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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms.

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Was he reading Neal Adams?

I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk!

I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong.

Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard.

Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport

Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I could prove it, I've never really studied geology or anything like that. And if I were to debate someone who believes they weren't real, I would probably lose as they would bring up obscure papers, incidents, etc. which I wouldn't be able to refute well.

You don't particularly need calculations, just have friends around the world or even a couple hundred miles away, get on a video call to prove the world is round. Whatever your pet theory of how the sun moves across the "flat" earth can be contradicted with a couple of facetime calls.

I’ll do you one better, you shouldn’t even spend any time engaging in a debate with people who believe the earth is flat because they don’t want to change their mind.

It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly.

If you're so disinterested why are you talking about it now? Better to focus your attention on something you're not going to be so dismissive and negative about unless your hobby is being an asshole.

I was just browsing comments and read yours and thought it prudent for others to realize what they were dealing with when it came to flat earth theorists so that they protect their time. I’ve probably at this point already saved dozens of seconds for someone.

No but its nice to do relevant observations of basic science yourself. Its fun and satisfying.

My daughter did the shadow stick experiment when she was 14 (for GCSE astronomy), we have lived in different countries so have observed the differences in constellations for ourselves, and we speak to people around the world anyway.

I was recently in Hawaii on Kauai. I wondered if I could see any of the other Hawaiian islands (besides the small local ones). Can you see Oahu from Kauai (70 miles away)? Rarely, and only if you get to a high enough elevation and even then you can only see the highest peaks. On the other hand, Maui is easily visible from Hawaii from sea level. Simple, practice, repeatable.

Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right?

Also: the southern hemisphere.

Conspiracy theorists can also be really into their stuff. Someone who believes the moon landings never happened and who is enthusiastic about that can probably recall a huge number of facts, whereas I can't even recall the years the flights happened, or the names of more than two of the astronauts. That stuff is just pretty irrelevant to a random member of the general public.

Modern inertial navigation fiber optic gyroscopes can be used to measure latitude because they can measure the earth's rotation.

The routes planes take make absolutely no sense if the earth was flat. They actually use great circle routes which are the shortest distance on a globe and these routes look curved on a flat projection.

Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen.

Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine.

oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory.

Plate tectonics was super controversial at one point. Would be a common one for conspiracy theorists of a certain vintage.

There were plenty of conspiracy sites pre-2000. I think a lot of them shared mindspace with USA late night talk radio. Also, usenet.

Okay. Look at the moon. Look at every other planet not currently protected by an atmosphere. They all have craters. This fact is ignored by rote Geologists. "All the high and low points on the planet are due to plate tectonics and erosion!"

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