And yeah, I've decided to come back here. As an aside, I got banned from Religious Forums for suggesting that maybe, just maybe atheists claiming Coronavirus being proof that God isn't real was way out of line. And that all over the country, churches are being prevented from helping those in need. Apparently this was the final straw for a forum "tolerant" of religious and political beliefs. I tend to be outspoken, so maybe I'll get banned here too. But anyway.
Well... we have a lot of Christians, preachers, pastors, claiming that Corona is God's punishment for accepting gays as human beings, or God using Covid-19 to evoke a new Great Awakening, or preachers shouting into an empty room that they rebuke the virus in Jesus name or claiming that God would protect their congregation from getting sick, or that God would spare the USA because of Trump, or, or, or...
I have to admit that I haven't heard any atheist claiming Covid-19 being "proof" against God... but, yeah, maybe they exist.
They are not more out of the line as these preachers who talk directly to God, who apparently feeds them fake news.
As for "churches being prevented from helping those in need", maybe you have some direct examples for that... but what I have heard of happening is churches being prevented from holding large personal gatherings... because, you know...
there is a highly contagious and rather serious virus around.
So if they really wanted to "help" people... maybe they should consider that in a time where the
gathering of people is the problem... they could use some other means of "helping".
And I dare say as long as you keep within the rules of this forum... which you should have read and agreed to when you registered, you should be pretty safe.
I'm an atheist, and I have been active here for almost twenty years without getting into problems.
I'm pretty solidly a flat Earther after spending a couple days staring and the sky and determining that while the Earth is possibly a dome, there are several issues with it being round and orbiting the sun.
It has to go quite fast to do this tilt/orbit/rotation (1000+ mph rotation, 65000+ orbit) yet despite all this none of us feel anything. Think about how fast the fastest hurricane is. Yet, a constant rotation happens without either disturbing us, or (lest you though there was some sort of biological evolution to adapt to a round rotating Earth) knocking over any chairs, cabinets, or as much as disturbing a leaf or the water. But, you say, what about centripetal/centrifugal (nobody I know keeps those two straight anyway) force? What about it? Check out an old amusement park. Remember that ride where the room spun and you started going up and out, towards the ceiling? Exactly. Remember, much slower speed, yet gravity did nothing to stop this. And you probably threw up.
Hm... how much "speed" do you think you need in order to notice it? Ever ridden in a really big nice car... a big BWM or Mercedes? I felt like sitting in my living room when going at 200km/h over the Autobahn.
Planes? Standard air travel? The concord? People sitting there, drinking champagne?
The problem is: we do not feel "speed"... we do not have any organ that would be capable of feeling it. What we do feel is acceleration - changes in speed. And here you would have a point: we should feel the
turning of the earth. But here the problem is scale.
The earth turns at a "speed" of 1000miles per hour. That's fast! But as said, we don't feel speed. The earth also turns at ONE rotation per day. A hour hand on a clock moves twice as fast. Take some time to observe it closely and feel the enormous forces.
A similar problem is with the centrifugal force. Yes, it exists, it is based on the rotation of the earth... and because of the rotation period and the distances, it is not very big.
A ride in an amusment park goes hellishly fast in contrast, and thus the forces are a lot bigger.
On the earth... the difference in weight due to centrifugal force on an average human of 80kg, at 0% force at the poles, and maximum force at the equator is about 200g. A package of butter.
Get up in the morning - have yourself a nice breakfast - and then tell me how much you feel the difference in weight between before and after. Our senses are just not precise enough... and our "feelings" are very subjective. We adapt to such "feelings" rather quickly.
When I was younger, I used to join some Live-Action-Roleplaying games a few times. You know, the events where people run around, play-acting as knights and monsters and such?
In this role, I used to wear a 15kg chainmail shirt. After just a day running around in such attire... you don't even feel it anymore. When you take it off at the end of the day... you feel as if you could fly. Our senses are very unreliable here.
But such things can be measured... and these measurements show that these effects do indeed exist.
I remember going to China not west or even northwest towards Alaska but straight north. While you could say this is to avoid running out of fuel and crashing into the ocean, from an overhead globe of the Earth (
like this one) it makes way more sense as it is also a straight line. In fact, they had fuel for a fifteen hour flight. There is an actual calculator, and as you can see, it is a very odd curved path. Until you look at it from the lens of a flat Earth and understand what they are actually doing.
Distance from China to United States
When using these "flight routes" you need to take into account the type of map you are using. Yes, most of these routes
on the northern hemisphere look very straight when using the north-standing azimuthal projection. And they look very curved when seeing there on a common mercator projection.
The problems here: The azimuthal projection has the least distortions close to the north pole. The further south you get, the bigger the distortions. The really existing flight paths in the southern hemisphere get horrible distorted, and much too long using the "Flat Earth map".
The problem with the "very odd curved path"... it's using a mercator map... and this type of projection does distort most great circle lines on the globe into curves.
Light does not curve, from my observation. But in order to fit a round Earth, it has to bend to fit the model. Yet unlike a thrown object that clearly travels in an arc, light always travels straight.
Hm... you didn't specifiy why light would have to curve in the globe earth model... but fact is: light does "curve". Or rather, it bends. This is the optical phenomenon called "refraction", which always happens when light enters a medium of a different density.
Lenses use the this phenomenon, and everytime you have seen a pair of glasses, you have seen light "curve".
Now air is not always of the same density, especially in the vertical. So light "curves" a little when travelling through the atmosphere.
Interestingly is that one of the things that most Flat Earthers use to explain observations like the setting sun. Kindale posted some videos about that earlier in this thread.
So light "curves" even on the Flat Earth... and even a lot more that in the globe model.
Human beings cannot stand upside down for any discernible length of time. Blood rushes to their brain and they die. Which rules out the notion that our entire southern hemisphere is hanging upside-down. Nor do they appear to be able to gradually adjust to minor curves. I've gone up several mountains, and even the most gentle uphill slope can be felt eventually. Also, it would have to be a near-constant vertical curve.
That would only be the case if there was a distinct, independent "down" direction. But in the globe model, "down" is not a universal direction... it is pointing towards the center of the globe. So no human is standing "upside down"... except if they are practicing headstands.
There is also a slight problem with comparing slopes with the curvature of the earth. Again, there is no universal "down" direction... at any point the direction of "down" is towards the centre of the earth. So if you are standing on "level" ground, it is always the same angle. But on a slope, this angle changes.
In contrast, the Earth could be a flat disc, as I have observed actual horizontal distortion as walking along our curved street eventually straightened out. US roads are never a straight line, yet airplanes appear to be able to glide comfortably at 30k feet.
Airplanes work in a completely different way. Flat Earthers always seem to assume that planes would automatically fly straight lines. They don't. A topic that is a little more complex, but can be explained if you are interested
I did some math one day. In order for Earth to be even vaguely round, geometry dictates that its sides equal to 360 degrees. Cut in half, you get Earth's diameter, cut half again, you get a 90 degree radius, not just horizontally but VERTICALLY. Since Earth's diameter is 3,963 miles, this means that there is an implied vertical rise of 1982 (my DOB, coincidentally) miles. Not feet, making this "gradual curve" I spoke of earlier rather extreme, higher even than Everest. My dad told me this was wrong, that I needed to use the circumference (even though I am only measuring for diameter). Doing this, he got a more gradual rise, but I still managed to show that this too is absurd.
Again, there is no universal "down" direction. The "drop" due to the curvature is only an optical one... and it is very much observable.
You made a slight mistake: earth's diameter is about 7930 miles... you used the radius.
So going a quater of the full circle, the "drop" would even be double your value. But this is spread over 6200 miles of distance, so this curvature is much more gentle in average than even the flattest piece of land.
A constantly orbiting and rotating Earth would invalidate all space travel, because once you landed on a planet with a different orbit that Earth, you would never be able to catch up. Moreover even landing from the moon would present four unique difficulties beyond that angle thing they always mention in movies like Apollo 13.
Not sure if I can follow your reasoning here.
When you say that "we would never be able to catch" up... do you mean that, because other planets move, we couldn't hit them?
Look up the mathematical paradoxon of Zenon about Achilles and the turtle. No, this isn't any problem.
- Trying to land on the Earth but having it pull towards us, flattening the spacecraft as it heads directly towards it.
- Trying to land behind, but having it pull away, constantly being slightly behind (to say nothing of the absurd speed of spacecrafts meeting no other known vehicle we have built.
- Trying to land from the side, but having it careen past
- Managing to time landing just right with the orbit, only to be pushed aside by the rotation, and either get knocked away or land upside-down
Again, I am not sure I follow you here. Might be a language problem - English is not my first language.
If I understand you correctly, you think that aligning the relative velocities of spacecraft and planet should be a problem?
Why? As said before, the rotation is not that huge relative to the distances, and for the general relative motion... aircrafts can land on moving carriers just fine. Takes just a bit of practice.
Astronauts however seem to have no such fears, meaning something is funny about this whole thing. Given that it is far easier to land on a flat plane, I think this is probably the issue
Consider the size of planets. They are, in relation to something like a spacecraft, extremely flat. They are also extremly big in that relation.
I took geometry, trig, and calculus. I remember at one point calculating height of like a tree using I think it was cosine or tangent and then adding height because the person involved was standing on something. We calculated based on distance for a straight line using the number of feet away. Something like that. Yet at no point is the Earth's arc added in to any calculations. You would think that how to "correct for the Earth's arc" would be drilled into student's regular education. Not in primary school. Not in high school. Not in community college, which is the last math I took before going into college proper (skipped it there). So wait, wouldn't the very people doing this math and trying to convince us the Earth is round... actually use equations that presuppose this, instead of working with flat forms?
Simplicity.
Yes, if you do stuff like land surveying over long distances, then you do indeed include earth's curvature. But for most applications, the amount of curvature would be neglictible, and it would complicate the calculations immensly.
If you are calculating distances in "feet away", a fraction of a fraction of an inch doesn't make much of a difference.
