I’ve always had a hard time with flat earthers, not necessarily for their hypothesis, but their absolutely inane arguments.
You can see a water droplet curve on any surface. You can dip a ball in water and see it curve, you can literally try it at home.
But then they move the goal posts, which is infuriating, but at least would move the discourse forward into teaching them about physical phenomena.
As mentioned in other replies, there are both time lapses and live feeds showing movement around a ball earth.
Moon landing can easily be checked by bouncing a laser on the reflectors left by humans there.
The technology to land on the moon might actually be lost (probably not), but it’s probably easier than landing on Mars or an asteroid, which has been done. Besides, no space mission relies on “let’s do it like we did last time”, but careful planning and integration of lessons from every space mission and study.
This is btw also guiding principles for any tricky engineering project.
Also, long bridges, artillery trajectories, and the GPS system all take earth curvature into account. Try talking to an actual engineer.
I will give them that in everyday life you’ll almost never notice the curvature of the earth, but then again you’ll not notice the limit of the speed of light, electron transmission, bandwidth limits on data transfer (beyond your service agreement ofc), Newton’s laws, DNS systems, micronutrient deficits, epigenetics, bacteria/viruses, lions, or microfauna affect on decision making and mood. Hell, a lot of people didn’t even notice being neurodiverse or mentally unhealthy until just a few decades ago.
Seems trivially easy to realise that local experience is insufficient to explain things outside it…
Which all lends credence to the idea that there’s psychosocial components to conspiracy thinking.
The tech isn’t “lost” as in we don’t know how to do it. The tech is “lost” in the sense that we spent billions building giant single use rockets, then shut down the factories to move on to other projects.
If we wanted to turn around and build the exact same thing, we could. But all it would accomplish is sticking a couple people on the moon for a few days again. We already did that, and we don’t want to waste the money it would take to repeat the stunt.
What we want is sticking people on the moon for a few months at a time, for a fraction of the cost. Which requires different tech and different rockets. We also want it safer, and more repeatable. None of those things can be done with the old equipment.
I thought it was due to one of the articles that I remember reading some time, which stated :
the lack of documentation due to a rushed project
most people who worked on it being now retired or perished
… causing the lost technology, meaning that some specific techniques/solutions/rule of thumbs that might have been used at the time, might have been forgotten, making newer projects, unable to use that as a base.
We frequently leave low earth orbit. We land shit on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids. We just don’t bother sending people. This guy is just straight up wrong.
Yeah, the issue with the old moon landing tech is that the success chances were so low. It was worth it to them when it was the first, but now that it’s been accomplished, there is less reason to take something that only has a 50/50 chance of working. Now, we want the odds of a successful complete trip to be at least 99%, ideally much higher. That is a much higher burden on the technology. I mean, consider the percent chance of a successful launch alone so far.
In 2023, there were 210 out of 222 successful rocket launches, about 95%. That’s just launch, the part we have the most practice with… once it leaves atmosphere, the number of things that can go wrong dramatically increases. Granted, that includes a lot of unmanned launches, which have a lower burden of safety. So far in the entire history of manned rocket launches, the success rate has been 98%, have to assume including only more recent data would probably pull that up a bit. If launch alone is barely hitting 99%, how many people are gonna sign up for something much more complicated, with much less motivation than they had in the 60’s.
Most have spent a considerable amount of time looking for “sources” to confirm their belief, and have talked in length about it to an unreasonable amount of people around them: family, friends, colleagues,…
The cost of admitting they’ve been idiots and fooled the entire time would be very very high on them. Denial is cheaper.
The problem is once someone feels special or makes money from repeating conspiracy theories or pseudo science claims without any effort other than listening to some crackpot for a few minutes they have incentive to ignore or reject facts of reality based on experimentation that disagree with their professed opinions.
We are all susceptible to confirmation bias, but if you don’t know what it is or how it works pointing it out won’t change their confidence in the evidence supporting their conclusion and multiple other conclusions.
You’re talking to someone with less educated views than you’d find in a fifth grade science class and trying to use objective facts gathered with a methodology they don’t understand to show them they’re wrong, but the only engagement they are demonstrating they are capable of are mockery or the very long task of building a scientific understanding from the basics up.
I’ve always had a hard time with flat earthers, not necessarily for their hypothesis, but their absolutely inane arguments.
You can see a water droplet curve on any surface. You can dip a ball in water and see it curve, you can literally try it at home.
But then they move the goal posts, which is infuriating, but at least would move the discourse forward into teaching them about physical phenomena.
As mentioned in other replies, there are both time lapses and live feeds showing movement around a ball earth.
Moon landing can easily be checked by bouncing a laser on the reflectors left by humans there.
The technology to land on the moon might actually be lost (probably not), but it’s probably easier than landing on Mars or an asteroid, which has been done. Besides, no space mission relies on “let’s do it like we did last time”, but careful planning and integration of lessons from every space mission and study.
This is btw also guiding principles for any tricky engineering project.
Also, long bridges, artillery trajectories, and the GPS system all take earth curvature into account. Try talking to an actual engineer.
I will give them that in everyday life you’ll almost never notice the curvature of the earth, but then again you’ll not notice the limit of the speed of light, electron transmission, bandwidth limits on data transfer (beyond your service agreement ofc), Newton’s laws, DNS systems, micronutrient deficits, epigenetics, bacteria/viruses, lions, or microfauna affect on decision making and mood. Hell, a lot of people didn’t even notice being neurodiverse or mentally unhealthy until just a few decades ago.
Seems trivially easy to realise that local experience is insufficient to explain things outside it…
Which all lends credence to the idea that there’s psychosocial components to conspiracy thinking.
The tech isn’t “lost” as in we don’t know how to do it. The tech is “lost” in the sense that we spent billions building giant single use rockets, then shut down the factories to move on to other projects.
If we wanted to turn around and build the exact same thing, we could. But all it would accomplish is sticking a couple people on the moon for a few days again. We already did that, and we don’t want to waste the money it would take to repeat the stunt.
What we want is sticking people on the moon for a few months at a time, for a fraction of the cost. Which requires different tech and different rockets. We also want it safer, and more repeatable. None of those things can be done with the old equipment.
I thought it was due to one of the articles that I remember reading some time, which stated :
… causing the lost technology, meaning that some specific techniques/solutions/rule of thumbs that might have been used at the time, might have been forgotten, making newer projects, unable to use that as a base.
Rules of thumb
We frequently leave low earth orbit. We land shit on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids. We just don’t bother sending people. This guy is just straight up wrong.
Yeah, the issue with the old moon landing tech is that the success chances were so low. It was worth it to them when it was the first, but now that it’s been accomplished, there is less reason to take something that only has a 50/50 chance of working. Now, we want the odds of a successful complete trip to be at least 99%, ideally much higher. That is a much higher burden on the technology. I mean, consider the percent chance of a successful launch alone so far.
In 2023, there were 210 out of 222 successful rocket launches, about 95%. That’s just launch, the part we have the most practice with… once it leaves atmosphere, the number of things that can go wrong dramatically increases. Granted, that includes a lot of unmanned launches, which have a lower burden of safety. So far in the entire history of manned rocket launches, the success rate has been 98%, have to assume including only more recent data would probably pull that up a bit. If launch alone is barely hitting 99%, how many people are gonna sign up for something much more complicated, with much less motivation than they had in the 60’s.
The tech isn’t fucking lost FFS. It’s in NASA, TRW and my grandfathers fucking brain. This is like interstellar level of denial.
I thought Interstellar was supposed to be a fairly accurate film?
Very accurate, down to the idiots on earth claiming we never went to the moon and forgetting about tech like MRI.
Most have spent a considerable amount of time looking for “sources” to confirm their belief, and have talked in length about it to an unreasonable amount of people around them: family, friends, colleagues,…
The cost of admitting they’ve been idiots and fooled the entire time would be very very high on them. Denial is cheaper.
The problem is once someone feels special or makes money from repeating conspiracy theories or pseudo science claims without any effort other than listening to some crackpot for a few minutes they have incentive to ignore or reject facts of reality based on experimentation that disagree with their professed opinions.
We are all susceptible to confirmation bias, but if you don’t know what it is or how it works pointing it out won’t change their confidence in the evidence supporting their conclusion and multiple other conclusions.
You’re talking to someone with less educated views than you’d find in a fifth grade science class and trying to use objective facts gathered with a methodology they don’t understand to show them they’re wrong, but the only engagement they are demonstrating they are capable of are mockery or the very long task of building a scientific understanding from the basics up.