"Flat Earthers"

This will not be pretty. This will not be short. The Earth is flat and I'm a complete moron for believing otherwise.

Spoiler Alert! I am not a moron, the Earth is not flat and these people will only openly discuss the topic with you until you begin to prove them wrong, which will only make them angry because they've invested so much time and effort into believing this nonsense that they actually get offended rather than enlightened.

Earlier this evening I came across an imgur post which stated that the poster had just received a 3 month ban from a flat-earth discord for posting an image which they did not enjoy. [read: no sense of humour, I mean have a look at the image he posted!] [Update: I have been informed by a twitter stalker that they did not ban him because he posted this image. I couldn't care any less.]


You can read more about the imgur post here.

Basically, someone posted a link to the Flat-Earth discord and the people internet proceeded to do what they do best: invade. [You can find it via this link, the one we joined was titled 24/7 Flat Earth Live (ODD Reality). All existing invite links have been killed, however.]


By the time I made my way onto the server there were about 220 new members sitting in general chat, 20-30 people were participating in voicechat across two chat channels. I jumped on channel A, where the action seemed to be (the channels were named F, L, A and T - lol) and proceeded to argue with a British guy who kept talking about the shape of photons causing us to perceive spherical planets. I soon found out that he, as well as many of the others participating in the chats were actually fellow imgurians just trolling each other for shits and giggles. It's especially hard to tell because the logic offered from a legitimate Flat-Earther is not much better than that of your typical internet troll.

The server, with contempt, proceeded to limit access to the new users, meaning more and more of us ended up in voice chat, speaking with a "gold" user whom seemed to only use a sound board to speak. Eventually we were all allowed access to a text channel titled "troll containment" and the bloke with the sound board offered the best of us "orange" status, which meant we were then given access to the remaining channels so long as we weren't disruptive in any way. Myself and about 20 others (including the British troll dude, and a couple of other self-proclaimed trolls from earlier) made the cut and the remainder of the server were banned.

Things were fine for a time. We had a good ol' chat, introduced ourselves, spoke of our occupations and educations, and so on, then proceeded to debate things. The only real argument for a flat Earth that was provided was along with the following image.

As far as I can tell, their explanation of why this is proof of the Earth being flat consists of there being no visible curvature of the Earth between the photographer and the mountains in the distance. [Their] math suggests that in the 400 kilometers between the camera and the mountains, there should be a 14 kilometer rise in the Earth, obscuring the view (that's four times the height of those mountains, for those not keeping track). Even taking into consideration the height of the mountain the photographer is standing (Andorra's peak is roughly 2,000 meters), there is still an estimated 5.7km of 'rise' in the Earths surface, more than enough to cover the mountains in the photograph.

How, then, is this image possible? There are a bunch of different explanations that people have provided, including the effect of gravity on light. The one we want is a much simpler one, however; refraction.

Those of you familiar with the dark side of the moon album cover will know what refraction looks like, for the rest of you, I am going to explain for you something I wish we were all taught when we were children: why is the sky blue?

Refraction is a simple concept, really. In the experiments I did when I was younger, we talked about water flowing down-hill; how it will always turn and try to take the easier path. Light does this, in essence, when it enters a more dense substance. Take that album cover, above, for example; when a beam of white light enters a glass triangle (such as on the left), the light will turn a given amount toward the right angle of the surface it is entering. Basically, the light turns to take a path of less resistance. The thing is, different wavelengths of light, or colours as they're known commonly, will turn at different rates. As is depicted, the blue light, or shorter-wavelength-end of the visible spectrum will deviate the most, while the red, or longer wavelength, will stay its course.

This is precisely why the sky is blue; the sun emits all the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, including all of our colours as well as infrared and ultraviolet. When the suns rays reach our atmosphere, the light bends, separating the shorter wavelengths from the rest. These short wavelengths peel away from our perceived image of the sun, taking with them the colour blue, which in turn makes the sky look blue. This phenomenon also explains why when there is a thick haze, such as smoke in the atmosphere, that the sun appears red, as all the other colours (due to the atmosphere between you and the sun being denser) have also refracted, or peeled off. On a clear day, this is also why the sun is a bright white (not that you should be looking at it).

So, in a nutshell, light can, and does, bend. Density of substances determines the refraction amount, and the density of air changes with temperature and pressure, which is also changed by altitude, so it's valid to presume that light will want to refract along the path of least resistance, therefore reducing the effect of the Earth's curvature.

Then, in a word, refraction is the answer for why that photo is possible, right? Wrong. You are a stupid "globie" and you are wrong. All the calculations included the refraction amount and you are clearly stupid. ...Right. So, every single variable in this unintentional, unhypothesized "proof" of the earth being flat has been taken into consideration already and nothing scientific can be used to disprove it as irrefutable evidence that the Earth is in fact a flat disc. ... Yeah, I didn't get much further than that, either. 

To cut this whole story short, so that I can get onto the real reason I wanted to write this post (and we'll get to that soon), I was called names, I was laughed at. Even the laughing-in-tears emoticon was used in response to my comments. I told this individual (meme-something-a-rather) if they continued, I would block them.

She, I assume based on her language and number of emoticons used, must have complained to her friend, because I immediately started being harrassed by another of their "gold" members, white-knight group. This new person kept saying it's not their job to explain things to me, and that speaking with me was a waste of their time. I asked repetedly "why are you still talking, then?" and that the rest of us were dying to continue our debate (there was actually a really good-sport bloke on there whom offered some decent scientific analysis that I couldn't argue with my limited knowledge on the subject - I would have liked to continue our conversation, but I do not know his name) before they told me they were going to block me, which must have resulted in a misclick because I was immediately banned from the server. [Ooohhh burn, you suck! Get banned, scrub!]

[Update: Funnily enough, my comments were screenshot and posted on twitter in mockery, despite my comments being completely sincere at the time. These people don't seem to understand basic human interactions. Underlying conditions to blame? IQ being of relevance? I can only speculate... Anyway, I blocked her on twitter also, then started getting random interactions from other flat-Earth twitter accounts. More white knighting going on, I suspect. I blocked them, as well.]

Cue Youtube. So, this discord that I was on is a community based around a 24/7 livestream happening on Youtube right now (here - visit at your own risk! It does not end!). I watched for a while... Too long, probably, before I begun to participate in the chat. I asked for clarification on a few of the arguments that were presented in the stream and was referenced another Youtube video when I finally lost the plot and called them idiots.

Alas, I left the livestream chat. Armed with only "200 proofs" to find me the video he wanted me to watch, I came across this video. I made it a mere 5 minutes in before I started my ranting in the comments. How can anyone this stupid be so popular?

I don't even have the energy to finish this post. It was my intention to continue that comment, debunking points made throughout the video. When I realised there were going to be a whole shitload of things I'd want to say, I decided to take the matter over to blogspot where TehRawt has been a bit of a rant blog of mine for the past several years... And now, I don't even have the capacity to confront this topic with any sense of decency. You get the idea from the nature of my comments over time:

I think that for tonight, at least, my patience with the human race has worn thin enough for me to not even bother writing a proper conclusion to this post. Perhaps I will write a part two, some other time.

Edit:

Edit2: An example of what I had to deal with: https://twitter.com/JamieBrownFE95/status/903753162963767297 Also, their obsession with that single, "record-breaking" photo of the horizon. See edit3, below.


Edit3: That photo from earlier, I took another look at it. Note the taller mountain actually appears shorter due to it being further away. They only see what they want to see. ://twitter.com/JamieBrownFE95/status/903753162963767297