Flat Earth Theory?
- Thread starter TankAss95
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Thanks.
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Exactly. All the more reason to believe professional opinion on something rather than construct conspiracy theories.
It bugs me when people attempt to form their own consensus on something they know nothing about beyond what their imagination tells them. It's no different from someone deciding a car is rubbish when they've never even been in the same country as one, let alone driven it. People can either be an ass and assume their ill-informed opinions are correct, or accept that someone, somewhere knows better than they do.
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"Flat Earth Hypothesis" at best. "Flat Earth Belief" at its most accurate. Never "Flat Earth Theory".
Also, the last post on that link tells you all you could possibly need to know. Anyone, they say, producing pictures of the Earth that appear to show it as a sphere is "in on the Conspiracy" (yes, they use a capital C), altering the pictures which really prove it's round. You can do it yourself with a balloon full of helium and a live camera:
Testability being one of the key characteristics of science and knowledge...
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- AMCNUT
- AMCNUT
I would like to think we live on a (roughly) spherical planet, but who knows!? There will always be a few that like to be different.
BUT, if the earth wasn't spherical, why would so many people go the effort of lying about it? We used to think the world was flat; now we think it's a globe. Life on earth, in practical terms, has not changed one iota as a result of this relabeling the earth as a 3D entity. Therefore, why would people theoretically go to SO much effort to lie about something so... trivial, or, at least, very distantly removed from ANY of us down here?
Therefore, if science says that we do, indeed, live on a spherical globe, then I am inclined to believe it.
BUT, if the earth wasn't spherical, why would so many people go the effort of lying about it? We used to think the world was flat; now we think it's a globe. Life on earth, in practical terms, has not changed one iota as a result of this relabeling the earth as a 3D entity. Therefore, why would people theoretically go to SO much effort to lie about something so... trivial, or, at least, very distantly removed from ANY of us down here?
Therefore, if science says that we do, indeed, live on a spherical globe, then I am inclined to believe it.
CodeRedR51
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I went to high school with a guy that was convinced the earth was flat and that it was encased in ice.
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The only people who held a more unusual belief in a flat earth were the Koreshans.
They believed in a hollow Earth, with us living inside of it, not externally. They were also big practitioners of celibacy, which is a terrible way to create more followers. They were going to create a utopia in Southwestern Florida, but it didn't succeed...go figure.
They believed in a hollow Earth, with us living inside of it, not externally. They were also big practitioners of celibacy, which is a terrible way to create more followers. They were going to create a utopia in Southwestern Florida, but it didn't succeed...go figure.
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- Antonisbob
- No...
Why don't they try to find the end then if they believe it's flat? That will sure prove their theory.
Nothing's infinite after all..
Nothing's infinite after all..
- 904
- orlando,FL,USA
I this quite interesting and why? If your really look in the bible there is no basis for a flat earth. Secondly, the idea of a flat earth pre-dated the establishment christianity by centuries, this when you consider the fact that the greeks and romans thought that the earth itself flat; its only after the christianization of rome did the church accepted this as it had absorbed many teachings of the classical world. The same goes for the theory that earth was the center of the universe, an other teaching of the classical world absorded by the church.
Another thing to think about, even before christianization many germanic and scandanavian groups/tribes such s the norsemen held the idea of a flat earth. Overall it would stupid to pin the origin of the flat earth theory on bible as there is no basis for it.
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What an odd statement to make. The Greeks had arrived at a spherical Earth model by the 4th Century BC. The circumference was measured by Erastothenes in the 3rd Century BC. The Roman conquest of the Greek lands lead to an acceptance (not total - Homer still wrote about a flat Earth) amongst the Romans that the Earth was spherical, as described by Pliny. Ptolemy - a Roman who wrote in Greek - described the planet as an imperfect sphere and his Almagest formed the basis of all European (including Islamic and Byzantine Europe) astronomy for a thousand years, though it used a geocentric model.
In fact, not even the Christian Church thought the world was flat - they largely either though it was a globe or didn't care. The flat Earth model wasn't seriously revisited until the 19th Century - some 2,300 years after it was discarded - when some authors decided that the church-dominated romance-era Europe was full of idiots (like Erasmus, Copernicus, Michaelangelo, Kepler, Machiavelli, Brahe, Petrarch, Buonarotti, Lorenzo de Medici, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci) and Columbus set sail West with a religious and mutinous crew afraid to fall off the disc of the Earth - in fact Columbus and his crew knew the world was a sphere, just they thought it was a bit smaller than it is (by a factor of four) and had no idea about the existence of the Americas. Furthermore, the Catholic Church knew it was a sphere too - that's why they funded Columbus's journeys (they wanted to open an alternate route to the Indian subcontinent beyond the Silk Road, which was both beyond their control and, after the conquest of Konstantiyye by the Ottomans, a bit more dangerous).
Frankly, no-one thought the Earth was flat until fiction writers invented that mindset for, of all people, Renaissance scholars! This was then retroactively blamed on the Catholic Church, so influential at the time and in the area. The reality was that scholars knew it was a globe (the heliocentric model didn't gain favour until Copernicus proposed it and observations by Galileo and Kepler, all three Renaissance Men, confirmed it, despite being proposed by Aristarchus in the 3rd Century BC) and the Church didn't care all that much - it wasn't theologically relevant.
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- TankAss95
Most of them believe in a 'great ice wall' that surrounds the edges of the earth. They claim that no-one has visited this area, or it is defended by a world power (that's conspiracy stuff).
They say that they don't know what lies beyond the 'great ice wall', but some say that it goes on for eternity, while some say that it simpily ends (you would fall off). They also claim that the conditions of the ice wall is extreamly harsh, and no living thing can live in it, not even temporarly.
Seems legit. 👍
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Famine
That's crazy. I can't believe that they can live close to absolute zero!
Thanks for sharing.
Edit:From your link-
Temperature – tardigrades can survive being heated for a few minutes to 151 °C (424 K),[citation needed] or being chilled for days at -200 °C (73 K),[citation needed] or for a few minutes at -272 °C (~1 degree above absolute zero).[16]
Pressure – they can withstand the extremely low pressure of a vacuum and also very high pressures, more than 1,200 times atmospheric pressure. Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of open space and solar radiation combined for at least 10 days.[16] Some species can also withstand pressure of 6,000 atmospheres, which is nearly six times the pressure of water in the deepest ocean trench, the Mariana trench.[9]
Dehydration – tardigrades have been shown to survive nearly 10 years in a dry state.[17] When encountered by extremely low temperatures, their body composition goes from 85% water to only 3%. As water expands upon freezing, dehydration ensures the tardigrades do not get ripped apart by the freezing ice (as waterless tissues cannot freeze).[18]
Radiation – tardigrades can withstand median lethal doses of 5,000 Gy (of gamma-rays) and 6,200 Gy (of heavy ions) in hydrated animals (5 to 10 Gy could be fatal to a human).[19] The only explanation thus far for this ability is that their lowered water state provides fewer reactants for the ionizing radiation.[citation needed]
Environmental toxins – tardigrades can undergo chemobiosis—a cryptobiotic response to high levels of environmental toxins. However, these laboratory results have yet to be verified.[20][21]
Outer space – In September 2007, tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission and for 10 days were exposed to the vacuum of space. After being rehydrated back on Earth, over 68% of the subjects protected from high-energy UV radiation survived and many of these produced viable embryos, and a handful had survived full exposure to solar radiation.[16][22] In May 2011, tardigrades were sent into space along with other extremophiles on STS-134, the final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour.[23][24][25] In November 2011, they were among the organisms sent by the US-based Planetary Society on the Russian Fobos-Grunt mission to Phobos.
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They're the Rasputins of the animal kingdom. They can survive poisoning, radiation, heat, cold (literally a degree off absolute zero), vacuums and pressure. Some were taken into space, exposed to full vacuum, near-Earth space temperatures (3-5K) and unprotected from solar radiation for 10 days, came back and carried on living and reproducing. They can survive 6,000 atmospheres of pressure (we get up to 1,000atm on Earth), 600 times the lethal full body dose of radiation for humans, a decade of dehydration and they can metabolise poisons.
If all the animal life were wiped off the Earth, tardigrades would still be alive. A tardigrade could kick Chuck Norris's arse.
If all the animal life were wiped off the Earth, tardigrades would still be alive. A tardigrade could kick Chuck Norris's arse.
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- TankAss95
Famine
Is there any chance that tardigrades could mutate into some kind of poison? What I'm trying to say is that could they mutate into some kind of plague (like a virus)?
If these animals came harmful to humans, then it would probably be impossible to fight them off.
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