Flat Earth?

I’m not sure how long ago it was that I first began hearing modern claims about the Earth being flat. Perhaps it’s come about within the last decade or so? No matter. Nowadays, people ask me about it all the time.

I’ll be mid-ramble about why I believe that people have never gone to the moon, and someone will invariably chime in with, “So you believe in Flat Earth?”

I have to be honest. My initial thought is this: Flat Earth is complete nonsense. It’s my humble hunch that concocting Flat Earth (and other) bogeys is a great way to distract people from spending time wondering about the stuff we ought to be concerned about. It’s poison in the well.

That said, I can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about. Is it possible that The Man has me under a spell on this particular issue?

The Spin

One thing that makes me wonder if the world is indeed a little different from what we’ve been told is the fact that, aside from the claims of the highly-suspect Apollo lunar missions, which ran from 1968 – 1972, there have been no manned space missions with flight altitudes higher than around 400 miles.

The 385-mile all-time altitude record was claimed by Space Shuttle Discovery during its 1997 mission to re-boost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. You have to multiply that distance by about 650x to get the Apollo missions’ claimed flight altitudes of over 248,000 miles from Earth!

Doesn’t that seem a little odd?

Another thing that makes me wonder is the considerable volume of “Flat Earth” information that gets booted out of mainstream media space. A good example is the The Lost History of Flat Earth video series, which used to appear on YouTube, but can only be found nowadays if you fancy poking around in the dark corners of Rumble.

Why should such information be actively suppressed if it’s simply the benign ramblings of crackpots? Are the crackpots actually onto something?

Earth Science 101

The currently accepted cosmological narrative posits that the Earth is more or less spherical, like a big billiard ball, and that it has an elliptical orbit through the vacuum of space around a giant, spherical star called the Sun, that’s located about 93 million miles away from Earth. There are several other near-spherical planets zipping around the Sun in elliptical orbits as well. Some planets are solid and others are big spheres of gas held into ball shapes by gravity.

The Earth also has a rocky satellite called the Moon that orbits Earth at a distance of about 239,000 miles. The Moon is said to have formed from gravitationally collected chunks of the Earth’s crust and other debris that were thrown into space as the result of a Mars-sized body, named Theia, colliding with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

The Sun and the Moon dominate our daytime and nighttime skies, respectively, because of their apparent size when viewed from Earth. They look big, prominent. At night, when sunlight doesn’t wash out our view of things, we’re able to see a bunch of other specs up in the sky. They look small, like little pinpricks of light. These are the other planets orbiting the Sun, plus millions upon millions of distant stars. The next closest star to Earth after our Sun has been given the name Proxima Centauri – it’s said to be about 25 trillion miles from Earth. That’s a long, long way away.

If we study the night sky closely, over a few nights, we can easily sort out the planets from the stars because the planets move along special, independent paths (their orbits around the Sun) – unlike the stars, which appear from Earth to stay fixed relative to each other as they spin in a circular pattern around a star named Polaris (the “North Star”) – which happens to be located straight above the Earth’s north celestial pole.

Because the Earth spins on its own axis as it orbits the Sun, Polaris appears to stay fixed in the night sky when viewed from Earth, and all the other stars appear to spin around it in a circle. A time-lapse photo will easily demonstrate this. But this is just an Earth-centric optical illusion. The stars are not actually spinning around Polaris. Instead, it’s the Earth that’s spinning. There just happens to be this star at the center named Polaris that lines up neatly with the Earth’s spin axis.

Because the stars stay fixed relative to each other as they appear to spin around Polaris, we can pretend that they form shapes, like dot-to-dot puzzles. We call these various shapes constellations. Some of them are thought to look like animals or people or other recognizable shapes, and are given names like Virgo, Gemini, Taurus, and such. Polaris marks the handle tip in the constellation we call the Little Dipper that’s thought to look like a small cooking pot.

Interestingly, the rotational axis of the Earth is tilted from being perpendicular to Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The tilt angle is 23.4 degrees. If you could travel away from Earth along a straight line on this tilt axis from the north celestial pole at the top of the Earth (even though there really is no such thing as “top” or “bottom” when it comes to Earth) you would eventually arrive at Polaris, way, way out there in outer space.

It’s this 23.4-degree tilt that gives the Earth its four seasons during one full orbit around the Sun – summer, spring, autumn, and winter – and it’s the Earth’s spinning about its tilted axis that gives us day and night. One orbital Earth trip around the Sun is called a year. One Earth rotation around its own spin axis is called a day.

The Equator is a string-like, imaginary belt wrapped around the fattest part of the Earth, positioned perpendicular to the Earth’s spin axis. The Earth’s Equator is always facing the Sun, give or take the 23.4 degrees of Earth tilt. It stays nice and warm at the Equator as a result of all the direct sunlight pouring upon it all the time. The so-called tropics stay toasty year-round too because they happen to lie within plus or minus 23.4 degrees of the Equator.

During the December Solstice the Earth’s celestial north pole is facing away from the Sun, so less direct sunlight reaches the “top” of the Earth (the region “above” the Equator) than at any other time of year, and the number of daytime hours are fewest compared to nighttime hours than at any other time of the year. This feels like winter to people living in places up above the tropics. The opposite happens during the June Solstice, and it feels like summer.

All in all, the current cosmological model of Earth is a tidy arrangement.

But if we accept all this, we must also accept some peculiarities, such as these:

  • The Earth’s orbit around the Sun and its spin around its own axis are not its only movements. There are also at least three other oddball variations, called Milankovich cycles, that describe changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit (eccentricity), changes in the Earth’s 23.4 degree tilt axis (obliquity), and changes in the direction in which Earth’s axis of rotation is pointed (precession). Obliquity supposedly cycles over a period of 41,000 years, eccentricity over a period of 100,000 years, and precession over a period of 26,000 years. Precession, sometimes called the “Precession of the Equinoxes,” means that 5,000 years ago, the pole star wasn’t Polaris – it was the star called Thuban, which is in the constellation named Draco; and it means that 13,000 years from now, the pole star will be Vega, which is in the Lyre constellation. Precession is often likened to the wobble you might see while watching a spinning top on your kitchen table. Except in Earth’s case, the wobble somehow self-corrects over long periods of time, keeping the Earth from pooping out and falling over like a spinning top eventually does.
  • For some accepted but unknown reason, the rotation of the Moon on its axis takes exactly the same amount of time as one Moon orbit around the Earth. This means that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth. Exactly and unvaryingly. This is highly unusual for a chaos-born satellite such as the Moon, and it has given rise to many speculations about what might be on the Moon’s dark side.
  • The size of the Moon is remarkable. With a diameter that’s about one quarter of the Earth’s diameter, it is by far the largest satellite in the solar system relative to its parent planet. In addition, the size of the disk of the Moon when viewed from Earth is exactly the same size as the size of the disk of the Sun when viewed from Earth. This is because the Moon happens to be 400 times smaller than the Sun, and also happens to be 400 times closer to Earth. This is what makes solar and lunar eclipses so perfectly possible.
  • Moon rocks that were supposedly brought back from the Apollo missions are virtually indistinguishable from Earth rocks. This calls into question whether or not such rocks were truly collected from a rocky Earth satellite like the Moon, or just lifted out of a creek bed in Arizona.
  • The compliment of the Earth’s 23.4-degree axial tilt – meaning the angle that you’d add to it in order to make exactly 90 degrees – is 66.6 degrees. This is why 66.6 degrees of latitude marks the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. The occurrence of the number, 666 – which is known to hold esoteric significance – spooks some people. Is it just a coincidence? Or is it a hidden-in-plain-sight “signature” placed on the world map by its makers?
  • Earth’s magnetic north pole does not align with Earth’s celestial (geographic) north pole. This is supposedly because the Earth’s magnetic field does not emanate from Earth’s solid innermost core, but rather from a volatile molten iron “outer core” that apparently allows the Earth’s magnetic field (and magnetic North) to wander around willy-nilly in the midst of all the precise physics that keeps all the planetary motions running like clockwork.

Peculiarities indeed. Is there perhaps another, alternate cosmological model of the Earth that can better explain some of these oddities?

Flat Earth 101

The above peculiarities, among other things, have encouraged some people to kick around some alternate ideas about the nature of Earth in the cosmos. In particular, there is a modern school of thought related to Flat Earth models.

Most of these models flatten the world map into a circle, like that shown in the United Nations logo, and then place a snow-globe-like dome over the whole shebang.

Inside this terrarium of sorts is the pancaked Earth, serving as the floor, with outer edges made up of an impenetrable ice wall. The Sun and Moon and planets live inside the terrarium, following defined, spiral orbital paths, while the fixed stars live outside the dome.

In most Flat Earth models, the Sun, Moon, and planets are considered to be electromagnetic aberrations, balls of plasma created by the same electromagnetic field that creates and supports the dome, rather than rocky bodies of mass that could potentially be visited by us Earthlings. The impenetrable, protective dome is typically referred to as the “firmament,” a name that’s presumably lifted from the following Bible passage:

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

Genesis 1:7-9 (King James Version)

You’ll notice that, according to this passage, our earthly terrarium is surrounded by water rather than the vacuum of outer space. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Now this whole Flat Earth model may sound at first like a lot like gobbledygook, but if you care to dig into it via the above-cited video series and other sources, you’ll soon discover that it’s quite possible to construct a rather neat and detailed cosmological Earth model using this framework. It’s possible to describe what we see in the sky, the changing seasons, navigation routes, and everything else. It’s really just a matter of shifting one’s frame of reference to the Earth rather than adhering to the currently-accepted heliocentric (Sun-in-the-middle) way of looking at things.

As a bonus, looking at the Earth this way resolves all of the peculiarities mentioned above. All that business about flight altitude limitations, the Milankovich cycles and the oddities about the Moon simply vanish like farts in the wind. So, it does cause one to take pause and wonder.

However, just as you might expect, Flat Earth models also introduce a few complications of their own. For example, in some models – hold onto your hats here – we end up with additional land masses that are outside our current realm of awareness.

Some Flat Earth models – namely, ones that attempt to provide macro views of Earth cycles as they relate to the Precession of the Equinoxes (the measurable 1-degree shifting of the visible constellations that occurs every 72 years)  – posit that the center of our knowable realm is off-center and rotating around the magnetic and geometric center of the firmament dome. These models say we’re living inside a little snow globe within another, bigger snow globe. Due to this, our known world – in terms of land masses and oceans – undergoes major, natural changes over time.

More specifically, a movement through one entire 30-degree house of the zodiac, which occurs every 2,160 years (72 x 30) – called a Great Year – results in all sorts of melting and freezing, and the emergence of new land masses, as our known little snow globe realm circles around inside the larger firmament. How’s that for Climate Change?

Phil’s Two Cents

While some Flat Earth models are certainly impressive, I have to say that I’m not convinced by any of them to date. That doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to watch them closely.

From my perspective, the big picture of how we’re told the Earth and solar system function is correct. The Earth is a large ball that’s spinning around the Sun.

I’m not yet ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater in order to patch a few holes in the current heliocentric model. Holes such as the weirdness of the Moon and the Milankovich cycles.

Here’s why all Flat Earth models that I’ve seen so far fall flat for me (pun intended):

When the Earth is flattened into a pancake, nearly half of the night sky ends up getting tossed to the curb. For some reason, Flat Earthers tend to ignore the half that we’d see if we lived in the Southern Hemisphere.

While it’s true that the same “zodiac belt” consisting of the commonly regarded constellations is just as visible to someone in Sioux Falls, North Dakota (at 43.5 degrees North latitude) as it is to someone in Christchurch, New Zealand (at 43.5 degrees South latitude), all the stars and constellations in the “upper” sky beyond the zodiac belt are completely different from these two viewing points.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the spin of the Earth on its axis means that the stars and constellations appear to spin around Polaris, as described above. In a Flat Earth model, everyone on the surface of the Earth would observe this – including people living in the circular ring area of the Flat Earth disk outside the Equator.

However, Polaris is not visible to someone living in the Southern Hemisphere of our round Earth. Instead, southern folks see a bunch of “upper” constellations that are completely unfamiliar to northern folks, spinning around a southern pole star, named Sigma Octantis (sometimes referred to as Polaris Australis), and spinning in the opposite spin direction as up North. Southern folks also see upside-down versions of all the commonly regarded constellations that float near the horizon. Taurus, the bull, is horns down, if you’re living down under.

Don’t take my word for it. If you travel to New Zealand or some such southern place, you can observe this for yourself. You’ll also see Moon markings that appear to be upside-down compared to what you’d see up in North Dakota.  Kooky, right?

So, I guess I’m back to square one on this one, folks.

I’m going to continue to suspect that modern-day Flat Earth theories are bogies, clever distractions. Although, I’m wide open to hearing a rational explanation from Flat Earthers about this constellation and upside-down Moon business.

Speaking of the Moon . . .

Worry not, conspiracy die-hards. I continue to believe that it’s absurd to claim that people have visited the Moon – or anything else that’s more than about 400 miles from the Earth.

I don’t think that’s because we’re trapped on Earth by a “firmament dome” or because the Moon is a glob of plasma.

I simply believe that the hard radiation outside Earth’s magnetosphere is impossible for humans to withstand with any sort of transportable shielding. It’s a Flight of Icarus sort of thing. Flying too high would burn us to a crisp.

– “Phil”

TPDcast.com

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