Daredevil “Mad Mike” Hughes killed in rocket crash outside Barstow
latimes.com
latimes.com
That's not quite right. The parachute deploys very early after the launch, separates from the rocket, and falls to earth by itself. I'm surprised there wasn't some kind of secondary parachute.
There's a video here: (NSFW warning...no gore, but you do see the crash) https://twitter.com/justindchapman/status/123133600217571737...
> *None of Hughes’ backup parachutes activated, either, Chapman said.
Or see: https://imgur.com/a/C37q14M
There are also some articles on perspective from their POV which are easy to find. Their ideas of perspective are novel.
[1] http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=...
If you mean "where the sky meets the ground far away", it's a finite distance away but maybe you can't ever reach the end, perhaps due to increasing drag force the closer you get to the edge, and a curved prism that distorts optics.
If you allow natural forces to vary with distance from the edge of a disk, you can probably recovery most spherical phenomena.
There's a sort of equivalence between static geometry models and dynamic force models.
Good on him for being an explorer and pushing the limits. Sorry it had to come to a end :(
Plenty of people that relieved investors from their funds were unaware that what they were building was a scam.
Plenty of people working for companies that built stuff that didn't work were not aware of the fact that it could not work until they themselves established that.
Plenty of successes where there were people saying 'this can't possibly work' right up until the time that it did, in fact, work.
Theranos, Moller sky car, Ubeam (now renamed to SonicEnergy in an attempt to leave their past behind them) -> clearly scams.
This particular steam powered rocket is not a scam in the sense that it did not attempt to pass the risk or the eventual results onto others. It is merely very stupid, and it should serve as an object lesson in that if you are trying to do something in your backyard that normally has budgets in the 10's to 100's of millions that you are likely not going to succeed. Finally, it should teach people that your tests of vehicles of any kind that go up should be done unmanned as long as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow
... And the (one) satellite it successfully launched is still in orbit, nearly 50 years later.
Presumably Hughes's belief system demanded that all his silver exist in coin form, hoarded and buried in the backyard, or something.
I can say that I'm only comforted thinking that he died doing what he loved. If only we all could be so lucky.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Douchebag%20...
The limits of stuntmanship.
NO. Just, no. This guy willfully ignored the knowledge and expertise that came before him; both, in how to accomplish the task and the demonstratively provable physics that show his goals were folly.
If he just claimed that gravity was false and jumped off a cliff to the rocks below to prove it, it would just be "local idiot jumps to his death." Some how, if you add rockets and a flat earth conspiracy it gets praise?
No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.
The glorification of guys like this is part of why we have disease outbreaks due to people's unwillingness to vaccinate and why every attempt to have a serious public discussion about climate change is overrun by denialists and trolls.
This is true for all pioneers - the successful and the unsuccessful. Everything from airplanes to vaccines to the age of european exploration is a result of guys willfully ignoring the knowledge and expertise before them.
> No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.
I suppose except the "tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems" put a man on the moon, created the internet and the modern world.
If you are going to blame something for the failures, you should credit it also for the successes.
He wasn't a pioneer, though. It's one thing when people say it can't be physically done, and the people talking have no theoretical basis to support it. People said it would never be possible to fly, but they has zero physics to back up the statement.
It's another when it has been physically done and the physics behind it is well understood. If he believe he was building a faster than engine using some new gravmetric-eletromagnetic effect, well more power to him. We have an ample amount of history on rockets, how to compute the physical performance of them, and a multitude of failure scenarios. This was ignored.
When it came to putting a man on the moon, we used the might of our education to predict everything we could and used hindsight when we failed. Importantly, we built into the systems things that would tell us what was happening so if there was a failure we could learn to not make the same mistake again. Rocket systems fail, which is why you launch them without people first.
https://archive.md/1QX2W#selection-2017.0-2017.330
Sounds like he wanted to build and ride rockets, and this was a way to get strangers to pay for it.
It is one thing to be so misinformed as to believe a flat earth has any plausibility. It is another to reinforce people in this mistaken belief to take advantage of them!
In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it. By adopting their beliefs as his own, he crossed into that zone. If he'd just announced that he'll check curvature for them, that would have been alright.
> In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it.
See: all of organized religion.
I always joke that programming is not rocket science even though some people I know think they are similar.
Perhaps so, but he's actually done it successfully before in 2018.
What an insight! If only all these daredevils knew that their occupation was hazardous, they could die a healthy death by cardiovascular disease, like the rest of us.
That's the magic -- doing what seems impossible to survive. Doing what is impossible to survive, and dying, is just stupid.
It is improbable, difficult, and dangerous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89dChsgznw
>"We were somewhere outside Barstow, on the outskirts of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
I can't read the article here, the details are "below the fold" and it won't scroll. In case others are in a similar situation, the submission above is another source for the story.
Then again, even if he did live and went, "Yea, it's round." All of them would just say he's a paid shill. You can't win with stupid. It's a lose-lose situation.
Seems to not be the first time, though, that I wonder if backup parachutes should be activated remotely.
“I don’t think he believed it,” Shuster said. “He did have some governmental conspiracy theories. But don’t confuse it with that flat Earth thing. That was a PR stunt we dreamed up.”
2015 kickstarter [0] mentions nothing of FE at all. Just wants to break his previous record. Kickstarter flops, hard.
2017 gofundme [1] sells itself as $7500 of sponsorship in return for the prime advertising spot on the side of the rocket.
None of these rockets were about trying to prove or disprove anything, he was no more scientist than evel knievel was. The FE community were openly courted for cash, but cash was the only relationship between FE and the rockets.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1441636269/mission-rock...
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/flat-earth-community-rocket-launc...
I've seen one guy argue that the sun is created and operated by NASA, and then there are the people who insist you can live from staring at the sun. Even a (quite nutty) friend of a friend claims to do this, someone I've personally spoken to and must unfortunately confirm is that dumb. He has 3 kids and is highly political, votes every time.
It's obviously the NOAA. They even tell you when they're going to be turning it on and off - it's like they're not even trying to hide it.
"...think about it – without the help of so-called "experts", how do you really know what you’re looking at? It could be a hologram, projected from various government installations throughout the world. It could be a large, crudely painted balloon, held in place by helium and propelled by tiny sails and rudders (which is why it moves across the sky so slowly). Or, most likely, it could have been different things at different times and different places, depending on the technology available to the conspirators and the culture and beliefs of the population being deceived.
The hoax could easily have been imposed on a gullible world at many points in human history. Perhaps it began as a collective hallucination or a religious myth, or perhaps an especially bright star that came to be exaggerated over time. However the moon story started, early proponents of the hoax were swift to recognize how it could be exploited for their benefit, and shrewdly devised a scheme to use it to their advantage.
They began to spread rumors, falsify scientific observations, and invent new gods to represent this fictional celestial body. They ingeniously concocted the idea of "cycles of the moon", and as their resources increased, were able to create the illusion that this object in the sky actually went through such changes. To make their hoax more plausible to early, superstitious societies, they arranged for these cycles to coincide with the months of the year.
But don’t all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn’t one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Even a layperson like myself knows that scientists are not supposed to approach issues with preconceived notions. Yet this principle is cast aside when the moon is at stake. You will never see the revisionist perspective on the moon being taught in institutions of higher learning, even as a controversial opposing view. In fact, in order to even become a recognized scientist in the current atmosphere of academic repression, one must pay lip service to the establishment’s orthodoxy. Could you imagine a student who argued the revisionist viewpoint on the question of the moon being awarded a degree? He would be hounded out of the university in an instant! How can one explain such behavior from institutions that are supposed to serve as forums for the free exchange of ideas, except to conclude that the establishment has something to hide?"
https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/The-Mad-Revisi...
In addition, search for flat earth on a the popular crowd/fundraising sites. The lies they tell to separate the gullible from their money. It's a nice little earner.
For some, possibly. As for the others, they would probably be a 99.9% / 0.1% ratio composed by actual believers and few smart con artists who saw the opportunity to cash on books, merchandise, donations, and perhaps even votes.
I suspect they're an extreme form of "contrarian" that craves disagreeing with conventional beliefs to the point where it becomes part of their self-image/identity. Like other conspiracy theorists, they're obsessed with intricate rhetoric and arguments, but they rarely take the extra step of trying to prove something without obfuscation and without ulterior motivations.
This guy strapped himself onto a homemade rocket and lit a fuse. There are easier ways to prove/disprove the Earth is flat-- even if you don't buy the shadow-measurment and clock experiments. One could, for example, mount an expedition of to reach the edge of the Earth and take pictures. But that hasn't happened, ever. Or perhaps it did happen, and the effect was merely to quietly convert the very chagrined expedition team members from flat-earthers into round-earthers?
They reminded me a lot of the classical "science" of bible theology. Where you take something ridiculus word for word - and then build a a complex stringent and logical philosophy above it. (with marxism I had similar experiences)
I'm afraid the religious mindset creates a switch that turns off critical thinking for certain topics. Then people can be more vulnerable to all kinds of hoaxes and scams.
If it wasn't flat earth, it would be some other conspiracy theory, but a lot of the time it's simply all the conspiracy they can fit in their head.
You make the world a safer and more welcoming place for those who actually believe it.
I prefer the world in which people do the crazy stunts.
It should make the entire movement even less credible:
“How can you believe this? Your fellow believers are probably just faking to get attention”
The overall idea of a spherical earth is a consensus since ancient Greece, and has been considered a fact since then.
Copernicus more or less established that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around.
I use "more or less" here because
1) The idea of the earth revolving around the sun was not _new_, it was already discussed and debated in ancient Greek texts. Part of the renaissance movement is based on the re-study of ancient Greek texts, which was influential to Copernicus and his ideas.
2) There is no universal truth behind what revolves around what. It's just a matter of perspective, and having the earth rotate around the sun did had the advantage of making calendar computations much simpler, since you don't have to deal with intricate planet retro-cessions. That was the reason that led Copernicus to choose this perspective.
According to Wikipedia: "Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th century.
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat Earth model."
Interestingly, it seems nobody but the Greeks independently discovered the spherical earth model
a) "I believe the distance is smaller and that we'll be able to get there no problem (as much as a trip like that could be ""no problem"")"
b) "distance is bigger but there might be something in between, etc, and I like adventures"
c) "distance is (or might be) bigger and this will be a very boring trip but we'll eventually get there but might have to wing it.
Going west from Europe to India doesn't make sense today, it seems the Cape of "Good Hope" was reached (but not crossed) before Columbus's voyage.
It's getting back which is the issue - your have the disastrously weathered cape of good hope, or the pirate-infested Aden. It's quite ironic that if you want to sail around the world, it's the ancient routes that are the worst parts.
If Columbus had discovered the Americans were an archipelago, or if the gulf of mexico had properly separated north and south, the discovery would have been a very popular trade route - even today.
Ptolemy estimated that the continents of Europe and Asia collectively spanned 180 lines of longitude, leaving 180 to travel by sea. Most contemporary scholars believed this too. In actuality, the continents span about 130 from China to Spain, leaving 230 that would need to be travelled by sea. The best sources available to Columbus were wrong, and the other available sources typically erred on the ocean being too small. Few, if any, people thought Europe and Asia spanned less lines of longitude than estimated by Ptolemy.
Additionally, he read that each line of longitude spanned 56 2/3 miles at the equator. Unfortunately, his source was quoting Arabic miles, but Columbus was only familiar with Roman miles, which are shorter.
He didn't believe that he discovered something the scholars of the day didn't. The fragmentation of the Mongol Empire meant that overland trade was growing more expensive, meanwhile nautical technology and seamanship was rapidly advancing. It would have been impossible to have made Columbus' planned (as he understood it) sea voyage in, say 1300. But now, the overland route wasn't well run, and the caravels used by Columbus were much better suited to ocean travel.
If Columbus hadn't done it, the economic necessity of the rising price of goods and dropping costs of sea travel would have resulted in someone else doing the same thing. Some people say he was a unique visionary, other people say he was dumb and lucky. Neither were true. He did his research and came to the natural (if wrong) conclusion. (he was lucky though)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographi...
And yes if it wasn't him it would have been someone else.
The fall of Constantinople and the the Ottoman Empire Also made trade routes more expensive
There were also efforts to circumnavigate Africa for this reason
Damn though, engineering mishaps are bad :/
He pre-dated Copernicus by a mere 1500 years.
Educated people have known for a long time that the earth is spherical is what I'm getting at, For many hundreds/thousands of years what the educated class knew and what the rest of society knew was often wildly divergent - as you'd expect in a society with no formal education system where only the wealthy or the sons of the wealthy could afford to spend the time educating themselves/tinkering.