This is something I hear WAY too much from the flat earth camp:
"Show me the curvature!"
"Show me the curvature!
"Show me the curvature! You cant, all you have is fish-eye images or CGI cartoons from NASA!"
Oh, you want non-fish eye images of curvature? Here ya go!
Recently, me and Pew Review used the first image to match it up with this program here to see if the curvature matched up with a spherical earth with a radius of 4,000 miles.
Axial Precession is the cycle in which the pole stars on the celestial sphere change over a period of 26,000 years.
That’s right, flattards! Polaris wasn’t always the pole star. 5,000 years ago, the Northern celestial pole was near Thuban in the draco constellation. In 8,000 years it will be close to Deneb and in 12,000 years from now the pole will be somewhere in the vicinity of the brilliant star Vega.
Since flat earthers seem to believe that Polaris is directly above the North Pole and is completely stationary with the stars rotating around it either on a dome OR a flat roof sky that goes on for infinity in all directions, I’m not sure how it would be able to change over a period of about 1 degree every 72 years. Flat earthers are obviously going to have to explain the physics that allow stars to switch from stationary to moving as the celestial pole changes places.
In reality, we do know what causes Axial Precession… it’s the gravity from the sun and moon acting on the earth’s equatorial bulge. Wait, GRAVITY?? Then how can the earth be flat, then?
Busted.
Enjoy this gif of axial precession I cheekily snatched off wikipedia:
Comets are objects made of ice that usually go on trekking tours around the solar system, like the famous Halley's Comet which has an orbit of about 70 or more years around our host star, Sol.
It doesn't make any sense for comets to go around the sun if the sun goes around the earth when the earth is only 3,000 miles away from the sun so the comet could just orbit that instead, and it also doesn't make any sense for Halley's Comet to have the ability to travel at over 250,000 km/h if the diameter of the flat earth from either walls of its dome is only 40,000 kilometers distant from each other. If Halley's comet was trapped inside and going at it’s speed, it would be able to bounce off one of the inside sides of the dome once every 10 minutes. This never happens.
Even if Halley's comet wasn’t going at this speed, being enclosed inside a dome this tiny would mean Halley's comet would ALWAYS be visible in the sky somewhere on the flat earth… But it only appears in the sky every 70 or so years.
Of course, flat earthers will probably say that God is just making Halley's comet appear every 70 or so years inside the dome and then takes it away not long after to make the world a prettier place to live as it shines in the sky.
This is delusional nonsense.
Now, it only gets worse from there.
As we go around the sun, we pass through two meteor showers every year left over from the debris trails of Halley's comet; The Eta Aquariids in Early May, and the Orionids in late october. These showers happen EVERY year during these times and is completely consistent with the earth going around the sun, rather than this rubbish with the earth being stationary and not moving or passing through ANYTHING.
(CoolHardLogic has a pretty good video explaining why it won't work in his Testing Geocentrism series. The earth is spherical in geocentrism, but at the end of the day the earth MUST be moving in order for meteor showers to make sense.)
Earlier on, everyone's favourite fuckhead of the internet known most commonly as Jeranism (or “Jism” as some would call him),uploaded this wonderful offering on his twatty YouTube channel, which is in fact his 263rd video. (Hence the star wars-like title of this post).
In the video, he claims that star trails cannot exist on a spinning, spherical earth because when he attached the laser beam to his globe and tied a rope to it attaching it to roof, he spinned the globe to see that the laser moved off the pole. His conclusion? It was that there should be no perfect star trails on a spinning spheroid.
If anyone is still alive right now because most who just read what I wrote had died from the stupid overload, I have some stuff I still need to tell you, Jeranism, and of course his entire fanbase of stupid fucking idiotic twits.
1. Do you honestly think that after over a decade on the internet of flat earth debunking over and over and over and over again you would just NOW finally find an argument we cannot refute? This is the same with doomsday nuts… every prediction for the end of world was WRONG, and it always WILL be wrong. This is the EXACT same with flat earthers who every 5 hours or so find a “new argument” to refute objective reality. Every time, and I mean EVERY TIME, it has been refuted. Always.
2. This one is aimed at Jism’s fans: Are any of YOU gonna test Jeranism’s experiment YOURSELVES or are you just gonna take it hook line and sinker without questioning it’s authenticity? Jeranism has said himself before that if you believe in something you are told blindly it can be considered a religion… That’s EXACTLY what you’re doing, you fucking hypocrites.
3. No, I’m not gonna test it myself. Why? Because guess what... Wolfie6020 is planning to do it himself and he KNOWS that Jeranism’s experiment was flawed. He has a plan to do it better than Jism.
Now, the more alert among you will realise that I myself am being a hypocrite because I will probably take Wolfie6020’s experiment hook line and sinker. Yes, but today I will be showing you why it is undoubtedly so that Jism's experiment is obviously flawed.
First of all, a HUGE shoutout to Cara Diann, who took a screenshot during the video to show that the rope is NOT aligned up with the globe’s axis. Take a look.
Now Jism, I have to ask just like Cara: Are you trying to be deceptive?
Are you TRYING to get the result you want? Wolfie6020, the guy from earlier, gave me this image here to show that Jism’s laser was NOT perfectly aligned up with North, making Jism’s results very messy as we saw in the video.
Moving swiftly on.
Flat Earth Math, a YouTube flat earth debunker, commented this wonderful piece of text on your shitey video. If you have the time, I greatly encourage you read it, it’s excellent. It basically sums up all the problems with Jisms clusterfuck of an experiment.
Now, I’m gonna cheat a little bit here: I’m gonna use simulations to “debunk” Jism’s video.
Yes, yes, I know Jism said in the video that he wants an actual model and NOT computer simulations to prove him wrong, but because I can do WHATEVER I want and nobody can stop me, I will show him and everyone else that star trails ABSOLUTELY can exist on a globe earth.
However, please don’t consider this a debunking,wait for Wolfie6020 and others to do that. Rather, consider this a shitpost.
Ok, let’s go.
Celestia is great. Celestia is a simulated heliocentric solar system simulation that is ALWAYS correct in its observations. I’ve talked with flat earthers before that the fact that celestia is heliocentric and ALWAYS correct means that heliocentrism is pretty useful when it comes to predicting astronomical events, making heliocentrism make much more sense than any other model that exists out there (be it flat earth model or the geocentric model.)
Let's set ourselves down somewhere on the northern hemisphere and look north from our location. We will see Polaris and the northern celestial pole, obviously.
Then, twelve hours later, (the equivalent of Jism spinning his little globe), Polaris is still in roughly the same place. The only difference is that Polaris has moved to the opposite side of the crosshair due to the rotation of the earth and because it isn’t directly on the celestial pole.
According to the heliocentric model, star trails absolutely CAN exist on a spinning globe earth.
Also, just for confirmation, celestia is based on heliocentrism. Take a look.
Now, if anyone’s wondering why I’m acting so dramatic, it’s because Jism seems to be getting desperate, and once his video is properly debunked by Wolfie6020 and Shawn Hufford, Jism will probably curl up into a ball and cry like a baby who got it’s toy taken away.
Actually, no. He won’t. He even stated in the description of his video that if he’s proven wrong, he will happily admit it. Good on ya, Jism!
I can’t believe I have to make this post, but apparently I do.
No one has yet commented on my previous Sun And Moon post to rebut my small point about how the sun cant set on a flat earth, but after seeing hundreds of YouTube comments recently from poorly educated fuckwits saying that the sun can set on a flat earth due to “perspective”, I guess I should talk about it here and now.
First of all, flat earthers are correct in arguing that the further away things are, the more they will converge into a single point, like this:
However, flat earthers seem to believe that as something gets further away from you, it will start to eventually look like it’s setting below a flat surface. This is flat wrong.
Now hang on tight, because this is gonna get pretty mathematical. (And by mathematical I do of course mean simple maths that teenagers learn in high school which shows how fucking stupid flat earthers are but… ah what the hell I’m getting ahead of myself.)
If we want to find out the absolute minimum altitude angle the sun can be above the flat earth, we need to look at the flat earth model itself and then we’ll get to the maths.
Most flat earthers seem to agree that the sun goes in circles about 4,800 kilometers above the equator during the equinox on their azimuthal equidistant projection map, like this: (ignore the moon, that’s irrelevant for today’s post).
Now, let’s imagine an observer somewhere on the equator during one of the equinoxes. Where he is on the equator is irrelevant, just imagine he’s somewhere on that longitude.
Now imagine it’s midnight for him, which means that the sun is on the opposite side of the flat earth, about 20,000 kilometers away from his position.
If we want to figure out how high above the horizon the sun would appear for him, we have to use the tangent formula, which is:
a = Tan-1(4800/20000)
When we crunch the numbers out, we find that at its furthest position away from our observer, the sun would still be 13.5 degreesabove the horizon for our equator fellow.
Also, here’s a diagram for proof:
Now, I recently had a talk with a flat earther who said the sun was even closer. He said it was about 1,000 miles, or 1,600 kilometers above the flat earth.
Well, let’s do the formula again, shall we?
a = Tan-1(1600/20000)
Huh. So even if the sun is closer, the sun would STILL be about 4.6 degrees above the horizon at midnight for our observer… And yet we can still see it set every evening, going WAY below 4.6 degrees HOURS before midnight.
So in conclusion, sunset on a flat earth would NEVER HAPPEN if the sun was always above the flat earth itself. It’s over, flat earthers. It was a nice run, but I’m sorry… You’ve been completely and utterly DEBUNKED.
Of course, I’m not finished with the flat earth just yet. There’s a lot more to go through, so stay tuned!
(Also, check out MetaBunks EXCELLENT page on this exact topic here)
