Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket The sad news that steam-rocket fan "Mad" Mike Hughes has taken his final flight reached Vulture Central over the weekend. Saturday's launch should have seen Hughes ascend to new heights atop his homebrew rocket, but judging by videos floating about on social media, a parachute deployed just after take-off, and Hughes plummeted …
Some commentary suggests he only claimed a belief in a flat Earth for fundraising purposes - Wikipedia puts it: "In 2016, Hughes launched a failed fundraising attempt for a rocket that earned $310. After professing his belief in a flat Earth later that year, Hughes gained support within the flat-Earth community. His post-flat-Earth fundraising campaign made its $7,875 goal."
and 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - here comes the CT nutjobs to say he was killed by NASA to stop him showing the truth .................................
bright enough to build a 'rocket' - but steam powered ? was it launched as per the US carriers do with jet fighters ? and if he WAS that bright, and rocket science was his thing, he had to take into account the gravitational pull of the big spherical thing he was standing on to allow him to actually break free of its bonds
yea, to my mind his particular tree didn't go all the way to the top
and much as I would not wish death on anyone, he did seem increasingly crazy as this project progressed, and so maybe there is a death wish, and he's hoping to generate interest via that
TL:DR
not too sure exactly what was going on in his head, but it did him no good :o(
"he was killed by NASA ..."
If NASA were involved, it would be a multidecade project requiring hundreds of millions of dollars. They would still be working on the Request for Proposal. Hughes would likely die of old age before the project came to fruition.
If Hughes was the victim of foul play, it was probably a drug deal gone bad, or some good ol' boy who was convinced that Hughes' rocket had somehow caused his chickens to stop laying.
"bright enough to build a 'rocket'"
Mike had a bad crash before and wasn't very good with physics. I know plenty of people that could bang some metal into a rocket shape and bolt a chair in the front that I would never take a ride with. The instant deployment of the parachute and no backup was a huge problem.
It is a little curious that he didn't do drone launches to iron out the technology though. If you planned a new launch technology that is how you would do it. It's how Rocket Labs for eg got going. But despite their successes they are yet to seek to enter the crewed flight market. I doubt the NZ govt would let them so it would have to be from the new US facility where such things are laxer.
I also suspect this to be true, I seriously doubt anyone with the engineering chops to scratch build a rocket wouldn't realise that 1500m isn't going to prove anything, and that you could walk up a taller mountain and get a better view, and still not see the curvature from up there.
Also, the cost of the rocket,... for about that amount he could have got an 'Edge of Space' flight in a MiG 29, and actually seen the curvature from the passenger seat. So again I suspect this was all about making rockets, and the flat earthers were being ridden.
I was given a book by a flat-earther. I did a brief cursory glance at it, but didn't read it. One thing that caught my eye is the explanation they have regarding the curvature of the earth. Something about a camera lens. I don't remember much because I didn't give it any serious attention. So showing these people the curvature won't work.
What we need to do is charter a flight that goes from west to east (following the jet stream) around the world and then north to south to north crossing both poles. If doesn't convince them, nothing will.
Only because the trees are above the centre of your camera's field of view.
Point your camera higher and they will curve outwards.
You can use a fisheye lens to make the earth look spherical (point the camera below the horizon) or as if we're on the inside of a cylinder (point the camera above the horizon). Incidentally in all the pictures of mountaineers summiting Everest with the curvature of the Earth visible the apparent curvature is entirely due to lens distortion.
(not a flat earther but you need to go higher than Everest to be able to see the curvature of the Earth. Apparently it was visible from Concorde which flew higher than other commercial airliners with a flat horizon visible).
> There are LOTS of people who think the earth is 6,000 years old
You mean people willing to spend $27million on things like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum
It was founded by a guy called Ken Ham, so don't even bother to add gags about pork barrels...
I heard about this because a relative said they'd spent a fantastic day there. Honestly, what can one say?
"but too big to float?"
Continents "float" and they're sorta big. You just need to displace a larger mass of water than the mass of your boat so you have enough clearance to keep water from coming over the gunwales. There can be issues of seaworthiness with a very large ship is it can be damaged due to wave action.
Continents float in solid, plastic Mantle rather than molten rock. They float because they are less dense than the Upper Mantle. Practically none of the Mantle is molten and even Mantle plumes are effectively solid apart from at their very top where they undergo partial decompression melting.
Got to love a bit of Ken Ham. Wasn't he the one who built that ark that was too small to hold all the world animals but too big to float?
You don't need a lot of space to store them. Just digitally encode them on a gold-copper alloy wire...
creation museums are actually fun. Often they have actual science in them. Sure there's _NO_ way I'd accept a 6,000 year old earth unless I worshipped at the alter of Bishop Usher and his dating method based on the old testament, and simultaneously believed that the book of Genesis [most likely an oral account penned to papyrus by Moses or one of his scribes] was somehow an infallible hyper-accurate record of human history via a long list of begats and begets...
That being said, 'Creation Science' has a lot of good points to make. A pure-random-evolution model doesn't make a lot of sense. A "guided evolution" model [whether the guidance is gods, aliens, cosmic consciousness of a species, or who-knows-what] seems to make more sense. Catastrophes (as a stresser) might actually trigger evolution for a species to survive. Not random, but perhaps a species-wide choice of sorts? It's worth pondering for a few minutes, at any rate. Epigenetics as a part of that method.
So I'd point out that Creationists (at the least) have a point to make, i.e. 'Intelligent design', and they're "not wrong" about a lot of the stuff they're saying. So maybe "their science" and "mainstream science" can contribute to a more accurate origin model? I think human+dino footprints in the same mud is interesting. It may simply suggest that what we see in the rocks is NOT the "entire picture".
But yeah, 6,000 year old earth, HIGHLY unlikely. Even though modern dating methods make a LOT of assumptions, there are some things that are VERY hard to "fake up" into 6,000 years. Light from distant stars is one of them. [ HOW far away is Andromeda Galaxy again? ]
(not on the same level as 'Flat Earth' believers, who have to literally DENY SCIENCE to believe the earth is flat)
Jesus monkeyfucking Christ! How wrong can you be while claiming to be right?
[most likely an oral account penned to papyrus by Moses or one of his scribes]
First, show that Moses existed. Second, demonstrate that there were ever hundreds of thousands of Hebrews for Moses to free from slavery in Egypt. Third, now that you've potentially established the importance of a historical Moses who founded Judaism, tell us how an oral account of Genesis could in any way be comprised more of truth than mythology.
That being said, 'Creation Science' has a lot of good points to make.
Creation Science (later to be renamed Intelligent Design, while retaining its salient feature of being complete utter bollocks only now pseudoscientific complete utter bollocks) is just a window-dressing 1990s version of biblical creationism. It has nothing to say about reality beyond being an example that some people who hold that the greatest quality of humanity is faith are desperate to show that their faith has scientific support. It's almost like they know that faith alone is a poor means of investigating reality, yet apparently the salvation of their eternal souls rests upon them having faith.
I think human+dino footprints in the same mud is interesting.
Paluxy River? Even most creationists now realise that they're on a hiding to nothing with that one.
Bob, I'd like to thank you for spending the last three or four years on here showing the rest of the world just how ignorant and arrogant some American Republicans have become. God bless America! Hail to the Chief! Semper fidelis! Bow down before Fox News!
A pure-random-evolution model doesn't make a lot of sense. A "guided evolution" model [whether the guidance is gods, aliens, cosmic consciousness of a species, or who-knows-what] seems to make more sense.
That's just anthropomorphic confirmation bias: We exist therefore some(one/thing) encouraged that to happen. Random evolution is only difficult to accept if you think that human beings are somehow important and desirable. The problem with that (aside from an obvious psychological bias on the subject) is that we have no evidence of any external entity that could judge our merits.
Occam's Razor suggests that we shouldn't try to explain things by making stuff up so without evidence we shouldn't posit such an entity (this is the main reason I'm an atheist). We're therefore left with no good reason to assume that our existence is the result of guidance.
> Occam's Razor suggests that we shouldn't try to explain things by making stuff up so without evidence we shouldn't posit such an entity (this is the main reason I'm an atheist). We're therefore left with no good reason to assume that our existence is the result of guidance.
As opposed to the abundance of documented science showing example of new species coming about before our eyes? Hmmm...
Natural selection resulting in specialization and adaptation is very easy to observe, even quickly with short-life-span creature like fruit flies, but the result is not a new species, where new species is defined as something that cannot cross breed with the old and produce fertile offspring. (That last condition deals with oddities like mules.) Science is rather lacking in observations of new species arising. The existence of lots of species if not evidence of the process of evolution, except as a matter of faith :).
If it helps, the conventional model is not purely random. The full title is "evolution by natural selection", and natural selection is not random. It has a bias towards survival of the fittest, which is consistent over time because the environment changes slowly.
alter of Bishop Usher and his dating method
It often amuses me to point out to rabid young-earthers (most of whom are Protestant) that ther foundation lies on the words of a 16th century Irish Catholic archbishop..
It's a shock to most of them. As is the news that, prior to Usher, most denominations had no problem at all with and old Earth. And some of us still don't..
"A pure-random-evolution model doesn't make a lot of sense. A "guided evolution" model [whether the guidance is gods, aliens, cosmic consciousness of a species, or who-knows-what] seems to make more sense."
No one ever proposed a "random evolution model" the title of Darwin's book is "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". Evolution *is* selection. For evolution to occur there must be inheritance, mutability and selection. Genes (inheritance) are arranged in groups (chromosomes) and shuffled during reproduction. There are also random errors arising from mistakes in reproducing genes and from damage to genes (mutability). As in poker organisms are dealt a hand, if it's a poor hand they die and don't pass on their genes, hence favourable genes tend to dominate in a population.
Except it's all much more complicated than this.
Try reading "Chance and Necessity" by Jacques Monod for some detail about how random events + selection pressure = evolution.
> [most likely an oral account penned to papyrus by Moses or one of his scribes]
it is unlikely that _anything_ in the bible was written down before 'fist temple' around 10C BCE. The main reason for this is that before then there was no written form of Hebrew. This is several centuries after the alleged time of Moses. Most of the stories in Genesis are retellings of older stories taken from other tribal groups, and are just stories (and not 'accounts').
Around 3C BCE the various different collections of stories and other writings were combined with some being discarded to arrive at what later became the OT.
> Often they have actual science in them.
No, not actual science but pseudoscience. They are proof that if you litter bullshit with enough fancy and scientific sounding words there will be people who believe that there’s something to it.
> That being said, 'Creation Science' has a lot of good points to make. A pure-random-evolution model doesn't make a lot of sense.
It only doesn’t make sense if you don’t understand what it means. Evolution isn’t purely random, the mutations are random and are then acted upon by various environmental pressures, resulting in natural selection, and these pressures are extremely environmental in most cases. One problem is that creation science attempts to nail evolution down to bigger, faster, smarter, stronger. This is so unbelievably flawed that if you do believe this is what evolution is, the best thing you could possibly with your life is to go and take a course on evolution aimed at 11 year olds.
> A "guided evolution" model [whether the guidance is gods, aliens, cosmic consciousness of a species, or who-knows-what] seems to make more sense.
Only if you believe that humanity is some kind of end goal. It’s not. We might have reached a point where, given universal healthcare and basic empathy, we can forego the efforts of nature to improve our species, and it might be the case that because of this we have effectively put the brakes on when it comes natural selection, but evolution hasn’t stopped and this can be seen in the likes of sickle-cell anaemia. Sure you’ll die if you so much as require any kind of oxygen transfer in your blood, but you’re now immune to malaria, guided? My arse!
> Catastrophes (as a stresser) might actually trigger evolution for a species to survive. Not random, but perhaps a species-wide choice of sorts?
Extinction level events don’t trigger evolution any more than relegation from a higher league triggers better sportsball players. The skill of your players rises and falls naturally as players join and leave the team, relegation simply cuts that team from the pool. The disappearance of the non-avian dinosaurs wasn’t because they all evolved, no they all died out. <insert dead parrot sketch>
> So I'd point out that Creationists (at the least) have a point to make, i.e. 'Intelligent design', and they're "not wrong" about a lot of the stuff they're saying.
No, they are wrong about a lot of the stuff they’re saying, and the only parts they aren’t getting wrong aren’t right, they are just word salad.
> So maybe "their science" and "mainstream science" can contribute to a more accurate origin model? I think human+dino footprints in the same mud is interesting. It may simply suggest that what we see in the rocks is NOT the "entire picture".
The human and dinosaur footprints were debunked well before it became an on-line argument, and no, there’s no value in ‘their science’. What we see ‘in the rocks’ isn’t the entire picture, but then nobody is actually claiming that it is. Palaeontology is just one of several lines of study that agree with each other over these facts, so it’s not just ‘HIGHLY unlikely’ but it is impossible.
> Even though modern dating methods make a LOT of assumptions, there are some things that are VERY hard to "fake up" into 6,000 years. Light from distant stars is one of them.
Modern dating methods make only one assumption, and that is that reality is measurable, if you delete that assumption then all you are left with is hard solipsism, and you’re left denying that even you might exist yourself. We have a world, and the assumption that it’s measurable is given even more verifiability by the fact that everyone measuring it is getting the same answers. Dating methods can be used to verify each other, not just radiometric dating but other dating data such as dendrochronology or ice core dating, they all tie in together and match what we observe today. Next you’ll be claiming that dating is circular because the rocks date fossils and fossils date rocks.
> (not on the same level as 'Flat Earth' believers, who have to literally DENY SCIENCE to believe the earth is flat)
Denying science like modern radiometric dating? Intelligent design makes the exact same denial of science that flerfers do.
Honestly, what can one say?
"Get yourself a good study Bible, a good concordance and something like Strongs[1]. And discard all you have been told in preference for doing your own study[2]. Oh - and don't bother looking at the Internet"
[1] A literal translation that also gives the original Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic words.
[2] One intereesting thought is that the 6 'days'[3] mentioned in Genesis refer to mass extinctions.
[3] Word used also means 'times'. Just like the word translated as 'morning' literally means "starting" and "evening" is "ending".
> Just like the word translated as 'morning' literally means "starting" and "evening" is "ending".Just like the word translated as 'morning' literally means "starting" and "evening" is "ending".
No it doesn't. Morning comes from one of several possible germanic sources meaning morning possibly related to the Greek to sparkle, but that sounds a bit of a stretch.
Unsurprisingly "morning" is an old word and the root is unclear.
Similarly evening isn't from "ending" of any source either.
Morning:-
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_German_Language/Annotated/Morgen
It's worth noting that the German "morgen" also means "tomorrow" in a similar way to Spanish.
Evening:-
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_German_Language/Annotated/Abend
>> Just like the word translated as 'morning' literally means "starting" and "evening" is "ending".Just like the word translated as 'morning' literally means "starting" and "evening" is "ending".
>No it doesn't. Morning comes from one of several possible germanic sources meaning morning possibly related to the Greek to sparkle, but that sounds a bit of a stretch.
I believe the poster was referring to the original Hebrew words being translated into English "morning" and "evening", not the Germanic origins.
One intereesting thought is that the 6 'days'[3] mentioned in Genesis refer to mass extinctions.
Another interesting thought is that the 6 'days' mentioned in Genesis refer to the number of grey hairs on my left testicle.
If you're going to swap unrelated words to make some point about God being able to rest after humanity has killed the oceans (or whatever), at least pick amusing ones. That or stick to a literal interpretation of the bible and learn to live with a slightly different form of mockery.
This has been done more than once, losing fortunes to a cultic belief in an 'end of the world' and then it never happened. In the late 80's or early 90's Rosh Hashanah was supposed to be the end of the world. People sold property and gave it to this one group to pass out pamphlets, warning everyone.
In the case of the 'Heaven's Gate' cult (a few years later), they committed suicide wearing a particular type of black running shoes, and as a result, NIke stopped selling them. [I liked those shoes. That's ok I buy Reeboks now]. I think they had some bizarre belief about the Hale-Bopp comet.
The Great Disappointment is a more impressive example. According to Schultz in Being Wrong, the Millerite believers probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Many disposed of all their worldly goods before the expected Second Coming. The repercussions of the Disappointment continue to this day - some of the post-Millerite sects are still going strong.
I have it on sound belief that if you travel east far enough, and return to where you started, you have in fact travelled to an alternate timeline version of the world where even though everything looks familiar, is in fact different in subtle ways, mainly that they're a day ahead of you. a similar thing happens when travelling west, though takes a lot longer and you end up finding everyone is still on the same day as you. so that's obviously chronological nonense and proof that time is not linear but curved. unlike the earth which is not curved by flat.
faith is bulletproof.
I waver on whether people who produce anti-factual gibberish on the internet should be simply made to stop, or should be allowed to run free on arbitrary and settled topics, so that voters are exposed to public nonsense and know what it looks or sounds like before the television debates happen.
In this case, "possible routes by which the Covid-19 virus will arrive in your neighbourhood" which depend on the actual shape of the globe, although this has been found to be mainly a chart of public passenger aeroplane routes, anyway. (And this does NOT mean "chemtrails". Do not... oh, never mind, I can't stop you. At least it'll counter-act the "Chinese biological weapon" meme.)
"should be allowed to run free on arbitrary and settled topics, so that voters are exposed to public nonsense and know what it looks or sounds like before the television debates happen."
Yes. Trying to "Protect" people from info-scammers and ridiculous notions by NOT exposing them (i.e. censoring it all) is like what happens to an overly sheltered child the moment he starts living in a college dorm room... or joins the military.
Anyone who's known someone who was raised in such a family (i.e. "the proverbial preacher's kid") knows EXACTLY what happens. This one guy I knew when I was in the Navy quickly became a porn addict - no self-discipline at all, He usually spent his entire paycheck on porn and strippers within a few days after payday, then went around trying to borrow money from people until the next payday - the stereotypical "preacher's kid" yeah - and I suggest that if he'd been allowed to make his own decisions when he was younger, he would have at least been responsible about it, instead of diving in head first into grossly addictive behavior when nobody was there to say "no" for him.
(as another example, I read playboy magazines when I was 10, and do NOT have obsessive tendencies with porn)
Similarly, "teh intarwebs". The 'sheltered kid' example is a HUGE reason why censorship on 'teh intarwebs' is BAD (other than freedom, and WHO gets to censor... shudder).
You can't control other people, nor "shelter them" because YOU are smart[er] and THEY are [implied] NOT as smart [yeah, arrogant isn't it?]. But you _CAN_ influence people and convince them to control themselves (or at least look at the 'stupid things' with an eye of skepticism and some "street smarts").
In any case, let the flat-earth crowd say what they want, and even people who do dumb things with rockets without knowing physics well enough (etc.) to do what they want, as long as they're not harming others. We can all choose to laugh at them or not visit their web sites. Works for me.
At least it'll counter-act the "Chinese biological weapon" meme.
Interestingly, just about everything about that theory is an independent quantity: if it escaped from the lab, then it could have been something they found, made or stole. If it was artificially engineered, they could have stolen it, made it as a bioweapon or were pursuing research in the area for other reasons. And, of course, if it is a bioweapon, it could have escaped from the lab or have been deliberately loosed in the area to make it look like it had.
Given how a la carte it is, there's a halfway decent chance some combination is correct.
engineered by those devious bats. Or was it pandas? Whichever it was, they are out to kill us. Good thing that we have a head start on them.
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> If doesn't convince them, nothing will.
Even that wouldn't convince them. As near as I can tell, for the majority of the ardent flat-earthers this is literally a religious belief connected to biblical literalism.
Considering that the utterly overwhelming evidence and easy-to-test-yourself demonstrations that the Earth is spheroid, combined with the ridiculousness of every flat-earth "proof" I've ever seen hasn't already done so, I think it's safe to say that nothing will.
I'm fairly confident that just about all adults at this end of the twenty-first century who are not actually mentally ill or mentally handicapped or living undiscovered deep in the Amazon jungle, or on notorious North Sentinel Island, do not really believe that the world is flat. Some just have fun pretending to believe that it is, even to the point of really upsetting people who want to straighten them out... that may be the wrong expression.
However, there was a nutty church cult in the U.S. in the 19th century who may have been sincere (although getting to America from the sort of place that they came from implicitly requires accepting that you are traversing the surface of a globe), and I think I read a BBC News web site report which claimed that the founder of the violent "Islamist" sect "Boko Haram", who is no longer with us, believed that the world isn't a globe on the specific grounds that modern Christians accept that it is. So do a lot of Muslims but presumably that just went to show. I also am not counting on the allegation as, er, gospel.
Happily, nowadays you only have to watch ’"The Clangers" to have a visual although rather fanciful demonstration of life on a globe, quite a small one in their case. The children run laps of it for fun. And they don't have television although they are on it.
> a religious belief connected to biblical literalism.
As one flat earther put it: "If we are monkeys on a spinning ball then there is no god."
They want to have been created as the centre of the universe. Being on an insignificant rock around a mediocre sun on the edge of one of millions of galaxies just doesn't make them feel important enough to overcome the failure that they were told they were all through school.
What we need to do is charter a flight that goes from west to east (following the jet stream) around the world and then north to south to north crossing both poles. If doesn't convince them, nothing will.
Nothing ever will convince them. When someone believes something is true, trying to convince them otherwise is a hard proposition. And, let's not forget that there's probably more than a few who are in this for money or FB "likes" and "follows".
What we need to do is charter a flight that goes from west to east (following the jet stream) around the world and then north to south to north crossing both poles. If doesn't convince them, nothing will.
I can't see why that would be convincing to a Flat Earther. Hell, I believe the earth is a spheroid,1 but if you told me I was on a charter flight that was going to circle the globe twice, following orthogonal routes, I'd think it more likely it was faked. What am I going to do, stare out the window and look for the latitude and longitude lines? "Oh, it looks like we're over the ocean. Oh, now it looks white - maybe we're over a polar ice cap?" Not wildly convincing.
We know from any number of psychological studies that firmly-held beliefs are rarely amenable to evidential challenge. Even beliefs in which people have little investment are hard to dislodge.
1Or more precisely, in attempting to base my model of the world on Perfect Bayesian Reasoning, even while acknowledging the many limitations of the human faculty for reason, I view this postulate about the shape of the earth as the most probable, by a large margin. Indeed, the second most probable would seem to be the solipsistic reduction (there is no world, it's all in my mind).
There are any number of ski resorts with lifts above 3000m.
Indeed. There's one that starts above 3000m only a short drive (or even a bike ride, if you're fit enough and acclimated to the altitude) of me here at the Mountain Fastness. Even here in the house I'm at about 2300m above sea level. (Earth does not look flat from here. Earth looks bumpy.)
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You can drive up Mount Washington. I've done that (well, ridden in the car of a friend who decided to do it; I'd rather walk, personally). It's a little shy of 2000m above sea level, and also features some of the most exciting weather in the US. Or, indeed, anywhere. Most places don't see straight-line winds of 230 mph (370 km/h).
You can drive up to about 3000m on Wheeler Peak, and then if you're in the mood walk up another km or so. It's mostly a pretty nice stroll, except for the scree fields near the peak - if you're not careful it'd be easy to twist an ankle there. But on most nice days in the summer you'll probably find a couple dozen people up there.
Observation Point in Zion National Park is nearly 2000m above sea level, and that's a doddle. I have a friend who's done the hike with his kids when the younger was 6 years old. Personally, taking a 6-year-old up that trail would make me nervous - it's not like there are guard rails or anything, and much of the time the drop is precipitous; but go there on a holiday weekend in the warmer months and there will be hundreds of people on the trail.
Ben Nevis is nobut an 'ill, lass.
Tioga Pass in California is over twice that height at 3,031m ... and that's a pass, not a peak. Tioga Road, aka Highway 120, is a very a pretty drive, being the Eastern entrance to Yosemite. Recommended. (Note that it's currently closed for winter. Check CalTrans for road conditions before setting out.)
sorry to say that, but you're either very naive, or trying very hard to fool EVERYBODY. It is a well-established fact that EVERY window in EVERY plane built on this flat planet is in fact a special lcd screen that simulates a view from the window and displays a curvature to prove earth is round. And if you don't believe me, anybody can look it up on the internets, the proof is out there! I didn't know, but when I found out, it suddenly all made sense to me! Likewise, my kids didn't realize it, but when I told them, they immediately thought it's a fantastic idea! We all head a smirk when we flew back home last night, when they said "please pull down the window blinds as we're preparing to land. Window blinks, yeah, right!
a) purchase weather balloon and associated launch gear
b) put stereoscopic HD camera on it [with enough separation to make long distances measurable]
c) use photos to measure the earth's curvature (or lack thereof)
It _WOULD_ make a good public 'crowd funded' experiment project, though. Have some university science department do it, maybe. Invite one or two flat-earthers as neutral observers.
I would like to invite all Flat-Earthers to take that flight in the MIG to 60,000 feet altitude and then open the canopy and open their helmet visor just to make certain that what they are seeing is not a projection of any kind. There is more than one way to chlorinate the gene pool. :-)
Copied from Wackypedia: "In 1870, a flat-Earth proponent named John Hampden offered a £500 wager (equivalent to about £48,000 in present-day terms[157]) in a magazine advertisement to anyone who could demonstrate a convex curvature in a body of water such as a river, canal, or lake. Wallace, intrigued by the challenge and short of money at the time, designed an experiment in which he set up two objects along a six-mile (10 km) stretch of canal. Both objects were at the same height above the water, and he mounted a telescope on a bridge at the same height above the water as well. When seen through the telescope, one object appeared higher than the other, showing the curvature of the earth.
The judge for the wager, the editor of Field magazine, declared Wallace the winner, but Hampden refused to accept the result. He sued Wallace and launched a campaign, which persisted for several years, of writing letters to various publications and to organisations of which Wallace was a member denouncing him as a swindler and a thief. Wallace won multiple libel suits against Hampden, but the resulting litigation cost Wallace more than the amount of the wager, and the controversy frustrated him for years"
So the lesson here is ignore Flat Earthers if possible. No good comes of trying to educate them...
"It was as predictable as the sunrise that his so-called rocket was never going to end well."
Yeah, and this is even before taking into account the SOOOOO many ways to prove earth is round, without trying to lift off in an aircraft that would have ashamed the masters of Cricket's first ship.
What an incredibly stupid way to die.
Welcome to the Darwin Awards !
"You don't need to die to win a Darwin Award. Surviving with loss of reproductive functions is sufficient - though a rarer outcome. As long as you remove yourself from the gene pool, it counts."
As long as you haven't already reproduced. He had two estranged sons, according to the Amazon Prime documentary "Rocketman: Mad Mike's Mission to Prove the Flat Earth". Well worth a watch because well, 'mostly harmless'.
I'd rather Mike's fate than this guy from Haddington who survived but certainly qualifies for a Darwin award:
Unfortunately for the young man, his organs couldn’t be reattached as the Old English bulldog had eaten them, The Times reports. A police source revealed that ‘peanut butter, or another food spread’ had been applied to the man’s ‘crotch area’ before the dog attacked. The dog, who has been named as Biggie Smalls, was put down after the owner gave their consent.
That story always made me scared of Mr Peanutbutter in Bojack Horseman.
account the SOOOOO many ways to prove earth is round
Even the ancient Greeks (who didn't believe in the scientific method particularly) were able to prove that theworld was round - and, by using fairly simple geometry, work out a pretty close estimate for the size.
It's coming to somthing when a modern, educated person has regressed to position less rational than the ancient Greeks.
Did it actually have a rocket engine in it, or was it a glorified "bottle-rocket"?
Whilst technically, this could be considered a rocket, more usually, you wouldn't call something a rocket unless it carried its own fuel / propellant. As far as I am aware, what he was launching was basically a tank full of live steam with some fins attached.
As for getting 500 feet off the ground, there are many, many ways you can manage that, without the means being a rocket in any way, such as using a balloon, or a helicopter, or jumping out of a window 2/3 of the way up the Burj Khalifa
What you call a "proper rocket" is properly called a "chemical rocket"(or "chemical booster", etc). These are the main design in use because of their high thrust:weight ratio; ion thrusters use non-chemical means to accelerate their propellant and are favored due to their high specific impulse(ie, they're highly fuel), but they're rather weak(and thus have only narrow applications). There are also nuclear rocket designs that have even reached the ground test stage, though none have flown.
So is a steam rocket a rocket? Yes, yes it is.
... or as folks have commented elsewhere, he didn't manage to prove whether the Earth was flat or not, but he did manage to prove that it is very, very hard.
RIP Mr Hughes. Whilst I might not agree with your Flat Earth exposition, the world needs more contrary nutjobs that are prepared to push the boundaries, if only to get the rest of us thinking.
It'd a bold claim "none of them really believe it". People genuinely believe in fairies in their garden, and all kinds of things weird and wonderfully silly.
Arrogant really, or at least very lacking in empathy that you genuinely don't believe people believe something just because you find it stupid. A sign you've not been exposed to a wide cross-section of the world... get outside more.
Too true JDX. In the documentary about him he quotes scripture to explain why the world is flat.
In the past decade Inverness has had a tourist boom in evangelical US Christians, who for some reason believe the Loch Ness monster is proof that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
Couple of years back did some supply teaching in a church primary LA school. Head did an assembly where he demonstrated the 6000 or so year history of the world to the kids on the whiteboard using a timeline with | Creation------------|-4000 years to birth of JC|------------ etc.
"Arrogant really, or at least very lacking in empathy that you genuinely don't believe people believe something just because you find it stupid. A sign you've not been exposed to a wide cross-section of the world... get outside more."
sorry , no
I'll happily accept there are people who believe in all kinds of bullshit, the biggest being GOD,
then going down the scale you've got UFOs , ghosts , faires , goblins , whatever.
(also fake moon landings , cia caused 911 , FINE) BUT ....
Flat Earth is so far down that scale that anyone that believes it has to be so batshit crazy that they cant be let outdoors on their own , let alone build rockets.
I was discounting this kind of proper nuthouse kerplunk-wheres-my-thriblle nutjobs OBVIOUSLY
My point is that a group of people organised enough to form a society cannot possible believe that shit , or that black is white etc.
Get out more??
What I *have* seen , are trolls and attention seekers who will spout any shit to get a rise.
Flat Earthers just enjoy the apopoplectic rage people get into when they willingly and knowingly refuse to see blindingly obvious facts that are satring them in the face.
> anyone that believes it has to be so batshit crazy
Not any more so than your average fundamentalist christian bible believer. Most of those seem to function OK in normal society, most of the time. Geocentralism is the next stage because why would their god create earth in a backwater of a massive galaxy among millions. They want to feel that they personally are the centre of the universe and the reason for everything.
Yea, OK, they are batshit crazy.
> none of them *really* believe the flat bit
Really? You've submitted all of them to some sort of effective lie-detector test?
This argument depends not only on knowing something that you cannot possibly know, but it's basically calling everyone who holds an belief you don't share a liar based on that thing you cannot possibly know.
To be fair, California has by far the largest population of any state in the Union with about 40 million people. The second most (Texas, with about 75% of Califonia's population) also is a hot-bed of nutters. As is the third (Florida, with about half). And the fourth and fifth (New York and New Jersey, with just under half and under a third, respectively).
Large populations equal a large number of stark raving loonies, at least in a fairly free society. Only stands to reason; it's the ol' bell shaped curve, innit. Try to remember, the mundane lives of the vast majority of us don't make the news in your tiny little corner of this dampish rock that we live on ... you just hear about the statistically meaningless ones that are out of the ordinary (or "newsworthy" if you prefer).
Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson: "I would sooner believe flat-earthers are attention-seeking trolls than they would truly believe the Earth is flat."
Or, to somewhat adapt Russel's chocolate teapot, the claim that somebody who is intelligent enough to drive a car and who has lived all his life in an industrialized country would really believe that the Earth is flat is so extraordinary that it can be discounted without evidence.
For the record, I also call liars people who claim to have seen a bigfoot, without feeling any need to provide a proof.
> the claim that somebody who is intelligent enough to drive a car and who has lived all his life in an industrialized country would really believe that the Earth is flat is so extraordinary that it can be discounted without evidence.
Except that it's not extraordinary at all. Intelligent people believe all sorts of bizarre and irrational things. This is not so very different.
Yes, I have Scott's* 'check yo' staging' T-shirt, and when I saw that premature parachute deployment was involved, immediately had to message my wife (who got me the T-shirt) that Hughes had not, in fact, checked his staging.
* Well, not his personal T-shirt ripped off his body, but you know what I mean.
There is footage out there if you really want to watch. What seems to have happened is that the main parachute deployed right after launch, and appeared to detach (or get ripped off) straight away. Then the rocket continues up quite a way, before falling back to Earth without slowing.
It must have been horrible for the people on the ground, knowing that his chute was gone and that the higher he went, the less the chance of him surviving.
Still, there's worse ways to go.
That's what they WANT you to think :-)
I once talked to a flat earther about this. They have some crazy "perspective plane" argument that "explains" this.
They have no explanation for why geosynchronous satellites and GPS work, nor can they explain why the spherical trig used to reduce sextant observations works when the earth is flat.
Since Eratosthenes of Cyrene first came up with a measurement for the Earths circumference more than 2200 years ago I personally consider them to be just a little bit out of date.
I'm sure that if you did a venn diagram of Flat Earthers & Moon Landing conspirators that you'd find a HUGE overlap.
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The Venn diagram of conspiracy theory nut jobs is by and large a circle. As anyone who has ever delved into the sewer that is Social Media would easily see. The Flat Earthers have to be part of that paranoia fest to protect their pet belief. But the "Moon landings were a hoax", chem trail, Jewish Conspiracy anti-vaxxers and the like all share their beliefs in online forums.(Or fora if you must). And happily shae all of them.
One of the really fascinating, from a Psychological view point, aspects, is how they reconcile the effort these conspiracies would require to make them operate with the gains to be had from them.
Slightly OT but last year I was recovering from pneumonia and a collapsed lung so decided to spend a couple of days simply resting in bed and going down the rabbit hole known as youtube chasing up (down? Across?) flat earthers, moon landing deniers, anti-vaxxers and their ilk.
It was an amazing journey into the minds of some really paranoid crazies!
What amazed me was how many of them could not be convinced of scientific proofs and truths. They always had the strangest explanations for the 'discrepancies' that intelligent folk seemed to raise.
Simple lighting tricks, photoshopping (years before PS was invented), giant cover ups by govmint agencies ("that's what 'they' want you to think") and so much more.
Just about any sane proof could be countered by an (often) totally insane counter proof.
Nearly had to buy myself a tin foil hat.
"I once talked to a flat earther about this. They have some crazy "perspective plane" argument that "explains" this."
You could have simply replied them to rent a boat to go from Patagonia East or West, always straight. Either they fall off the edge of the Earth or they go back to the starting point. Well, leaving from Patagonia they might find rough seas, but no land blocking their voyage. The only problem is that nobody would do this because there's no point. It has already been done a lot of times since the 16th century. But on the other hand I also suspect that there is no point in proposing such a simple experiment because your flat earther friend does not exist.
Just go to the sea-side where there's shipping and watch the way they way they appear and disappear hull-down
Stupid. That, of course, is because the light is bent slightly while travelling close to the sea surface. And photos from great height showing curvature? It's only the lenses that distort the picture, as every one knows who's ever used a wide-angle lens.
Anyway, going up in a balloon is no option either: it's another big lie that balloons are round. They are flat in fact.
/flat_earth_mode
Balloons do not, in fact, go up anywhere. They just repel the ground which itself moves away from the balloon as it serenely floats in the same position. It's not common knowledge but I suspect this is due to the elephants, propping up the ground, bending their knees in anticipation of the balloon bursting.
You can amplify this effect if you add a wicker basket containing mice to the balloon.
Stupid. That, of course, is because the light is bent slightly while travelling close to the sea surface. And photos from great height showing curvature? It's only the lenses that distort the picture, as every one knows who's ever used a wide-angle lens.
Netflix had a doc about the flat earthers. One group got funds to buy a fairly decent lasers, so set out to find.. err.. a flat bit of ground. Laser at set height, target some distance away, and thus dot from laser should appear at the same height. Ergo, Earth is flat!
Program ended with the motley crew trying to figure out why it was higher on the target, in line with the conspiracy theory involving a non-flat Earth.
Shame someone had to die to try and prove their theory, but the 'accident' was probably sabotage, and if he'd achieved his goal, would have crashed into the hard ceiling above the flat Earth anyway. All the world's a (sound) stage.
There are bunches of this sort of thing happening. One of my favorites is a group of flat-earthers who raised enough money to buy a very expensive and accurate laser gyroscope -- the idea was to test for actual rotational movement on the earth's surface. They expected to find none, but in fact found that the gyro indicated a ~15 degree drift -- exactly as the standard globe model predicts.
Bob Knodel's “What we found is, is when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift” has become a popular meme for FE debunkers (yes, it's a thing) and is generally played on their videos any time Globebusters is mentioned.
But what's funnier is their attempts to come up with a flattard compliant "theory" to explain it - everything from "it was precalibrated to show a drift" to "It's measuring the heavenly harmonics in the aether"
Proof? they've heard of it
> If you want to tst things out for yourself you don't rely on optical instruments when the Mk 1 eyeball suffices.
Mk 1 eyeballs are completely unreliable in so many ways. They are also only backed up by human memory which is even more unreliable. If you have two observers of an event you are likely to get three or more incompatible descriptions of what happened.
Optical instruments can be calibrated and corrections applied. They can also record so that comparisons can be made.
You could also just watch the sun disappear below the horizon while in the UK, then Skype your friend in LA and ponder why it's still visible in the sky where they are. If I hold a light over a dinner plate, there's no way I make it only visible on one part of the plate. If I make it a beam of light and move it around the plate, I can't make it seem to disappear over the horizon.
Yes, but that's not actually your friend in LA, that's "them" pretending to be your friend. Obviously.
/s
Some of these people are just trolls, but some of them have real mental heath issues so you should be careful how much you wind them up. If they decide that you're one of 'them', and part of the conspiracy, rather than just a dupe, there's no telling how they might react.
I can't make it seem to disappear over the horizon
Ah, but you see, it doesn't disappear over the horizon, you see. It moves away from you and, due to the Laws Of Perspective(TM), we can only see about 300km (I guess that should be in miles, since flattards don't seem too at home with the metric system) or so through the atmosphere, cos of the vanishing point thingie.
And the sun is only between 3 and 6 thousand miles away, not millions of billions.
Of course, that doesn't explain we can see the sun overhead when it's 6,000 miles away, but not when it's on our left 100 miles away. Maybe the vanishing point thingie only works horizontally. That would explain why planes don't get any smaller when they gain altitude, but stay the same apparent size. Oh, wait ..
JERAAAN!!!
Hiya devTrail,
Mike didn't explain in depth how he was planning to launch the craft from a balloon in the documentary, just that he planned to launch it from a balloon to get to 63 miles high. I know for a fact that could never work, at least not with his resources, but I also know the Earth isn't flat.
I tried to launch two 6' inflatable whales covered with rape alarms once as part of a war protest. They didn't fly, not with all the helium in all the balloon shops in Glasgow. That was as crazy and experimental as I ever got.
Mind you, Lawnchair Larry took off and survived so what do I know.
.
If you think you got the meaning of my post by reading the title you are wrong. I am wondering how can people believe that the Flath Earthers exist. They are clearly a fake publicised by big media to let people believe there can be BS that is even worse than what they feed to the public.
Never doubt how stupid people can be. Just think how dumb the average man in the street is, and then consider, that by definition, half of all people are dumber...
Just as there are individuals who reach the zenith of human intellect, there are their counterparts who reach the nadir.
Technically the jet pack of James Bond fame was propelled by steam, for that is what you get from the catalytic breakdown of hydrogen peroxide. It's the temperature that matters: Bond's jet exhaust was at about 750 deg C. Not the best stuff to be blasting within inches of the glutes.
The particular risk in question involved the stunt guy wearing flameproof insulation under the Bond tuxedo.
Of course, now we have a new jet-pack guy with his little jet-lets fastened to various parts of his body. He looks great in flight, but I have to wonder what will happen when (not if) he experiences a hard landing.
Whenever there's one of these great ideas for getting around without a vehicle, you have to consider that the vehicle is at least partly there to make sure you come out alive and uninjured every time.
In my official capacity as Reverend Fink, I believe that was a brief glimpse of one of the Noodly Appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, making sure that Hughes didn't get high enough to risk catching a clear view of the FSM, thereby undoing all those centuries of subtle meddling with the fossil record.
Take your convictions to their logical conclusion: if you're going to bend the surface of the Earth from convex to flat, keep going and make it concave. As we all should know, the earth is hollow, and we live on the inside[1][2]. Lots of people have believed this, including in the 20th century a Nazi-era Luftwaffe pilot and general all-round nutter called Peter Bender. Bender's theories inspired one Rudolf Nebel (a predecessor of Mike Hughes) to propose a project to to prove this by firing a rocket from Magdeburg in Germany to a point just south of New Zealand[3]. No-one lost their life in the attempts to test the prototypes, but Nebel's attempts came to an end when the Nazis pulled the plug on DIY rocketry.
[1] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4343
am I the only one to think there's something VEEEERY suspicious about his death? You know he got death threats from FBI?! (it was actually CIA agents posing to be from FBI!!!) And we all know for a fact that CIA is sponsored by this round earth conspiracy, right?! And they cut his parachute, man...
"The original flat earth was confined, restricted, and twisted into a perverse spherical shape by a conspiracy of TELEVISION BROADCASTERS in an attempt to realize their dream of TOTAL HUMAN MIND CONTROL through subserviant captive homogenized market share. ... Before the Earth was enspherized, people could escape television broadcast beams by direct linear travel. This is no longer the case, as television broadcast transmissions encircle the finite globe. The goal was not spherization, but limitation. The most obvious solution, to cut off the remainder of the planet beyond a small fixed inner area, giving a flat, bounded earth with the traditional falling-off-the-edge-of-the-world, would have been too obvious, and would have left too much evidence of the deed."
From Dave Fischer's "Flat Earth Liberation Front Against Television". Been around for ages. Dave is an artist with an obviously quirky sense of humor.
"Mad" Mike Hughes is to be commended for the successful launch of his steam powered vehicle which successfully carried him to the location of his death. He should be a primary candidate for the 2020 Darwin awards.
As for "going atop a mountain", There are multiple ski resorts with lifts that will take you above 13,000 feet. Even more above 12,000'.
https://www.tripsavvy.com/highest-ski-mountains-in-the-united-states-4132322
Chacaltaya, Bolivia has a lift over 17,785' (5241M).
http://verticalfeet.com/highest-lifts.html
However, According to most high-altitude pilots, the curvature of Earth’s horizon becomes obvious at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15.24 kilometers) and is prominent by the time you reach 60,000 feet (18.29 kilometers). Until they can get a rocket above 50,000 feet the earth will still be flat.
A person that thought firing rockets into space left holes in the atmosphere and we would all suffocate. More recently a person didn't understand how rockets worked in the vacuum of space (Every action as an equal and opposite reaction). These incidents were separated by many decades apart.
Sigh.....
I once knew a young girl who had been taken into care at the age of six. When she was seventeen, she once asked me "You know - when the sun sets, where does it go?" I was flabbergasted. She had had virtually no education during the eleven years she was in care, she was not stupid, just uneducated. I showed her a globe and asked her what it represented. She said that she had seen one before, and thought that it was just a pretty desk lamp. I had to explain to her that it was a scale model of the Earth, and show her how day and night are caused by the rotation of the planet.
"Maybe a balloon and go-pro would have been a better option."
I don't think that would have done it. I could have easily sent him a whole wodge of photos from 36km that I got from the last high altitude balloon flight I helped with some years ago. The Earth looked roundy from that altitude.
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