After reflecting on it more critically, the flat earth theory is clearly a hoax perpetrated on mankind to try to make them seem more important than we actually are. The greeks, sumerians, and mayans all knew the earth was round.

It flew due south. Probably got taken down with a surface-to-air missile when it got too close to the ice wall.

It's a long time since I looked into this (it made a great English conversation lesson with some programmers BTW) but if I recall correctly the southern ocean has something like a "jet stream" in the air that makes planes able to fly faster and over longer distances.

yea trust me this guy is an established member of these forums and has been well documented going off on this crazy **** many times before, for years and years. I think the last flat earth debate i got into with him was when he came out with the moon is a spaceship ****.

But i totally understand the gut reaction to call this trolling: in a way it is, but the way you think is giving them way way way WAY too much credit.

It really is hard to believe there are people dumb enough to think a round earth couldn't work because then north flowing rivers would be going uphill. Like, that's an obtuseness I can't even wrap my mind around.

But there's an entire forum of these people. Not a lot of them, but enough to shake your head at and say "Wow, we're doomed as a species." The funnier part is that a huge percent of posters on that forum are "Round earthers" shaking their fists like me, except they have 10k+ posts there. What drives someone to do that is beyond me but it really is fascinating when you delve into that culture so I can see how one would get sucked in. I seriously can spend hours reading that stuff, it's just so fantastically stupid.

I'm definitely not shaking my fists in anger at this, but slightly bemused. I'm intrigued by what makes people believe in this kind of stuff. And in the end, I always find, you do learn something, by being forced to explain your beliefs. I've learned a lot about evolution from debating creationists for example. Not from the creationists, mind you, but from investigating it when answering their often inane questions.

The obvious point of all these dumb conspiracies is to obscure the one seemingly outlandish conspiracy that is true. To make reasonable people think "Oh noe not this **** again."

Wonder which one it is.

Pretty sure it must involve Aliens, as they probably do actually exist.

That isn't the point though. They say that a "round" earth like ours which is not perfectly spherical but slightly flatter at the poles (6353 km to centre of earth) and with a slight bulge at the equator (6384 km to centre of the earth) would have south flowing rivers going uphill. So the upper reaches of a river like the Mississippi are closer to the centre of the Earth than the mouth, which is pretty counter-intuitive and people who don't instantly get it shouldn't really be characterized unbelievably dumb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_radius

The point is that what "up" means at all on spherical earth isn't usually measured relative to centre of the earth but relative to the gravitational and centrifugal forces operating constantly upon us and also shaping the imperfect spheroid shape of the earth, which is why we use sea level rather than distance to the centre of the earth as the basis for what "up" means.

It's aliens mind controlling the English middle class to give up on their promising football careers.

Believing in FE is no crazier than believing in religion imo

Religion can't be disproved though. Flat earth can.

I feel creationism is a similar animal, because it deals with an easily disproved set of premises (many of which are outright falsehoods or misrepresentation/total misunderstanding of facts) that are firmly entrenched in the believers' minds, but religion as a philosophy is much harder to deal with, because it's been such an integral part of our existence for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.

Color me shocked that this turned into a religion derail this quickly.

That video was clearly altered by the illuminati. You've never seen the curvature from a plane?

Hell, you can even see it from the ground here:

So... if the Earth is a disc... what's on the B Side?

Found an interesting Moon Landing hoax video by Joe Rogan while looking at a flat-earther's youtube channel:

I thought it was all about religion. Are there any non religious FE people?

There's also the problem that all cyclones or depressions in the northern hemisphere turn anti-clockwise, while those in the southern hemisphere turn clockwise, for reasons to do with the rotation of the actual, near-spherical Earth (like bathwater going down the plughole), which doesn't make any sense at all on a flat-earth model.

Plus I'm disappointed that the turtles don't seem to have figured yet.

This is not true. Chalk one up for the flat earthers.

Yea and weather patterns don't always follow the clockwise pattern in the northern hemisphere, hence the terms cyclonic/anti-cyclonic.

But the Coriolis effect is a very difficult problem for them and like most difficult problems for them they either distort what it actually says so badly that it fits their model or they ignore it altogether because they don't understand it.

I mean this entire thread can be summed up by the terminology he used in one of his posts when dealing with the flight times:

"Explain it away"

Basically just have to formulate some idea that let's them explain the doubt out of their mind.

but thats what he wants, to debate with you because he knows you cannot win. because hes pretending to be legit crazy with all his crackpot theorys and beliefs. thats why its super funny to him and he keeps coming back year after year.

i know because this is how i used to string people along who really really liked to please me with their attention to my idiocy.

Maybe it's like a CD

RF,

I drew this image to help you understand how a constantly falling away surface is consistent with either a line or a sphere. Let me know if you need further clarification.

Grunching, and only read half the OP, but I think you might want to look into this gravity thing.

An anticyclone is a high, rather than a low, and the same applies in reverse. They turn clockwise in the northern hemisphere, anticlockwise in the southern.