Man plans to launch himself in a homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat | Hacker News Reader

Man plans to launch himself in a homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat

washingtonpost.com

21 pointslisper32 comments

"Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave."

I think that sums it up.

All the best to him, taking money out of their pockets is probably an admirable feat.

Also for all the people just roasting this guy. He's actually already shot himself into the air with these rockets (you can see them on youtube), and does nearly kill himself since his parachute is so shotty. But he's actually fucking doing it.

Godspeed, sir.

"I'll prove that sabre-tooth tigers are actually vegetarians by attempting to scratch that one behind the ears" said one of his caveman ancestors. And then people learned.

People like him are the unsung heroes of civilization.

Flat earther plans to launch himself into the air using steam powered rocket because the two 10 year old girls from Seattle who sent a helium balloon to 78,000 feet to capture video of the earth’s curvature [0] are obviously part of the conspiracy.

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2015/two-seattle-girls-launched-a-b...

If 78,000 feet were enough, he could get there by airplane. http://www.rusadventures.com/tour6.shtml says that a ride on a MiG-25 costs about $20,000 and gets to about 80,000 feet.

Something tells me that no matter how high he may get, no matter what he sees up there, it will still somehow be evidence of the flat earth we live on. It's always that way with these folks.

(Also: Is steam-powered rocketry a real thing? Hmm.)

Just because we haven't found the edge of the world yet doesn't mean it's not there...

We just have to sail a little further. Now if you help finance my "research" yacht, I promise I'll send you a picture when I find the edge of the world :)

I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but yes, High-Test Peroxide (and a catalyst) is most definitely a legit rocket fuel and the byproducts of that reaction are oxygen and steam.

I believe John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace venture used HTP.

Well, he may not be able to discern its (lack of) roundness but I think there may some evidence gathered about its hardness.

Flat earth theory is all about humans not being able to do a specific 2d to 3d mapping using the natural brain circuitry/architecture/pathway we gained from evolution for this operation because the earth is too big for our brains/senses as an object viewed from nearby (like from a plane in the atmosphere) and we never encountered something with such measures and relationships (like a circular path that becomes linear to our senses) in the natural world we evolved. Some of us know the earth is not flat because we developed other ways (other brain circuitry) to do the mapping: some think it terms of pure geometry, some scale down earth to a ball and compare our senses to it, some think in terms of planetary movements, some use the moon to help with the mapping from our vision, etc.

I always just assumed that flat earth theory is some elaborate inside joke, that the practitioners all "get", and are collectively trolling everyone else. Somewhat like the illuminati theorists, etc. If you think about it, it takes quite a bit of effort to form a valid sounding debate on a topic that you don't believe in. And it is also fun coming up with defenses on either "side".

So here's a good one I came up with for the "round earth" side. The sun is always about the size of a dime held at arm's length, at sunrise, noon, or sunset. If there earth were flat, then the sun would appear larger at sunrise, smaller at sunset, when in New York, and it would be just the opposite (smaller at sunrise, larger at sunset) when in San Francisco.

All of that, plus a lack of understanding regarding the basics of astrophysics, it would seem. (e.g. I've seriously heard flat-earthers argue 'how can water stick to the surface of a ball?')

From what I've seen on youtube you're right, the one thing they all seem to have in common is that the have no understanding of gravity. Everything else seems to be an elaborate set of logical contortions to overcome this lack of understanding.

No, it's much worse than that; it's a variant of the conspiracism disease, the belief that everyone else is lying about it while being unable to confront evidence.

> a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

Ok, cool.

> ... though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

Surely at this point, someone should step in and stop him? Is this not at this point, basically just really elaborate suicide? Not even joking here, I think this guy may genuinely need help.

It's America who would help a suicidal person?

Maybe you can call the cops so they can shoot him... That way he won't cause any harm to himself.

Really though; if he is just slightly sane trying to stop him will only convince him therr is a conspiracy.

Witness a Darwin Award in the making

Do videos like this prove the earth is round:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQf4m6rew7c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I

There are comments saying that they use a fish-eye lense, but the only thing that seems to be affected is the earths curvature and nothing else...

Except those ARE both fairly extreme fisheye lenses, and you can tell whenever the horizon goes above the midline and the curvature inverts (see 22:10 on the MiG video).

Neither the MiG nor Baumgartner were high enough for the extreme curvature visible on these videos to be an accurate reflection of what you would have seen in their shoes.

Ah ok, thank you.

I read things that say you should be able to tell that the horizon dips at each end when you're at 35,000 feet above average sea level, but I can't eyeball it there and tell there's bend. I can at 50,000 feet.

2 things:

Sailors could see the top of ships before the whole ship when using a decent telescope.

I saw the curvature of the earth when I flew to Paris in a Concorde many years ago.

Him and this guy from Denton, TX need to be friends: http://ntdaily.com/home-adorned-with-cryptic-messages-under-...

Why not simply go to the top of the Stromboli and watch the curve of the sea?

"But Eratosthenes knew that this wasn’t the case where he was, in Alexandria. Sure, the Sun came closer to being directly overhead at Noon on the Summer Solstice in Alexandria than at any other time during the year, but vertical objects still cast shadows.

And — like any good scientist — Eratosthenes did the experiment. By measuring the length of the shadow cast by a vertical stick during the solstice noon, he could figure out what angle the Sun made with the vertical direction at Alexandria.

And the answer he got was one-fiftieth of a circle, or 7.2 degrees. But at this time, in Syene, the angle the Sun was making with an identical vertical stick was zero degrees! What could be causing this? In perhaps a stroke of genius, Eratosthenes realized that the Sun’s rays could all be parallel, and that the Earth could be curved!

If he could then figure out the distance from Alexandria to Syene, since he knew the angular difference between the two cities, he could figure out the circumference of the Earth! If only Eratosthenes had a grad student, he could have sent one to make the trip, and measure the distance!

Instead, he was forced to rely on the reported distance between the two cities. The most “precise” measurement of his day?

Travel-by-camel. (So I can understand criticisms of his accuracy.) Nevertheless, his results were that the distance between Syene and Alexandria were 5,000 stadia. The question, of course, is how big is a stadium? The answer depends, of course, on whether Eratosthenes, a Greek living in Egypt, was using an Attic stadium or an Egyptian stadium, something still debated among historians. An Attic stadium was used more commonly, and is 185 meters in modern terms. Using this value, one gets a circumference of the Earth of 46,620 kilometers, a number that’s only about 16% bigger than the actual value.

However, an Egyptian stadium is 157.5 meters, and it’s conceivable that’s what Eratosthenes meant. In that case, we get a value of 39,375 kilometers, which is off by less than 2% from the modern value of 40,041 km!

Regardless of what the actual values were, Eratosthenes went on to become the world’s first geographer, inventing the concepts of latitude and longitude that we still use today, and constructed the first models and maps based on a spherical Earth.

Although many things were “lost” during the subsequent millenium, neither the idea of a spherical Earth nor the rough knowledge of the Earth’s circumference were one of them. In fact, anyone can perform this same experiment today with two locations at the same longitude, and with simultaneous measurements of shadow lengths, you too can measure the circumference of the Earth! Not bad, considering that the first direct, photographic evidence of the Earth’s curvature would not arrive until 1946!"

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/21/who-disco...

We might also need to remind him of the story of Icarus's study in flight...

How far can you climb with s balloon and jump down? Wouldn't it be more cost effective. I'm not sure if this guy is trolling or not, but if he really believes in flat earth I give him respect to "showing the proof" instead of moaning online.

About 40km.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace#Stratosphere_jump

But has he had a chance to breed? Don’t want that line continuing....

So who else would you not want to breed? You can tell us, we won't say a word regarding your eugenic ambitions. After all it was all the fashion in the 1920s and 1930s with acclaimed intellectuals and personages such as Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, HG Wells, GB Shaw and the socialist Sidney Webb. The list is long and thought-provoking for some of today's fashionable ideas.

http://www.conservapedia.com/List_of_people_who_supported_eu...

Conservapedia?

Please, now link the articles about Theory of Relativity being a liberal plot and the discussion about Lensky Experiment

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