5 ms·

Come on flat-earthers. I know you are out there. Lets hear your crazy rant about how this is a fisheye lens on a weather balloon or a webcam atop the eiffel tow

Come on flat-earthers. I know you are out there. Lets hear your crazy rant about how this is a fisheye lens on a weather balloon or a webcam atop the eiffel tower. Why can't we see the poles? And is that an ice wall on poking up in the lower-right quadrant of the disk?

layer8 7mo ago
Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?
- geldedus 7mo ago
  of course they are sore losers
itsalwaysthem 7mo ago
Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific. When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence. Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right? See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.
- kube-system 7mo ago
  > a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-light-to-study-planets/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig... > with absolute certainty It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.
  - trueidiocy 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    > It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum. FWIW, this fact isn't taught properly or normies are somehow unable to process it. There's this popular dismissal of tech people, saying that "they think in 0s and 1s, but world is shades of gray", but in reality, it's almost everyone else that thinks in 0s and 1s - STEM people and people in/into similar fields (like medicine) are usually forced to understand nuance due to nature of their interests/occupation, but everyone else seems to operate in purely binary mode, and what's worse, whether something is true and false isn't even correlated much with objective reality, and mostly with one's personal feelings about how things should be. (Now, to be an equal opportunity cynic, in my experience, the concept of categories and taxonomies being arbitrary - invented and assigned by people, and judged by their usefulness, as opposed to being inherent facts of nature that are discovered - seems to be hard for even STEM people to process, for some reason, at least based on my observations and the number of conversations I had about this with all kinds of people.)
    - sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
      What is a "normie"?
  - cringearrogance 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - lowiqonly 7mo ago
    [dead]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- wat10000 7mo ago
  Do you believe in Antarctica?
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance". Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it. For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions. However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong. If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong. This planetary reclassification was not the first. When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.) However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt. Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.
- maxbond 7mo ago
  > ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence. Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty. Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.
- chrisnight 7mo ago
  Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?
- sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
  Correct. This guy gets it. All other replies can be disregarded.
jgrahamc 7mo ago
There is no point engaging in any way with people who believe in such "theories". They are like trolls, the only way to deal with them is not at all. Don't engage, don't disagree, just nothing, total silence. One can choose to be a wilful edit and waste your life and time on complete bullshit, but the rest of us should just ignore those people completely.
- sandworm101 7mo ago
  Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police. Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
simonw 7mo ago
This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.
YZF 7mo ago
"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason" https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/dp/0262046105 https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...
- brendoelfrendo 7mo ago
  Ridicule them until they leave? Don't really feel like wasting my time on any more than that.
  - majkinetor 7mo ago
    Exactly what Professor Dave does.
- sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
  How to talk to a science cultist: you can't, as your post will be immediately flagged and censored.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day. But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.
- maxbond 7mo ago
  They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals. Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
    - maxbond 7mo ago
      > There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ... A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue". It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon. > ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
christophilus 7mo ago
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
- NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
  > This is all CG. Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.
  - dylan604 7mo ago
    ahem, Kubrik
    - saint_yossarian 7mo ago
      Kubrick, even.
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    And here I thought it was all shoot on soundstage on Mars.
  - sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
    "Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement."
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
  Now you're catching on.
_adq2 7mo ago
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself. - Feynman
gaurangt 7mo ago
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
sph 7mo ago
[dead]

layer8 7mo ago

Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?

geldedus 7mo ago
of course they are sore losers

itsalwaysthem 7mo ago

Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific. When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence. Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right? See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.

kube-system 7mo ago
> a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-light-to-study-planets/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig... > with absolute certainty It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.
- trueidiocy 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  > It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum. FWIW, this fact isn't taught properly or normies are somehow unable to process it. There's this popular dismissal of tech people, saying that "they think in 0s and 1s, but world is shades of gray", but in reality, it's almost everyone else that thinks in 0s and 1s - STEM people and people in/into similar fields (like medicine) are usually forced to understand nuance due to nature of their interests/occupation, but everyone else seems to operate in purely binary mode, and what's worse, whether something is true and false isn't even correlated much with objective reality, and mostly with one's personal feelings about how things should be. (Now, to be an equal opportunity cynic, in my experience, the concept of categories and taxonomies being arbitrary - invented and assigned by people, and judged by their usefulness, as opposed to being inherent facts of nature that are discovered - seems to be hard for even STEM people to process, for some reason, at least based on my observations and the number of conversations I had about this with all kinds of people.)
  - sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
    What is a "normie"?
- cringearrogance 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- lowiqonly 7mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
wat10000 7mo ago
Do you believe in Antarctica?
adrian_b 7mo ago
I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance". Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it. For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions. However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong. If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong. This planetary reclassification was not the first. When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.) However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt. Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.
maxbond 7mo ago
> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence. Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty. Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.
chrisnight 7mo ago
Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?
sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
Correct. This guy gets it. All other replies can be disregarded.

jgrahamc 7mo ago

There is no point engaging in any way with people who believe in such "theories". They are like trolls, the only way to deal with them is not at all. Don't engage, don't disagree, just nothing, total silence. One can choose to be a wilful edit and waste your life and time on complete bullshit, but the rest of us should just ignore those people completely.

sandworm101 7mo ago
Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police. Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

simonw 7mo ago

This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.

YZF 7mo ago

"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason" https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/dp/0262046105 https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...

brendoelfrendo 7mo ago
Ridicule them until they leave? Don't really feel like wasting my time on any more than that.
- majkinetor 7mo ago
  Exactly what Professor Dave does.
sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
How to talk to a science cultist: you can't, as your post will be immediately flagged and censored.

slopinthebag 7mo ago

The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day. But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.

maxbond 7mo ago
They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals. Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
  - maxbond 7mo ago
    > There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ... A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue". It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon. > ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.

christophilus 7mo ago

My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.

NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
> This is all CG. Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  ahem, Kubrik
  - saint_yossarian 7mo ago
    Kubrick, even.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  And here I thought it was all shoot on soundstage on Mars.
- sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
  "Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement."
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
sdfjkhdfjkdhs 7mo ago
Now you're catching on.

_adq2 7mo ago

Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself. - Feynman

gaurangt 7mo ago

Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!

sph 7mo ago

[dead]