Depending how much of a life you have, you may or not have heard of Mad Mike Hughes, a Flat-Earther who has been trying to launch himself into the sky to obtain proof that the Earth is flat.
Yesterday afternoon, in his steam-powered (sic) rocket, he finally took flight. The rocket went up 1875 feet and came down nose first. The video shows him being gingerly removed from his rocket and although he was conscious and alert, he was not entirely unscathed.
How he hopes to demonstrate that the Earth is flat with his rocket is unclear.
Washington Post story:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/25/an...
Video:
https://noizetv.vhx.tv/mad-mike-hughes-the-launch-or-non-launch/season:3...
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If you want to see the earth from space then return and lie about your findings, astral projection is cheaper .
I went higher than that on some kind of high-speed elevator ride on top of a high-rise in Las Vegas. The Earth definitely looked round from up there after I got my eyeballs back in.
Has the man never heard of commercial airlines? Pretty sure a simple ticket for a trans-Atlantic flight would have been MUCH CHEAPER, and I KNOW the altitude would have been higher. Hell, I've jumped out of airplanes from ten to fifteen times higher than his rocket went. Still, I bet he had one helluva ride. I'm almost a little jealous.
haha
You won't believe the dude, but if he used something like air consolidator.com, his flight would be even a lot cheaper. The destination is not so important to him, but the very fact of the flight, so he would fly for nothing
You only need to stand on a headland with a wide unclutteted view of the ocean horizon to see the curvature of the earth.
For the patient binocular owner, you can watch an approaching ship come mast first up over the horizon.
Too boring? Perhaps but beats getting mangled in a steam powered rocket.
Don't these people ever look at a lunar eclipse? How do they explain that little tidbit?
The guy is a dummy. Everyone knows that the Earth is shaped like a square pyramid triangle just like the moon is.
THE FLAT LEAGUE.
When a member of the Anglo-Saxon race invents a new creed, whether theological or political, his first step is to organize an association to maintain his views, and his second is to establish a newspaper to publish them. The latest illustration of...
May 15, 1876 -
THE EARTH FLATTENER'S PARADOXES.
The earth-flatteners form a considerable section of the paradoxical family. They experienced a practical rebuff a few years since, which should to some degree have shaken their faith in the present chief of their order. To do this chief justice, h...
October 07, 1877
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/flat+earth/from18600101to18...
You can read the articles in a pdf format from the NYTimes archives. I've used up my limit for the month so this is the best I can do. They've been fighting the dummies for over 150 years.
Too bad this guy doesn't know something about mathematics. All he has to do is collect all the known distances between 4 cities, 3 of them forming a large triangle with respect to the Earth and the 4th being roughly in the middle of that triangle, and show that his flat-earth map accurately reflects those distances.
It is easy to prove (with mathematical certainty) that if the Earth is flat then the distances between 4 such cities cannot be carried over to the surface of a sphere without serious error. It works the other way, too. If you measure the distances on a globe, and get a good match with the known distances, then the Earth is spherical. No flat Earth is possible. Who has the best map wins! This decisive test is nice in that if one side produces an accurate map, the other side cannot have such a map--mathematical certainty! And, if one side cannot possibly have an accurate map, then that side is wrong about the shape of the Earth.
This test is based on the assumption that we either have a flat Earth or a spherical Earth, the only two shapes in contention here. If you want to rule out additional, weird possibilities to a high degree, and are willing to put in a lot of work, then you need only consider more cities. 4 cities, arranged as above, are the minimum for this decisive test. Forget about all the photos, observations, and other arguments. This one test settles the issue with mathematical certainty.
If you have a 9" globe (or larger) you might want to do the test for yourself. Looking up the distances between the following large cities should be easy.
London, England
Cape Town, South Africa
New Delhi, India
Khartoum, Sudan
Use a string to get the distances (a centimeter ruler to measure the marked string is convenient). A roll of painters tape, the kind that sticks gently and can be removed without wrecking your globe, can help hold a slippery string in place. A careful job gives you all the accuracy you need. (It can be mathematically shown that the expected errors for a wrong map would be considerably larger.)
Make a table of the distances (centimeters of string length) between the 4 cities. Get the known distances from the Internet (miles or kilometers or whatever). Choose a new unit for distance, namely the smallest of the distances in each table will be defined as 1.00 unit of this new distance. Normalize both tables that way so that every distance is expressed in terms of this new unit. The Internet data table and your string data table now have the same units and can be compared directly. So, (holding breath), are the distances as measured on your globe a tight fit for the Internet data? Viola! The spherical map wins--and a reasonably accurate flat map is mathematically impossible. A flat Earth can't be real if it can't be mapped in principle.
Greensnake,
"Too bad this guy doesn't know something about mathematics."
Then next thing you're be saying is that the sizes of the land masses on this map are wrong. http://sf.co.ua/id129661
Everyone knows that Greenland is larger than China, that Alaska is larger than Mexico, that the US and Canada are larger than Africa, that Australia is larger than Brazil, and that Russia is much larger than Africa.
https://www.google.com/search?q=true+sizes+of+countries&client=firefox-b...
The True Size of Countries = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XAIwSc4Yic
Yeah. Maps can be deceptive. Do you see how close New Zealand is to Australia? Well Auckland is about as far from Sydney as New York is from Utah, and it's so far from London that the distance is the same whether you fly east or west.
If the Earth was flat and had an edge, New Zealand would be over it.
Algebe,
"Do you see how close New Zealand is to Australia? Well Auckland is about as far from Sydney as New York is from Utah, and it's so far from London that the distance is the same whether you fly east or west."
I've never really thought about that. It's a heck of a trip in a row boat, that's for sure. https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-is-it-between-sydney_-australia-and...
Hopefully he ain't reproduced...
rmfr
"a Flat-Earther who has been trying to launch himself into the sky to obtain proof that the Earth is flat."
I'm not entirely sure why, but I just laughed so hard I coughed a small piece of biscuit out, my missus is not happy. Has it occurred to him to wonder why ships disappear 'over' the horizon when they sail away from the coast on a clear day?
The flat-earther this thread was about; recently died from another launch.
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Attach Image/Video?:
One doesn't wish to be too unkind under the circumstances, but I can't be the only one who thought wow, the average global IQ probably just rose a fraction of a point.
Do I dare another joke?
Hell yes, he's a FLAT flat earther....
I'll get me coat.
First off ... Australia can’t be bigger than Brazil - it doesn’t exist.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/201...
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Darwin Awards 2020! Honerable Mention! I love it! There is one born every minute I hear.
@Cognostic
"There is one born every minute"
Well there's one less now...how was this individual not locked up for their own safety ffs?
That's sad. The world needs eccentrics, and this one was mostly harmless to everyone but himself. The place where he landed will forever be his own little patch of flat earth.
At least he didn't land on anyone.
Pretty sure I saw an article saying the bloke had been killed in his attempt.
I once joined a Flat Earth Forum. It was amazing; I really couldn't pick the difference between the loonies and the trolls.
--I was banned after one post. Yeah, pretty unfair. ---- All did was recount story of how, on their return journey from discovering the Bahamas, the Nina and the Pinta sailed off the edge of the earth. They were then eaten by the first great tortoise. The Santa Maria survived to tell the tale.
Now I don't know if that story is really true. However, it was what we were taught at the Catholic school I attended. Fair dinkum, I'll bet you can't even begin to imagine some of the REALLY weird shit we were taught.
WOW? TRULY? Of course ,would I lie?