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32 comments
I- jus- I- thi- What? What is this, what even is this!?
Sigh, I'm waaaaaaay too sober to deal with such stupidity right now...
"A Airplane"?
You should give your English teacher a apology.
Also, most airplanes will not stretch the length of the Atlantic Ocean, and they most certainly will never go fast enough to slingshot off the earth.
Glandu: I think they have never even heard of physics .
@Bill
For a flat earth, monkey? Uuk, uuk? I have no words in my language to convey your primitivism and just how detached I feel from your kind. We simply cannot be one species, even if by a genetic margin, I am diffrent from you as the sapiens sapiens were diffrent from their cro magnon peers.
There is this little thing called the atmosphere, which you'd run out of pretty quickly. But planes have a whole bank of instruments to keep them where they are supposed to be, and the altitude at which they fly is rigorously controlled (by the pilot) and mandated (by air traffic control). There are constant small changes in direction and altitude. The pilots have a really good view from up there, of the CURVATURE OF THE EARTH, you dingbat.
I've never thought of this before but he's right: there must be a constant very slight "lifting" compared to what we would expect in a flat world. But since the plane has so many other, much bigger forces to deal with, I'm sure this one is in fierce competition with the measurement error.
Gravity . . .Pffftt! It's only a theory.
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OK, then all you sciency round-earthers tell me
just how it was that the cow jumped over the moon?
(Proven fact - it's in the book)
Huh? Riddle me them apples!
Because when you don't understand the first thing about how something works, then that must obviously mean it works via magic. Hence things like this make perfect sense, at least if you're the kind of person who dropped out of elementary school.
What makes this sillier is if physics worked how people who think the flat worked (Or just the trolls who push it. Impossible to tell) then the planes flying East would pretty much always curving their planes to a "North" or "South" direction if going "straight" and could just go straight for a normally curved trip, if they follow the maps I've seen them use. And this is ignoring ALL the other issues with those maps.
So, which is easier to explain? That a combination of drag, gravity, air pressure, balance, and a few other factors will keep a plane level(ish) to the planet'so center of gravity, or that there is a massive, massive global conspiracy composed of easily close to half the planet's population trying to keep this and other apparently obvious facts hidden? With the added bonus being this super conspiracy is so incompetent that simply by looking at about any writing or piece of media they offer one can expose them for the liars they are.
@Kryptozoon
I've never thought of this before but he's right: there must be a constant very slight "lifting" compared to what we would expect in a flat world.
Nope. Try again.
Think about gravity, centrifugal force, atmosphere, flaps, speed, and remember that the escape velocity is ca. 11.2m/sec. If anything, an airplane has to have it's nose ever so slightly up to maintain constant altitude at a constant speed.
@Kryptozoon
Technically this would be true, if airplanes were in the habit of flying in perfectly straight lines. They aren't, of course; the design of most airplanes is such that they will seek to fly level unless directed otherwise*, and since "level" in this case is described in terms of atmospheric pressure, and levels of pressure ultimately curve around the Earth, so to do level airplane flights curve around the Earth.
If you had a projectile that you could accelerate to an indefinite speed (imagine for the sake of argument that it ignores Earth's atmosphere and doesn't light it on fire or cause sonic booms or any of the other things that would happen). If you pointed it exactly perpendicular to Earth's ideal surface and fired it off, it would indeed see the planet fall away below it until eventually it left the atmosphere and went on its merry way into space.
Ultimately we don't see airliners exhibiting the same effect because it wouldn't be practical for them to do so, and because they would rapidly find themselves in air too thin to generate lift and be unable to climb further.
* This tendency is called "dynamic stability" and not all airplanes have it; some fighter craft are actually designed to be dynamically unstable and they have computers to sort the whole thing out. But for most aircraft, they will tend to remain at the same height above sea level, minus the effects of turbulence, etc.
Fun fact: Planes require air to go up. Air gets thinner when you get higher. Therefore, as you get higher, air craft struggle to keep rising, due to thinner air.
If only the world actually worked like this, we'd all be living in space (which probably doesn't exist thanks to the CIA of Switzerland/Greenland whatever).
Oh, and great circle routes prove the world is round thanks to the fact that flying in an arc on the map generally gets you to a place faster than flying in a straight line there.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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