Testing Flattards Part 1

Video Transcript:

I told Killian I'd be back. I wouldn't want to be a liar. Greetings, dear viewer. So this is the first part of a new series that will pick through the manure pile of flat earthers. Vins, apparently they prefer the word retard. I'll have very quiet. Flat odds think there is a global conspiracy to hide the shape of the earth. A conspiracy that dates back to antiquity yet is all due to NASA and the United Nations. Organizations formed in 1958 and 1945 respectively. What these mental defectives have yet to do is explain why the shape of the earth is so significant that such a concerted effort to hide its shape would be necessary. Let alone why treating the earth as a spheroid allows the rest of humanity to be far, far, far more productive than they are. The best they can come up with is hand waving about trying to undermine faith in their magic sky wizard, who will allegedly build a flat earth inside a giant snow globe, just so that his creations could scuttle around talking to the ceiling and praising his capriciousness. Basically, their argument boils down to... But Mahooly Book! They can't even agree on whether their flat earth has an edge. Some of them think it does to suit their viewer living in a giant snow globe. Others think it just goes on forever. This alone gives us a valuable insight into the fast pace of flat-hard research, because all they had to do at some point was travel a few thousand kilometres and find out. It's not like the last few thousand years they think they've been around have lacked the technologies to enable them to do that. They've had access to the same tools for measuring distances, directions and positions as the rest of us. And yet, their achievements are nil. Despite this, these vacant-minded gobshites think they can make pronouncements about reality without having explored it. So, now that we have set the scene of who we're dealing with, let's get cracking. Flat-hards think of looks like this, because they saw it on a flag. This and this are examples of an azimuthal equidistant projection. One of many ways of projecting a three-dimensional speuroidal surface onto a two-dimensional one. If you've ever tried flattening out an orange peel into a nice map of its former self, you'll have noticed the problem. Presenting a rounded 3D surface in 2D means that something has to give. In the case of an azimuthal equidistant projection, what stays intact? Lines of longitude radiate from the center of this polar projection, so directions from the center point will be represented correctly. In fact, the center point is the only point on this projection where one can determine the direction and distance to any other point correctly. For other points, only distances along lines of longitude will be consistent with reality. Distances and directions between any other two points will be incorrect. Consequently, shapes and areas are also incorrect, and become increasingly distorted the further from the center of the map they are. We'll come back to that. The azimuthal equidistant projection does have some practical applications, but for general navigation, the problems highlighted mean it's an absolute cluster f***. Consequently, flat odds perading this as their go-to map of the world gives some indication of just how little thoughts they've put into things, as well as revealing that they've never tried to use it. Due to their avoidance of doing anything more difficult than naval gazing, flat odds preemptively claim that anything that looks a bit tricky can't be done. For instance, they can't even find out how big their disk world is, because the UN would stop them. Of course! It is claimed that they patrol the southern seas and stop anyone going too far and finding the edge of the world. What these oxygen-deprived mouth-breathes have failed to consider are the logistical requirements of such an operation, so let's do the thinking for them. Let's get a ballpark figure on how many patrol boats they would need. The straight line distance from the North Pole to the tip of South America is about 16,200 kilometres. Since flat odds claim that distances on land are the same on their magic disk world as they are in reality, it's going to be 16,200 kilometres per then too. Let's have our patrols passing roughly halfway between Tierra del Fuego and the Crack-Off Peninsula, say 16,500 kilometres from the North Pole. This gives us a circumference of roughly 103,700 kilometres of ocean patrol continuously. Place a boat, say, every 10 kilometres, so no flat-hard can sneak past under the horizon and the UN needs around 10,000 patrol boats, just to stop flat-hard explorers discovering that truth. Ignoring the high probability that no flat-hard is explored further than the edge of their trailer park, I for one look forward to them providing proof of the largest boat fleet in the world, comprised of craft capable of handling the worst of the southern ocean. I also look forward to them finding out where they were built, who buy, how much for, identifying shipyards capable of churning out 10,000 such vessels and finding out where all the boat builders and crew actually are, given that nobody has noticed any of this stuff going on. Then of course they can explain why no flat-hard undertook such an expedition before the UN created this alleged fleet to stop them. There is of course one key reason why nobody will ever find the missing boats and their missing crew, and that's because it's just another pathetic ad hoc excuse, concocted by flat-earthers to try and account for their bon idleness. That and the idea that the earth is flat is bollocks. Noting that flat-hard claim that distances on land are the same on their fantasy world, they've failed to consider a simple and fundamental problem. Whilst you could just stick a land mass onto a polar grid, without changing distances between its locations, you can't do so without changing their coordinates. The best you can hope for is to get one line of points matched up, but then the coordinates of everywhere else are wrong. It's inescapable. Consider for instance Australia. 30 degrees south of the equator on the eastern coast is the small town of Red Rock. Let's take this point here, 30 degrees south and 153 degrees, 13 minutes east. At the same latitude on the west coast, just 6 kilometres south of the town of Lehman, let's take this point at 30 degrees south, 115 degrees east. The difference in longitude is 38 degrees in 13 minutes. If you were to set off from our point near Red Rock and drive west until you got to our point near Lehman, you would cover a distance over land between these two points of 3687 kilometres. So what happens if we travel along the same 30 degrees south latitude line for 38 degrees and 13 minutes on the polar grid of the flat earth? The 30 degrees south line is 13,322 kilometres from the geographic North Pole and must be on the flat earth too, for reasons we saw earlier. We know the longitudinal and hence angular separation between our two points of this latitude, 38 degrees in 13 minutes or 38.217 degrees. The length of an arc on a circle, subtended by an angle alpha, is alpha pi r over 180. When we crunch the numbers, we find that two points on the flat earth service, 30 degrees south of the equator and separated by 38 degrees in the 13 minutes are 8886 kilometres apart. This is 2.41 times greater than the real distance between our points near Red Rock and Lehman. But flat earth say that distance is on land of the same on their giant space pizza as in real life, in this case 3687 kilometres. In that case they must agree that these separation in longitude on the flat earth must be considerably smaller than it is in real life. It's an inescapable feature of the geometry. If we make L 2.41 times smaller, we must make the angle alpha 2.41 times smaller. Which means that only flat earth, the difference in longitude between our points near Red Rock and Lehman, would be just 15.85 degrees. Reality however, begs to differ. And that's a paradox that flat earths can't resolve. These points are 3687 kilometres apart and their longitudes are separated by 38 degrees in 13 minutes. It is simply impossible for flat earths to keep distances the same without giving glaring discrepancies in their own coordinate system. And it is impossible to keep the coordinates of locations the same without giving glaring discrepancies in distances and consequently the shapes of land masses. Particularly paranoid flat earths needn't rely on GPS to check this. They can use the old fashioned methods of establishing longitude and latitude and find themselves wondering why reality disagrees with their stupid beliefs. For the rest of us the reason is simple. They are geometrically illiterate perfoons and this is bollocks. The claim that distances on land are the same in the flat earth disc world would also obviously mean that distances over sea couldn't be. As with problems on land, the further south you go, the greater the discrepancies would become if you travel over the ocean, in anything other than a north-south direction. This also screws up simple travel. Quantus fly direct from Sydney to Johannesburg in South Africa six days a week. It's a direct distance of 11,060 km with the flight taking around 13 hours and 20 minutes at a speed of 830 km an hour. As you might have expected, things on the flat earth aren't quite so simple. Sydney Airport is 151.1772°E. Johannesburg's OR TAMBO Airport is 28.2461°E. The difference in longitude is therefore 122.9311°E. Sydney Airport is 13,759 km from the north pole. OR TAMBO Airport is 12,894 km from the north pole. Now that we have two sides of the triangle and the angle between them, we can use the law of cosines to calculate the straight line distance from Sydney to Johannesburg on the flat earth. The distance D is equal to the root of A squared plus B squared minus 2ab cos C. When we crunch the numbers we find that on the fantasy flat earth, the distance is 23,419 km. This is more than twice as far as it is in reality. For the Boeing 747-400s that Quantus use on this route, this poses something of a problem. With maximum payload, they have a maximum range of 13,438 km, which means they would fall rather short of their intended destination, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a direct flight. Fear not though, the route taken by the Flattard Airways flight would pass over Papua New Guinea, China, the Himalayas, India, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Aden, the countries of East Africa, including a nice view of Lake Malawi, so could refuel along the way. There is however a lack of stopover options along the route, the Tibetan Plateau has a porosity of international airports. India's India-Iragan Di Airport is a bit too close to maximum range. Quantus don't fly there anyway. The next best option with a long enough runway might be in a Tajis Abbas-Chandra Bose International. However, it's more than 1000 km off the most direct route on the Flatt earth, and Quantus don't fly there either. So, if the earth is flat, where do these flights go? Since no passengers who have flown direct between Sydney and Johannesburg have ever spotted China, fleeing Himalayas, the Arabian Peninsula or East and Africa, let alone stopped at any of their bloody airports, we can be quite sure that this isn't the route taken. Also, as passengers on these flights do arrive in the scheduled 13.5 hours or so, Flattard Airways would have to fly at an average speed of 1,756 km per hour, and faster with a refueling stop, rather than any more sedate 830 we found earlier. The maximum speed for a 747-400 is 988 km per hour, so unless Flattards can demonstrate that a 747-400 can fly at nearly double its rated maximum speed, and to do so without critical components like wings and tailplanes simply being ripped off, and tell us where all the extra fuel is stored, and explain the slight discrepancy and scenery on the flight, we can safely say that the idea that the earth is flat is bollocks. There is an even simpler problem which is a consequence of using a polar coordinate system, long distance navigation. Traveling north or south are the only ways to travel in a straight line if you maintain a constant heading. If you maintain, say a western compass heading on a Flattard, you will follow a curved path, it would be inevitable. Clearly though, following a curved path on a constant compass heading is no good for commercial aviation, as it would waste prodigious amounts of fuel. The way to use the lowest amount of fuel and maximize your profit is obviously to travel as close to a straight line path as you can. Two problems would manifest themselves were Flattards to try it. The first is one we've already seen on the Flattard, the straight line route takes you over a completely different path and completely different sites. This ties in with our earlier point about maintaining coordinates of locations. The second is with the compass. If you take the straight line path between two distant points on a Flattard, your compass bearing would drift over time even if you kept the aircraft in level flight. For instance, start flying west and keep the plane in straight flight and on the Flattard, your compass is going to drift south of that. Since Flattard seemed to think that with a round earth you have to constantly point down to stop aircraft flying off into space and conclude that Earth must be flat because they can't feel the plane flying down, they should by the same pathetic reasoning expect a plane flying west to be constantly banking to the right to maintain a western course. And remember the further north the aircraft is, the more pronounced that bank is going to have to be because the tighter the arc is going to be. And yet, not even Flattards in North America and Canada have noticed this taking place and waved it around gleefully as proof of their Cords Wallup. If Flattards had passports and the brains, they would have noticed that none of these effects happen and never will because this is BOLOX. We're only just getting started and we've already found some simple problems that are mathematically and geometrically irreconcilable between two differently shaped objects. We've seen that Flattards can't even wrap their heads around the effects of their idiocy in two dimensions, so it's perhaps not surprising that their failures become even more laughable when dealing with three. In the next part we'll continue looking at how geometrically illiterate Flattards are as we turn our attention skyward and see what subtractions from the sum of human knowledge they've been able to offer there. See you then.