Are there any flat earthers or geocentrists on Straight Dope Message Board?
I’d say it’s pretty unlikely.
Someone will vote yes just to be obnoxious, though.
How can anyone be either of those these days? I can’t imagine anyone on earth who has a smidgen of education and can read could believe either of those things.
Neither, as I believe the United States is the center of the Universe.
This may just blow your mind.
Is that real O.o???
I can’t watch videos right now – what happened?
And duh, everyone knows that PITTSBURGH is the center of the universe.
In a French gameshow like Who wants to be a millionaire?, a guy was asked what revolves around the earth: the moon, the sun, Venus or Mars. Yes, that was the actual question.
He required the help of the audience (really!).
56% of the audience voted for the sun.
If it had been a UK show, a snarky audience might have been presumed. Not here.
Sad to see the correct answer is missing – Boyocentrists.
On OKCupid they ask if the Sun or the Moon is bigger. A not insignificant amount of people say it’s the moon. These tend to be the same people that say birds on power lines DO get shocked, they just don’t express it well.
I like saying that the sun goes around the Earth just on principle. There’s no “center” to the universe. It’s all relative. And if I define a coordinate system where the Earth is the origin, then everything has to go around the Earth by definition.
And of course, the Earth doesn’t really go around the Sun anymore than it goes around Mercury. The Sun and the Earth both go around an empty point in space somewhere between the two. Now sure, the Earth circumscribes and area that contains the Sun’s orbit, but it does that for Mercury and Venus too.
The point is, when you’re talking about interplanetary distances, it makes no sense to say that anything “goes around” anything else.
Nope; the barycenter of the Sun-Earth system is well inside the Sun.
[quote=“carm, post:7, topic:556720”]
I couldn’t imagine going through life like that.
Well…the Earth IS the center of the Universe, if you use an Earth-centric coordinate system, no? 
-XT
Call me old-fashioned, but I rather like the “has the majority of it’s local path gravitationally dictated by” definition of “goes around” pretty well, regardless of the distances involved.
Sure, you can call the some point on/in the Earth the center of the coordinate system if you want, but it’ll still be pretty obvious that all the OTHER planets have the sun as their primary in-system gravitational “center” (OK, eliptical focus), even though they do, technically, rotate around us every 24 hours in that coordinate system.
Plus, you’re just being contrary. You don’t actually believe (I presume) that the heavens are on fixes spheres centered on the Earth, you’re just pointing out a mathematical quibble. There exist people who simply don’t get the physical phenomena involved – and I guarantee you that most of them are not just choosing a bizarre coordinate system.
Of course the Earth is the center of the universe - Hubble proved that in the 1920’s when he showed that the universe is expanding and that this expansion is occurring at the same rate wherever you look in the sky. Since everything is receding from us, we are obviously at the center… and at the focal point of existence.
I was going to but then I saw it was a public poll.
I voted “yes” to geocentrist, but only in a metaphorical sense. We all know that there’s no “center of the universe,” so the earth is as much the center as any other random coordinates. Plus, as far as we know so far, we are the only intelligent species we know about . . . the only species for whom the phrase “center of the universe” has any meaning. So we might as well claim the center until some other species comes along.