Ask HN: How do I Convince someone the Earth isn't flat
4 points by shyn3 1 year ago | 18 commentsRan into a few religious people who suggest the earth is a firmament. How do I prove it's not round/sphere.
- cratermoon 1 year ago"the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...
- jfengel 1 year agoThe trivial way is a phone call to a friend in a different time zone. It's dark there; it's not dark here. It's just past dawn here; the sun is at the highest a few time zones east. More phone calls to more places and it's pretty quickly apparent that the angle to the sun is exactly what you'd expect from a sphere and not from a disk.
Not that it matters. Flerfers have had decades coming up with increasingly elaborate and absurd cosmologies. They don't understand them, but that's what science looks like to them as well, so they figure it's your word against theirs. And since their word is the Bible, they win.
If they were genuinely curious, there are a million ways to show the roundness of the earth. But there are zero ways to demonstrate it to a person who is fundamentally incurious and doesn't want to know.
- h2odragon 1 year agoWhy do you need to prove them wrong? Have they given you doubt the world is round?
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-th...
- shyn3 1 year agoYes because it's in the Bible. And Quran. And Torah.
Have to convert the radicals.
One argument is when the plane lands why doesn't it curve. Another is why can we see over 1500km with a telescope.
- shyn3 1 year ago
- mtmail 1 year agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Let them bring evidence of Earth's flatness.
- yasp 1 year agoDon't waste your time?
- alex_lav 1 year agoJust go find different people to talk to
- jjgreen 1 year agoMeet them at night, point to the moon, walk away without saying a word.
- gwnywg 1 year agoOut of curiosity, what religion was that?
- clouddrover 1 year ago> Ran into a few religious people who suggest the earth is a firmament
The firmament is the sky, not the ground.
- shyn3 1 year agoThis suggests that we can't make it to space so that's a new worm of crazy.
- clouddrover 1 year agoNo, what it suggests is that you must first address your own lack of understanding before criticizing others for theirs.
- shyn3 1 year agoThey don't believe we can leave the firmament so never been to mars, no satellites, and never been the moon. Feel free to answer that other comment in this thread mr smart.
- shyn3 1 year ago
- clouddrover 1 year ago
- shyn3 1 year ago
- zgs 1 year agoIgnore their idiocy. Such folks cannot be convinced by mere facts.
- iefbr14 1 year agoDid they, by any chance, mention elephants and a big turtle too?
- 1 year ago
- lphillips0825 1 year agoAsk them to take you to the edge of the Earth and show you where you can jump off. /s
- hardkorebob 1 year agoYou don't. You respect their mind. Simple. Make love not war of any kind.