Is there any chance he was being intentionally ironic?
I all depends on what you mean by “we”.
I am fairly sure that flat earthers believe that the military have already explored as far as they can go and that they may even have encountered the impassable celestial canopy, but the FLB’s also believe that if the average Joe hires a plane and tries to duplicate the feat, the military will shoot him down.
I am guessing that every flat earther is a Christian, and a creationist, and that the core belief is that God created the earth as the center of the universe … the illuminati, who are of course the servants of Satan, are aware of the reality of the flat earth, but want to keep it hidden so that people will continue to believe that they are nothing but the product of random evolution. If the general populace became aware of the truth then there would be a global (or the flat earth equivalent) uprising.
Or something like that.
The thing that puzzles me is how the military are able to keep tabs 24/7 on a perimeter which presumably extends for something like at 78,000 miles circumference, and implement an instant response to any attempt to cross the ice wall.
And of course the fact that ordinary civilians (like, say, my mother) have in fact set foot on Antarctica, and weren’t shot down by the military.
Ah-- but all you have is the word of this woman that she is in fact your mother.
I have a lot of dealings with Flat Earthers. The most common reasoning is that the “ball hoax”, along with evolution, space travel etc, is a ploy to make us think that we are mere worthless monkeys crawling on a spinning ball lost in space, rather than wondrous perfect beings created in God’s image. That’s the gist, anyway. It’s about self-worth.
Edit: I see Bones Daley mentioned the same reason above.
Yes, but how many miles inland (outland really) did Mom get? Not enough apparently. Or you’d never have seen her or her [del]exploration[/del] raiding party again. 
There’s a nice irony in the … ah … circularity of these people having such little self-worth that the only suitable remedy is to grant themselves near infinite self-worth.
It’s almost like the two extremes wrap around to become adjacent on the unseen other side of a sphere.
But why couldn’t worthless monkeys be crawling on a spinning disk lost in space, or wondrous perfect beings created in God’s image live on a ball?
And why there aren’t Christians in this secret military force that will reveal the Truth?
Yes–that’s who I was thinking of. He/she started multiple threads trying to prove that we live on a concave surface rather than a convex one. Nutty stuff.
I don’t think that would matter.
Whether the Earth is flat, spheroid or shaped like a novelty sex toy ; from a gravitational point of view it’s just a point with mass isn’t it ? A flat Earth would also have a centre of gravity pulling the sats “down” along a roughly circular path… right ?
Nope, a flat Earth would be nothing like a point mass to satellites. That point-mass approximation only applies to essentially spherical objects. Even the spherical one we have is not perfect gravitationally. There’s some inhomogeneites that, for example, cause satellites in geosynchronous orbit to migrate to one of two longitudes over the long run. They have to put in some kind of station-keeping mechanism on them to keep them in place (I think they usually use light pressure).
Sure was. The first proof was something about being surprised that the zoom function on a shitty camcorder didn’t keep the image centred (combined with confusion about zooming a camera, and actually travelling into the distance).
Pretty sure not. Johnson (and his wife Marjorie) were entirely humorless, and extremely dull. Johnson’s newsletters were repetitious and dreary. He harped incessantly on the “Greek greaseball” theory, blaming the Greeks for the lie (!) that the earth was a sphere. Marjorie went to Australia once, and came back with a notarized affidavit, attesting that she had never, even once, been upside down.
They were too damned stupid to be ironic.
I never saw Johnson (specifically) make any claim like this. I’m pretty sure he believed that the great wall of ice surrounding the (flat) earth was impassible. He didn’t have the imagination to envision anyone climbing it or flying over it.
There might be Hindu flat-earthers or neo-Egyptian-pantheon flat-earthers. (There really are Osiris worshippers out there, and the Egyptian cosmology had a flat-earth basis.)
Also of interest (?) are the Tychonians, or Biblical Astronomy fanatics, who accept that the world is a sphere…but insist it does not rotate (!) The cosmos whirls around us. They base this idea on various Biblical verses. (Among these, Acts 7:49 “Heaven is My throne, and the earth a footstool of My feet.” They claim this proves that the earth cannot be rotating, because how could God rest his feet on it if it were?)
(Yes, they really are that crazy!)
I see what you did there.
An infinite flat earth would attract straight downward at all points above it, anywhere – and the force of attraction would be proportional to the inverse of the distance, not the inverse of the square of the distance as we know it to be with respect to spheres.
There couldn’t be orbits…but things could fall sufficiently slowly as not to impact. Maybe the moon is constantly falling, closer and closer, until some day it will hit. Same with weather satellites. (The fact that the signal strength of their transmissions would be getting greater as they came nearer… Well, why bother reasoning here? It’s all quite beyond sanity.)
Oh, yes, there is one more group of revisionists who hold that the universe is “inside out.” Not only is the earth hollow, but all the stars and galaxies are inside it, toward the middle! What’s really fun is that they accept all the conventional measurements and calculations of astronomy, because the inversion is mathematical. So when you measure the distance to Alpha Centauri, you get a perfectly valid answer; the answer just has to be run through their equations to derive the “real” answer.
This has the lovely advantage of not being falsifiable in any way.
An infinite flat earth of uniform density and thickness would become a black hole, since the event horizon radius increases linearly with the mass, whereas the mass increases as the radius squared, so the mass will always catch up to the mass needed for a black hole.
It’s really pointless to discuss what gravitational properties a flat Earth has. The Flat Earthers just deny any reasonable concept of Science so they have no need to posit any idea of gravity as we know it.
Remember, from their point of view, all Science is a Satan-led conspiracy of lies.
They can reject the very existence of orbiting satellites if they wish. It’s all a lie, sheeple!
Not all Flat Earthers are Biblical Whateverists. Some are loony without a need for a holy text. But the latter people tend to be loner types- pretty much each with their own ideas.
Suppose someone needed to travel from Argentina to Australia.
One need only fly over the Antarctic…very close to the South Pole.
Do Flat-Earthers claim that airline travelers who take flights between South America and Australia are liars, or dupes of Big Aerospace?
Yes, some do. There are no flights over Antarctica! Period! His map suggests an Argentina to Australia flight would travel over the NORTH pole. Or maybe it would go underneath. I wonder if radar detects giant turtle shells or elephant trunks so they can be avoided in the dark?
This might seem a silly question … but with whom are we arguing with?