747 Pilot Kelsey (74 Gear on YouTube) challenges flat-earthers

The earth is a sphere!

And we live inside!

Cyrus Teed told us all about it!

You may as well ask “how do they explain X”, where “X” is any seemingly irrefutable proof of a round earth - for example, orbiting satellites, GPS, seismology, video footage of the earth from the ISS, whatever. I don’t know the details of what their explanation will be for your particular question, but I can guarantee the first part of it will be “the earth is flat.”

Given a few days, I could photo shop that. And “authenticated by NASA” means nothing when NASA is obviously in on the whole thing (not sure what the whole thing is (who profits from lying about the shape of the Earth?) but there is apparently one).

Your understanding of ‘West’ is flawed. The way compasses work, your local ‘west’ will continue to rotate until you have looped all the way around the disk (through what would appear to be ‘south’ on a map) and encounter New Jersey.

Of course.
How silly of me.

Those weren’t real windows. It was 3D virtual reality. We never went over Antarctica.

There I just “disproved” Kelsey.

Well, I didn’t say it. :shushing_face:

I still think that that guy that managed to kill himself with his homemade rocket wasn’t actually a flat-earther. He just wanted to ride in a rocket that he built himself, and pushed the flat earth angle on it to get funding.

Okay, next trip, you can have a wing seat.

I have one in my critique group. She is the most gullible person I’ve ever met, a fundamentalist and fond of every conspiracy theory out there. She’s a flat earther because the Bible says so.

The picture won’t convince because it is CGI from our NASA overlords. That CGI of that quality didn’t exist back then (and I got the SIGGraph newsletter in 1974 so I know this for sure) doesn’t affect them at all.

All you have to do is look at the flight schedule of this flight. There is a website giving distances between cities in the flat earth model. It is so much greater than the the real distance that the plane would have to exceed Mach 1 by a lot for most of the flight. Also, on the flat earth map the most direct route between these cities is over Alaska.
For those lucky enough to not have followed this, the flat earth map is basically the UN map symbol, chosen with the North Pole at the center to avoid placing any member nation at the center. Land masses are more or less to scale, but the oceans between them in the Southern Hemisphere are much larger.

My guess is they’ll say “We didn’t really fly over the South Pole. We flew west, parallel with the Ice Wall, which was hidden by clouds so you couldn’t see it. The plane’s instruments were wrong and/or faked. Pay no attention to the fact that the plane would have to exceed Mach 1 if the Earth were flat.”

I know someone that believes in the mermaid found a few years ago. And the hidden train from Denver International Airport to Philadelphia. That if your dog has a white tip to their tail that they are genetically an alpha since they lead the pack in the dark (the others follow that white tip as a guide) and she has full-on silent mental conversations with dogs.

Even she does not believe the flat Earth.

You poor, gullible fool. Who told you that the speed of sound is some sort of barrier? The very same people that tell you the Earth is sphere! And don’t say “what about sonic booms?” - the “supersonic” jets have a huge speaker that transmits that sound.

The jig was almost up in 1947, when test pilot Yeager accidently put in a tape of “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

Yeah, some conspiracy theories people, that’s all they can talk about. You meet them, they seem normal and before you know it, we didn’t land on the moon, 9/11 didn’t happen or orchestrated by the US government and Covid is a virus created by the Iranians (or is it the Iraquis?), for what purpose is not explained.

That’s the part that’s always bugged me. I can understand the “why” of Young Earth believers – their holy book tells them so, so they must believe it – but a flat earth is the Underpants Gnomes of conspiracy theories.

  • Convince everyone the earth is a globe
  • ???
  • Profit!

Does it really matter, and does anyone really need to care, that some people believe sh|te like this? After all, these apparently aren’t the people who will be designing the next generation of GPS systems or intercontinental rocket ships.

Contrast that with crackpot beliefs like some of the anti-vax conspiracies, which really are socially harmful. It does matter that people believe sh|te like that.

Why, we even have one person on this here very Board who believes that some people are hypersensitive to monosodium glutamate, and you wouldn’t believe (or maybe you would) the heroic efforts of this Board to convince that poster that it can’t be true. Hey, if he doesn’t want to eat MSG, fine, he doesn’t have to eat MSG. But no, the Straight Dope Message Board couldn’t leave someone to be Wrong On The Internet.

Same with these flat-earthers, and the moon landing hoaxers, and the various other not-so-dangerous crackpot theories.

Flerthing is different than the other CTs. You can’t prove men went to the Moon. Maybe at best we sent an unmanned ship with pre-recorded tape to fool us about “communicating” with them in space. You can’t prove that the US Guv’ment didn’t take part in 9/11, even if it was only to let it happen after James Woods reported it. You can’t prove the Chinese government didn’t manufacture the Covid-19 virus then tested it on people in Wuhan.

But the flat Earth is different. You can actually prove the Earth is round 3 different ways in 5 minutes. THAT is why it is unlike any other CT.

At least some of the flearthers claim there is no moon, just a holographic projection in the sky.

That gives off cold light.

Most seem to think it, and the sun are small disks only a few thousand miles up at most. Flerfers unanimously are moon landing hoaxers also.
As for proving we were there, there are laser reflectors anyone can bounce a laser off to measure the distance. Doesn’t do any good, of course.