel is false, just endlessly guessing at the details of how they fake it?

Does someone have a plausible explanation of the borders of the conspiracy? Who at Spacex and NASA knows FE is true? If they don't know, how do they put astronauts in the capsule and get them later? If they do know, how do they keep the giant conspiracy secret? How do you get billionaires to lie about it (convincingly, requiring acting skills and rehearsal to get the story straight), or how do you fake 0 g for them?

[Rushy]

Well, let's take the opposite of the argument: is it impossible to keep anything secret if lots of people must keep it secret?

Are the plans for a minuteman ICBM missile readily available and acknowledged? After all, tens of thousands of people designed them, maintain them, manufacture them, and conceal them. Certainly someone has mentioned exactly how they work, what signal frequencies their computers use, and how to build one yourself? If not, then it isn't happening.

How about a space shuttle? That's not secret, right? Oh? It's classified? Well, too many people worked on it. But, I don't see anyone revealing how to build it? It must have never existed at all, then.

These threads pop up time and time again, their basis is always fundamentally flawed. The thought process of "certainly if so many people are keeping a secret, at least one would say something!" Furthermore, if they do say something, would you believe them? How many whistleblowers out there have tried to revealed critical failures in government only to be forgotten, ignored, exiled or executed? The world is filled with many secrets, the larger they are, the more implausible the truth becomes.

After all, you might even have whistleblowers here. People who understand it is faked but without the wherewithal to reveal themselves. 

[SteelyBob]

Are the plans for a minuteman ICBM missile readily available and acknowledged? After all, tens of thousands of people designed them, maintain them, manufacture them, and conceal them. Certainly someone has mentioned exactly how they work, what signal frequencies their computers use, and how to build one yourself? If not, then it isn't happening.

Lots of systems exist that have some degree of security protection, of course. The ICBM example you give is a good one. But the fundamental difference between that and the shape of the earth is that a complex system like an ICBM can be protected by the 'need to know' principle - very few people, if indeed any, need access to the totality of the system. They just need to know what their particular part of the system does. They can also openly declare what they do to friends and family as long as they don't go into the specifics. But if your job is to create fake footage of space travel, for example, or to drive the fake astronauts back to their accommodation after the fake launch sequence, then the everything about your job has to be kept secret, because even the existence of your job blows the secret. And that's the problem for FE - it requires an enormous number of people to be working extremely hard in total secrecy to fabricate something, and it wouldn't take much of a whistleblow to completely undermine the whole thing.

[ichoosereality]

Lots of systems exist that have some degree of security protection, of course. The ICBM example you give is a good one. But the fundamental difference between that and the shape of the earth is that a complex system like an ICBM can be protected by the 'need to know' principle - very few people, if indeed any, need access to the totality of the system. They just need to know what their particular part of the system does. They can also openly declare what they do to friends and family as long as they don't go into the specifics. But if your job is to create fake footage of space travel, for example, or to drive the fake astronauts back to their accommodation after the fake launch sequence, then the everything about your job has to be kept secret, because even the existence of your job blows the secret. And that's the problem for FE - it requires an enormous number of people to be working extremely hard in total secrecy to fabricate something, and it wouldn't take much of a whistleblow to completely undermine the whole thing.

Precisely.  Plus of course space based systems like GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing, and weather satellites all work.  But the most basic proof of the globe earth is simply that humans have traveled over every inch of it and travel times and distances in the southern hemisphere, let alone over the southern pole, correspond to the globe earth not the flat earth.  Traveling in roughly a straight line from South America over Antarctica you do not hit a wall or a dome or find an infinite frozen waste but merely land in Australia. 

Which of course is why the goal of the mods here is not to facilitate debate but to misdirect and discourage it as they know any actual debate will show FE to be nonsense.

[Rushy]

Precisely.  Plus of course space based systems like GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing, and weather satellites all work. 

Do they? Do you often work with GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing and weather satellites?

[ichoosereality]

Precisely.  Plus of course space based systems like GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing, and weather satellites all work. 

Do they? Do you often work with GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing and weather satellites?

Yes I use GPS very often and have done so at sea), as have many millions if not few billion others (using GPS or one of the other global or regional systems).  Given that the receiver is measuring arrival times, I see no way that this can be faked.
I have not personally used a Sat phone.
Yes I have used satellite TV and played with moving the dish around watching signal strength).
You can see earth sensing data, just google for it.
Weather satellite data is of course used/seen constantly.

[RonJ]

I used GPS every day while traveling worldwide.  Sat phones were also used on a regular basis.
Weather satellite data was received via a WEFAX receiver and weather maps were received every day.
Later the same weather data was received via the INMARSAT system or the Tracfone satellite receiver
connected to the internet.  All of this worked very well at any latitude below 70N or above 70S.   

[stack]

Precisely.  Plus of course space based systems like GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing, and weather satellites all work. 

Do they? Do you often work with GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing and weather satellites?

Entirely anectdotal, but... I've actually talked to someone very near and dear to me who I trust implicitly on their Sat phone while she was 1800 miles south of Hawaii and thousands more from any other land mass on a 2 handed sailing trip from the US to Tahiti. And she was the navigatrix and was using GPS and real-time weather charts the entire crossing there and back.

Threading two storms, their mainsail got torn. Still usable, but nerve-wracking nonetheless 1000's of miles from land. In any case, she called me on their Sat phone to let me know what was going on. We only talked for a minute or 2 because Sat phone usage is extremely expensive.

[Rushy]

Yes I use GPS very often and have done so at sea), as have many millions if not few billion others (using GPS or one of the other global or regional systems).  Given that the receiver is measuring arrival times, I see no way that this can be faked.
I have not personally used a Sat phone.
Yes I have used satellite TV and played with moving the dish around watching signal strength).
You can see earth sensing data, just google for it.
Weather satellite data is of course used/seen constantly.

That's not working with GPS. That's using GPS. At the end of the day, GPS is just a signal frequency popping out of the sky. You don't know what put it there.

Entirely anectdotal, but... I've actually talked to someone very near and dear to me who I trust implicitly on their Sat phone while she was 1800 miles south of Hawaii and thousands more from any other land mass on a 2 handed sailing trip from the US to Tahiti. And she was the navigatrix and was using GPS and real-time weather charts the entire crossing there and back.

Threading two storms, their mainsail got torn. Still usable, but nerve-wracking nonetheless 1000's of miles from land. In any case, she called me on their Sat phone to let me know what was going on. We only talked for a minute or 2 because Sat phone usage is extremely expensive.

As said above, this isn't working with those systems. This is just a form of using them.

[ichoosereality]

That's not working with GPS. That's using GPS.

If you want a precise answer, ask a precise question.

At the end of the day, GPS is just a signal frequency popping out of the sky. You don't know what put it there.

We do actually.  Suppose the signal from the satellites is recorded right next to the GPS receiver and
then retransmitted, a sort of relay.  Now consider that relay is computing the signals instead of actually receiving
them from the satellites (I presume this is along the lines of what you have in mind).  That would indeed work for that
ONE location.  But the timing data would be wrong for any other location yet would be received by many thousands of
receivers within range of the transmitter.  So that does't work, let alone work all over the planet including in the middle
of the ocean.

Its also worth noting that the coordinates GPS gives you are of course for the globe earth and those coordinates match up
with the distances and travel times actually experienced anywhere on the planet (even in the southern ocean).

[gwrox007]

Precisely.  Plus of course space based systems like GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing, and weather satellites all work. 

Do they? Do you often work with GPS, sat phones, satellite TV, earth sensing and weather satellites?

I can answer this. Yes, I work with GPS on a literal daily basis. I am a land surveyor, and using the GPS satellite network our equipment can accurately and repeatably measure the locations of objects on the Earth's surface to within 1cm (0.4"). That would not be possible unless the satellites that our equipment detect up there were actually travelling in the elliptical orbits that I was taught in school they were following, to be able to use to triangulate to determine the positions of objects on the Earth's surface.

Elliptical trigonometry and geodesy work extremely well, and would only do so if they reflected reality.

[jimster]

Gps works by having multiple super accurate atomic clocks on the satellite and broadcasting the satellite id and time constantly. Your cell phone has a clock, not as good but sufficiant, and ewhen the phone gets a signal from the satellite, it figures out the time, and therefor the distance. this means you are on a sphere x distance from the first satellite. A second satellite gives a different sphere, and the intersection is a circle. A third satellite gives another sphere, the intersection is now two points. A fourth satellite narrows it down to one point.

There is a network of ground stations tracking these satellites, their accurate position is critical. There are web pages showing where these satellites are now. The positions are updated in all phones. I wonder, on FE, are the people running the satellites tracking stupid or evil?

YOU !!! can buy a USB gps receiver and download C++ source code from GITHUB to run a gps app in your pc. With an IDE, you can look at the source code, the algorithms, what location you are using for satellite, and the raw data from the satellite. Many have done this, both people working at companies like Garmin and hobbiest/student. You can look at where the satellite is said to be, and the distance to that satellite and the raw data it sent.

So we know that the calculation is based on the location of orbiting satellites, and it works. A signal arrives at your phone that correctly uses the published position of the satellite and the timestamp in the signal to figure out where you are, 24/7, worldwide. Explaining this without impossible conspiracy or impossible technology would be hard. I am skeptical that is is possible.