Flat Earther With Rocket

[Superluminal]

A Flat Earther is going to an altitude of 2,000 ft. in a steam powered rocket to prove the world is flat.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-plans...180046485.html

[slang]

A very clever man...

The Washington Post has raised the question of whether Hughes’ flat-eartherism may be more opportunistic than sincere, pointing out that he only “converted” to the philosophy after failing to come up with enough money to fund his latest project on his own.

Getting his hobby funded by the gullible! P.T. Barnum would be so proud.

[CJSF]

Regardless of his sincerity, what sort of experiment or evidence at 2000 feet is going to change anyone's mind, vs. ground level?

CJSF

[bknight]

The stupidity of the "experiment" is astonishing barring that he would be better buying a ticket on a commercial jet liner and travel at 35000. But as slang alluded, P. T. Barnum would have been proud.

[slang]

Regardless of his sincerity, what sort of experiment or evidence at 2000 feet is going to change anyone's mind, vs. ground level?

Exactly! That underscores how clever this fellow is! If folks can't get beyond the "he could drive up a suitable mountain or get on a cheap airliner flight for this", how can you possibly feel guilty for taking their money?

[Hornblower]

That would be great if this rocketeer is a flimflam man getting money from true believers in Flat Earth woo to finance his hobby.

[bknight]

Oh wait:

A California man who planned to launch himself 1,800 feet high Saturday in a homemade scrap-metal rocket — in an effort to prove that Earth is flat — said he is postponing the experiment after he couldn't get permission from a federal agency to conduct it on public land.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.b42ac4e2c17f

[CJSF]

I still don't understand how launching to a height easily achieved by hiking up hills would "prove" Earth was flat. What instrumentation was he going to fly with?

CJSF

[WaxRubiks]

I think the rocket probably isn't real...I think it would take quite a lot of expertise even to get to 2000ft in a home made rocket. I'm sure von Braun wasn't hired by NASA for nothing.

[01101001]

I still don't understand how launching to a height easily achieved by hiking up hills would "prove" Earth was flat. What instrumentation was he going to fly with?

As I read the article, his 1800-foot target is an incremental improvement fron his 1000-foot flight, and is not his final step. From the cited article:

His ultimate plan, he said, is to launch a rocket into space so he can see for himself whether or not the earth is flat.

[01101001]

This has a little more detail: Washington Post

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

[WaxRubiks]

If he really wanted to get into space wouldn't the Richard Branson Galactica thing be enough.

To get to a few thousand feet, I would think a balloon would be better.

[Superluminal]

For those of you who may not remember Evel Knievel's infamous jump over the Snake River Canyon. Here's an idea of what a steam powered rocket is capable of. IIRC the rocket was designed by a NASA engineer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llzIVDbvSAc

[George]

Nuts!

And he's managed to raise money for this, 'His second campaign on GoFundMe, this time titled "Flat Earth Community Rocket Launch" raised almost $8,000 toward Hughes rocket launch.' [ Forbes last week.]

[AGN Fuel]

Nuts!

And he's managed to raise money for this, 'His second campaign on GoFundMe, this time titled "Flat Earth Community Rocket Launch" raised almost $8,000 toward Hughes rocket launch.' [ Forbes last week.]

It never fails to amaze me how many people have more money than sense.

[Jens]

It never fails to amaze me how many people have more money than sense.

Do you know what the exchange rate is?

[Gillianren]

I actually refer to a few of my friends as having "more dollars than sense," as I like the symmetry.

[PetersCreek]

In the aviation safety world, those types are described as having checkbooks thicker than their log books.

[Nicolas]

Anyway, if someone is planning to launch himself way up high in a dubious contraption, the term "flat earther" just might get a whole different ring to it, depending on the quality of the parachute system...

[Jens]

Anyway, if someone is planning to launch himself way up high in a dubious contraption, the term "flat earther" just might get a whole different ring to it, depending on the quality of the parachute system...

A flat flat earther!

[Swift]

The first genius trying to prove the Earth is flat with a rocket.

[Nicolas]

Physics never worked for him quite the way it worked for most of us. Except gravity. Good old reliable gravity.

[Iago]

A very clever man...



Getting his hobby funded by the gullible! P.T. Barnum would be so proud.

A man is nothing, if not flexible.

[Hornblower]

I hope he does better than Evel Knievel, who popped his parachute on the launching track.

[WaxRubiks]

I think maybe this is related, but I often wonder how people feel who live on the opposite side of the world to me. I try to imagine going to Australia, to see how it would feel. Being in the Northern hemisphere, I am used to thinking that the UK is kind of the top of the world. And I am pretty sure that people in Australia don't think that they live upside down....but maybe they feel they live on the underside, as that is how globes are usually portrayed. I'm sure they are used to it somehow, although the idea of going down under gives me a little uneasy, and vertigo, that it would feel like I might fall off, which I realise is just my mind projecting my person experiences of how things might behave if they were put on top, or on the bottom of a beach-ball.
I'm a bit unsure about the concept of irrationality, as I think there is a chain of logic in peoples minds between something logical, and something that appears illogical, but I wonder if there maybe a connection between genuine flat-Earthers and a failure to take in the idea of living on a ball, and connect it to their own experiences of up and down, and how gravity works..

It's a long-shot I know.

[bknight]

I think maybe this is related, but I often wonder how people feel who live on the opposite side of the world to me. I try to imagine going to Australia, to see how it would feel. Being in the Northern hemisphere, I am used to thinking that the UK is kind of the top of the world. And I am pretty sure that people in Australia don't think that they live upside down....but maybe they feel they live on the underside, as that is how globes are usually portrayed. I'm sure they are used to it somehow, although the idea of going down under gives me a little uneasy, and vertigo, that it would feel like I might fall off, which I realise is just my mind projecting my person experiences of how things might behave if they were put on top, or on the bottom of a beach-ball.
I'm a bit unsure about the concept of irrationality, as I think there is a chain of logic in peoples minds between something logical, and something that appears illogical, but I wonder if there maybe a connection between genuine flat-Earthers and a failure to take in the idea of living on a ball, and connect it to their own experiences of up and down, and how gravity works..

It's a long-shot I know.

Well I live in the Northern hemisphere also and have travelled to both Australia and New Zealand and can report that no they are not upside down, nor do they believe that!

[AGN Fuel]

Well I live in the Northern hemisphere also and have travelled to both Australia and New Zealand and can report that no they are not upside down, nor do they believe that!

As an Australian, I can absolutely confirm we don't fear going outside without Velcro-soled shoes in case we drop helplessly off the face of the Earth and fly despairingly out into space....

From our perspective of course, the traditional orientation of the globe is an anomaly of northern hemisphere bias. From a viewer perched in space to the south of the solar system, planets orbit quite happily clockwise around the sun and (with the exception of Venus) rotate on their axes with a similar clockwise rotation. There is no reason to suggest one perspective is more correct than another.

[KaiYeves]

I think maybe this is related, but I often wonder how people feel who live on the opposite side of the world to me. I try to imagine going to Australia, to see how it would feel. Being in the Northern hemisphere, I am used to thinking that the UK is kind of the top of the world. And I am pretty sure that people in Australia don't think that they live upside down....but maybe they feel they live on the underside, as that is how globes are usually portrayed. I'm sure they are used to it somehow, although the idea of going down under gives me a little uneasy, and vertigo, that it would feel like I might fall off, which I realise is just my mind projecting my person experiences of how things might behave if they were put on top, or on the bottom of a beach-ball.
I'm a bit unsure about the concept of irrationality, as I think there is a chain of logic in peoples minds between something logical, and something that appears illogical, but I wonder if there maybe a connection between genuine flat-Earthers and a failure to take in the idea of living on a ball, and connect it to their own experiences of up and down, and how gravity works..

It's a long-shot I know.

As the others have said, being in Australia doesn't feel like being upside-down, nor does traveling there feel like falling. I'm from the US and I traveled there about ten years ago-- it's just a regular 18-hour plane ride from LA, then you get off and Sydney is a perfectly normal city, physics-wise. The sidewalk is down and the skyscrapers point up.

There are also plenty of globes that you can turn in their cradles to make South up and North down (or even East or West up). There's a funny story that supposedly National Geographic only made fixed-axis globes until one of their directors in the 60s complained that he hated having to crane his neck every time he was trying to follow Antarctic expeditions.

[WaxRubiks]

Yes, I was talking about how we may subconsciously feel about the idea of travelling to different parts of the planet...I suppose, think about it, that the brain has different parts that process information in different ways. Parts of the neocortex can process information more logically, where as deeper parts may act more intuitively...which give rise to feelings about things.

[Hornblower]

When my mother visited New Zealand and Australia, she had a vague feeling that something was amiss, but she could not put her finger on it initially. Finally it dawned on her that when looking at what seemed like south, the noon Sun was going the wrong way.