I believe this has a factual answer, so I’m placing it here.
Let say I am an Islamic person on a ship on the South Pacific Ocean at S 24° 50’ 47" W 133° 14’ 31" and it comes to prayer time.
I could therefore commence* my prayer in any direction I wanted and still be facing Mecca.
However I “assume” the rules state I should be facing Mecca by the shortest route possible. Otherwise, anywhere else one the earth I could face 180° in the opposite direction and it still be valid. Or, to be pedantic, many other angles where after many circumnavigations I’d score a hit.
*I say commence, because the rules do state that I don’t have to shuffle around if the ship changes position.
So here is the question: Would my best option be to pray straight down? For this is indeed the shortest route.
Again this is a genuine question, I could’ve disguised it as being about the Eloi or the Morlocks but I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence here.
If you don’t hit after one circumnavigation, you never will. Mecca is either on the great circle you’re aiming on, or it’s not.
And anywhere on the Earth, the shortest route to Mecca will be at least partly down, but the orientation of the body is based on the projection of that shortest distance onto the surface of the Earth.
Prayer is not an exact science. The faithful feel obliged to make their best effort to conform with the articles of their faith.
As Chronos pointed out, if you are at the antipodes, any straight line that follows the curvature of the earth will pass through Mecca, so any random compass point will do to perfection. Anywhere else on earth, a devout Muslim will make a conscientious guess to the best of the information at hand, and be at peace with himself if he thinks he is within about 30 degrees. Which is about the best you can do from moat places in the Muslim world.
From what I understand about Islam, it’s not a pedantic rule-based religion like the Catholic system - none of this “ha ha, you missed one Sunday mass last year, you had a mint when you were supposed to be fasting for communion, you are going to burn in Hell forever!” (unless you say 10 Hail Marys)
I’m sure a knowledgeable Muslim will set you straight, but as I understand its just best effort between you and your conscience.
I don’t think any religion is actually as pedantically rule-based as nonmembers seem to think. Probably the most pedantically-rule-based religion is Judaism (or at least, as observed by some subset of Jews), and even there there are a lot of pragmatic allowances made.
But from what I’ve been told, Jewish religious rules may be complex, but if you fail them, you only answer to your conscience (and your Jewish mother).
The rules for Catholicism that I grew up with were more like the US legal system, one silly mistake and you burn in hell forever - especially if you die before making it to confession.
…which is odd, because the prevailing doctrine in Catholicism is that we don’t know what Hell is, or who (if anyone) is there. You got some bad information, and on behalf of all the Catholics for whom I am empowered to speak (which, after a short poll, is just me, really), I’m sorry that it’s carried with you from then until now and brought discomfort along with it.
Catholicism, like every religion with which I’m familiar, is aspirational. We are certainly steeped in tradition and ritual, and its historical intertwinement with secular government has made it less overtly so than Judaism, but the idea that God is sitting there with a ledger waiting for you to slip up so He can start slinging demerits is not part of my faith.
If you’re now in a place where you know the correct orientation, you could pray to God to ask for specific instructions about what to do in the future if you’re in the South Pacific.
Or is there some reason that this obvious solution wouldn’t work?
There are at least two justifiable directions on the surface of the Earth - a rhumb line direction or a great circle. The rhumb line is the path involves a constant compass direction, which is, in general, not the same as a great circle route. For most great circles, your compass direction changes as you traverse it:
Both rhumb line and great circle calculation have been suggested for the correct Qibla:
In fact, a constant compass direction path on the Earth, except for special cases like due NSEW, will spiral around the globe towards the poles, which may be what the OP was referring to.
But that still won’t “eventually hit”. You’ll only pass through each latitude once, so if you don’t hit Mecca when you pass its latitude, you never will.
That isn’t what I was assuming. The OP said “Or, to be pedantic, many other angles where after many circumnavigations I’d score a hit.” I thought he might be getting at the idea that there will usually be multiple loxidromic spirals which pass through the target point. The rhumb line direction is the one which does so without completely spiraling around the globe in a more shallow spiral first.
A non-great circle loxodrome plots on a Mercator projection as a series of parallel diagonal lines - when you hit the east or west edge of the map, go over to the other side, and continue traveling at the same angle across the map again. If you aren’t travelling completely horizontally or vertically, you can pick an angle that will hit your target point after completely crossing the map any desired number of times.
Pardon me, I should have said “if you aren’t traveling completely horizontally”. If you are traveling to a point north or south of you, you can obviously pick a direction which will be at that latitude when it spirals completely around.
Ah, I get it now. There’s a rhumb line that hits Mecca after a fraction of a circuit, and one that hits after one-and-a-fraction, and two-and-a-fraction, and so on. Almost no directions will work, but the ones that will are still infinite in number, so “many” is justified. I think I must have misread “many other angles” as “any other angle”.
Actually, there are two of each. You can go the long way around going southwest instead of southeast, and get another series of spirals (with a larger fraction). The multiple loop spirals converge to due east or due west - if you set out almost east with just a little south, you spiral around a lot of times to get very far south. And, yeah, they’re countable, so the probability of a randomly chosen direction working is 0 …
If I am a Muslim astronaut who is part of the manned Mars mission, and it is now 3am at our base on Mars, placing me in full opposition to earth (which is currently far from conjunction with the sun), which way would I face? Would I have to pray on a panel that has me facing straight down?