Does anyone really think the earth is flat?

Is the idea that some people think the earth is flat just a joke or are there really people who believe that?

 

I've seen some convincing and amusing stuff on YouTube about flat Earth theory. And yes, some people really believe it. It all falls apart when they try to explain how aircraft circumnavigate the globe, for obvious reasons. The flat Earthers at this point argue that reality is nothing but a simulation, as if we are all living in God's matrix. I like to entertain daft notions as thought experiments, but flat Earthers are just lazy at conceptualizing the probable complexity of how the world really is.

 

it is flat here, unless you're walking uphill or downhill..

 

If the earth was actually flat, cats would have knocked everything off the edge by now.

 

and there'd be russian dudes hanging off the edge taking selfies.

 

Vodka....

 

great use of a potato, though

 

He does

 

People understood the Earth earth was curved centuries before Columbus. It is easy to obverse it with your own eyes if you look too. Flat earthers are part of a fake news society. It's OK to be wrong as long as you think you are right.

 

Yup.

The Flat Earth Society

They're called ''flatists.'' lol

 

I kinda wanna click on that, but I also don't want it in my history. Don't want people to think I'm one of them.

 

when i was little growing up, we lived in forested mountains so you never saw the horizon. the furst time i even heard the word horizon, i thought it was something mythical.
so of course what i thought and believed was that forested mountains went on forever in all (x,y) directions (with a random 'z').
i did not believe there was any rim or edge to fall off of, just mountains and trees going on in all (x,y) directions for ever.

of course as soon as i started learning about how the universe actually works, i understood how this wouldn't have been possible.
it still makes a great fantasy, and of course a ring world or a dyson sphere world would make the next best thing.

 

The Earth is flat, but it keeps on repeating like the background in a cartoon. That's why you can circumnavigate the globe and get back where you started.

 

Maybe it’s the pot smokers that think it’s flat!

 

but then it wouldn't actually be the SAME place, just a rubber stamp of it. and does this go on for ever? i mean, ok, you fly 'around' 'the world' and land in the 'same' place, next rubber stamp over. so everyone there welcomes you home as if it were. great. and the you from two stamps back lands where you left from, and thinks THEY'RE 'home'. ok fine. but what happens, i mean if it doesn't fold back on itself somehow, where does the -1 you come from and where does the infinity +1 you, end up. if it folded back on itself somehow, they could be the same you, but then if it somehow folded back on itself, it wouldn't actually be flat, to have the geometry to be able to do so.

i was dissapointed when i furst learned that the x and y of the planet's surface did not extend infinitely as a surface, (with its anything but flat 'z').
but then i realized that all those little dots of light in the night sky, well most of them, that you can see that aren't fellow planets of our own sun,
were also suns, and orbiting each were whole planets, as vast or more so, and maybe a few less, as our own.

and that this means, that at least some (possible even most of those 'exo' planets, the ones that orbit in their sun's 'goldylocks' zone) would have indipendently evolved life,
and at least some of those (possibly many) creative 'sapient' life, i.e. people, 'funny looking' people (because they evolved entirely independently),
with their own cultures and ideas about and perceptions of, how everything worked.

(and hay, potential partners you wouldn't have to worry about pregnancy with, just to throw in something silly)

but mostly, you know what i'm fascinated by is infrastructure, technologies, and sustainable harmony with natural environments,
and of course each populated world arriving at its own solutions, its own even, independent history of how its technologies evolved.

(this of course goes for political and religious thought as well)

 

Hardly anybody ever circumnavigates the globe, which is why we're short on the discrepancies you speak of. If they did it would be chaos. This is why so many aviators disappear.

 

I once few to Hawaii toward the setting sun. The sun took 2-3 times longer than normal to set. That wouldn't happen on a flat earth.

 

the potsmokers think it's round, square, everything... because they're really, really high....and that's how the discussion goes...

 

Maybe that's still believed in some places with people that are still tribal and haven't been taught about things like that.

 

the earth is actually a 4 dimensional toroidal dodecahedron!