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I mean, in a vacuum, and given enough time (and provided you remove the heavy bucket afterwards and are in no other gravity well), A. And flat-earthers DO believe this because they somehow accept that every OTHER planet is a sphere... For some reason... Just not our special little disk of god-made mud.
The dumb leading the dumb.
But... We have satellites that have imaged the earth. Why is that bad but doing it to mars is ok
They claim those are faked by Big Science or whatever. You can't convince these people.
iT's A FiSh EyE LeNs!1!
Even without that, there's plenty of evidence for a spherical Earth, from the way shadows vary with longitude to the shape of Earth's shadow on the moon always being round.
A lot of Flat Earthers don't believe in space at all. They believe the Earth is covered by a dome called the Firmament, which just has a lot of pretty lights on it. My favorite obscure Flat Earther belief is that all gravity is caused by the Earth continuously accelerating upwards at 9.8 m/s².
That's also my favourite flerf fact as well! ❤️ If the acceleration was true and we just threw out the physics which would stop this from being a thing, we would have already been travelling at the speed of light within about the first year of the Earth's existence. We'd be going over 6000 times the speed of light right about now... Assuming you believe in a young Earth as well.
It's the Biblical conception of Earth. That's why.
what's in the great deep?
Not much, apparently?
Here's the two references to it in the Bible:
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:2
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
Genesis 7:11
So... dead fish? I have no idea.
First, the globe would have to be solid and sufficiently dense to scale.
Then, it would have to be removed from any other significant gravitational field - such as the actual earth.
Then, the layer of water would be as deep as about half the width of a pin.
Then yes, it would work and the water would settle on the globe correctly.
(I am not a scientist and have probably missed a variable or twenty in this summation)
You're mostly correct, but hilariously even all that wouldn't be good enough because water behaves differently at different scales. Surface tension would dominate in a miniature model, and the water would be trying to stick to everything in a way which oceans simply don't do
Now I'm wondering what high surface tension oceans would look like.
How high? Like we can walk across it high?
I'm thinking where you could lay down next to the water on the beach and have the surface of the ocean slightly higher than the tip of your nose.
Probably absolutely terrifying, considering the water would cling to you and it might be impossible to escape the surface tension.
I am not a scientist
That's okay, neither is the person who made that Facebook meme.
You may not be a scientist, but your summary is pretty much spot-on. And it certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than whatever horse shit the flat earth clowns are pushing.
A working model will be scalable.
A 1:6 model of The Queen Mary will capsize in still water.
Why is that? I couldn't find any info on that.
Probably because volume increases faster than surface area.
Edit: To expand on that, assume the Queen Mary is an airtight cube. A small model of the cube might have 1m sides, with a volume of 1m³. If the real cube had sides of 3m, it would have a volume of 27m³. Buoyancy is a function of the volume of water displaced by an object, so since volume increases so much faster than surface area (and, by extension, weight), the larger cube would displace enough water to overcome its weight where the smaller one wouldn't.
Good on you for challenging that and bad on me for repeating that without knowing precisely. Heard that decades ago and use it as a general reference to the fact that functional models are absolutely not scalable. I'm not a trained engineer and I don't know if the 1:6 part is right but there is a scale where that design would capsize because it was designed to function at the scale it was built for. At sufficiently different scales different properties of water would become dominate and upset the intended function.
At a super small scale it might just kind of stick in the water. That's a funny image. With water I just imagine it as kind of like 'resolution'. Take a small boat and a cup of water, then scale that up 10,000x. You're not really 'scaling' everything because the molecules aren't growing, there's just more of them, and the dynamics that govern the interactions of 10 molecules are very different from 10,000.
I also remember something about Gulliver's Travels- proportionately scaled giant's bones couldn't support the weight because square-cube law. I should have used that reference because I do know how that works. Could just be that with the Queen Mary too but I vaguely remember it being something about water itself.
But again good on you for asking. And since you are the kind of person that challenges things you probably already understand everything I just babbled about but thanks for giving me a minute to pretend I remember stuff I sort of learned once.
Can't help myself so I'll take a total guess that maybe the Queen Mary thing something about friction of water not having enough effect at smaller scales to provide resistance the keel needs? idk- that was probably an embarrassing guess but I'm just a dilettante so who cares.
Good on you for expecting the best out of a person. I did suspect something like surface tension or viscosity, but I was curious about the exact reason. The relationship of volume to weight should be about the same, and thus the ship should still float. That was my reasoning.
Anyway, thanks for the lengthy response, even if you don't have a source.
Both actually, assuming lots of time and no external gravity field.
Both will also have a problem with surface tension.
This is one of the few times a spherical cow in a vacuum is accurate
In light of the last decade, I've come to almost appreciate the dumb, harmless conspiracy theories like this one.
Flat Earth, birds aren't real, etc - if folks think spending their time on that shit is fun, then more power to em.
More of the fun dumb shit, less political conspiracies that almost invariably shepard idiots over to supporting fascists.
I don't think there is such a thing. Aside from obviously credible things like "the CIA did X thing Y years ago", conspiracy theories are generally not harmlessly even if they're the flat earth kind.
I've seen interviews of flat earthers who say their family has cut them off because of their conspiracies. It can become such a huge part of them, that they can't help but push it on their friends and families. It drives them crazy, so they cut off said conspiracy theorist from their lives.
And there is also the part that belief in conspiracy theories lowers your standard for evidence, makes you paranoid and stubborn, all of which makes you prone to other conspiracy theories.
I've seen much of this with my own mom. She first started believing the covid vaccines were bad, now she believes Bill Gates & George Soros are trying to depopulate the earth. And nowadays it has lead to her acting like fluoridated water and toothpaste is cyanide. Once you have your foot in the door, every other more dangerous conspiracy theory becomes more palatable.
Most flat earth conspiracy is part of a larger biblical conspiracy, which lines up with pushing for Christian theocracy. Most of the flat earthers are not "one and done." They are part of deeper and way more harmful conspiratorial groups like Qanon.
It's not at all harmless joke conspiracies like "birds with arms" or other kinds of one off cryptozoology like Bigfoot or Nessy.
Oh. Well... fuck.
Reality always finds a way to disappoint
I agree. I like the idea of the loch ness monster.
Problem is though, this stuff all seems to blob together and you start a conversation about the Baghdad battery and all of a sudden someone is making some pretty antisemitic theories about the world.
Conspiracy theories generally involve a worldwide conspiracy to hide the “truth”. There’s almost always at least an implied “them” who doesn’t want this truth to be revealed. The illuminati, the freemasons, or, inevitably, the Jews get blamed for suppressing shit. It’s a short road from flat earth or the lizard people to “a worldwide Jewish cabal is trying to sacrifice our children to Satan”.
Beautiful thing is, it does scale perfectly.
Pour water over that globe and it'll be wet all over. Do it in space and it'll even coat the surface evenly.
Their own point misses the point 🤦
They already tried going to space once and failed. So they can only accept results from tests done on Earth.
And even then they can't accept their own rest results. Like at the end of Behind The Curve where they shine a laser from one location to another location on the horizon.
They are adamant that because they believe the Earth is flat, the last would hit the target on the horizon exactly in the middle. But no matter how hard they try, the last keeps overshooting the horizon target... because of the curvature of the Earth. But do they accept that their own experiment has disproven their hypothesis? Nope.
Just have to make our globe working model dense enough to distort space-time and then spin it at a thousand miles an hour. 'Course this will require a working model of the sun to power the working model of the Earth.
answer is clearly "the earth is shaped like a bucket"
I just learned that I don't care for relief globe. It's unsettling somehow.
Aside from the lack of accuracy when it comes to scale?
Because at that size, a smooth globe would definitely be more accurate.
I just want one that shows the actual shape, with the bulges at the equator.
I don't think you would be able to see those at that scale either.
A yes, the Pour a Bucket of Water creation story. We all know it, we all grew up with it. It's checkmate, rounders!
No, B yes
You'd have to be in freefall to eliminate the earth's gravity messing it up, and at this scale surface tension would likely be the overwhelming force so not really fair there anyways. Never mind that those elevations are crazy exaggerated; the differences in the real earth are far less pronounced.
And also this is scalable, assuming you also scale the gravity fields.
I may be lonely, but I'll never be, "give a bunch of crackpots some attention so I can at least hang out with other dudes at conferences and stuff until they invite me to join whatever the incel equivalent of Amway is" lonely
Hrmmmm. 3! Wait, no... False! Er.... 4i over pi!