So, lately I’ve been reading a lot about those crazycrazy flat earthers-- but I can’t for the life of me find out what they believe is under the world.
Any ideas?
It’s turtles all the way down.
For starters, nobody’s even certain that “they” exist at all. There are certainly at least some members of the Flat Earth Society who are in it just as a joke; it is not certain that there are any who aren’t just joking.
Mind you, the ones who are just joking ceased to be funny a long time ago, but since when has that ever stopped anyone?
Well, maybe not so much anymore, but there do see to be some Christian fundies that literally believed in the “four corners of the world”.
At least <a href=http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm>this guy</a> seemed to believe what he preached.
Crap, my bad. Here’s the url: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm
I had a read of the FAQ at the Flat Earth Society here , but it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s dry satire.
Either way… in my job I use the great circle method all the time to determine the distance between two points on the surface of the Earth, and it seems to work reasonable well.
Or did the government get to geometry as well?
I’ve always wanted to know: down to what?
Although they do give some of the standard “flat earth” answers, the sarcasm meter went through the roof when I read this answer the question “what is underneath the disc?”
*A: This is unknown. Some believe it to be just rocks, others believe the Earth rests on the back of four elephants and a turtle. *
I’m certain the elephants-on-the-back-of-a-turtle myth predates Pratchett by centuries, but I can’t remember where it comes from. Indian mythology?
More turtles.
Assuming that there really are flat earthers, the problem with asking this sort of question is that you are asking it of people who are not factually based people. If they were, they wouldn’t be flat earthers in the first place.
I always wished I could find a street addy rather than a PO Box for them (I live in Lancaster, where the FES is, or was purportedly based) just so I could go see if they were for real or not.
I more than halfway think they’re for real, mostly because I know the sort of people that live out here. Space program be damned, there’s a lot of nutcases.
Business record. Status is suspended, and of course Johnson is dead.
From Our Dead Selves Link:
Conveniently burned up! I might go poke around tomorrow, in the interest of fighting ignorance.
I hope you wrote the address down. The SoS server seems to be down now. I was going to get an aerial view from MapQuest.
43803 90TH ST E
Ack, submitted too soon. I was going to add, I went through Lexis trying to find Mr. Johnson’s record of death and came up with zip.
Second ETA: ditto on the wife, although it’s within the realm of possibility that neither of them died here.
Looks like there’s a house there now.
EDIT: I used to live about a dozen miles from there. (W Ave. K-13 & 23 St. W)
This comes from an apocryphal story about someone lecturing on cosmology, and a woman in the audience rose to claim that the Earth rests on the back of a turtle. The lecturer said, “But madam, what is underneath the turtle?” And she said, “It’s turtles all the way down.” And “down to what?” is exactly the point of the story. The woman was seeking a simple answer to a complex question, and by introducing the simple answer just raises an infinite series of other questions. (Some people use this analogy as a refutation of the argument for the existence of God which claims that a god must exist to have created the universe. The refutation is that it’s far simpler to just say that the universe is here because it somehow came into being in a way we do not understand. They claim that if God created the universe, it doesn’t really solve anything, it just adds a needless layer to the problem–how did God get created? Is it gods all the way down?)
It’s alternating layers of roasted pecans, caramel, and chocolate, repeated ad infinitum (certainly not ad nauseum).
Turtles all the way down, indeed.
Turtles all the way down is incorrect. There’s only one turtle, upon which are four elephants, upon which is the world shaped like a disc.
But, what does the turtle stand on?