>Self-taught rocket scientist plans launch to test flat Earth theory
>‘Mad’ Mike Hughes, 61, plans to reach an altitude of 1,800ft over California in his home-made steam-powered rocket
>Science is littered with tales of visionaries who paid for pioneering research to prove their theories, and this weekend “Mad” Mike Hughes is hoping to join them. He plans to launch a homemade rocket in California as part of a bid to eventually prove that the Earth is flat.
>Hughes has spent $20,000 (£15,000) building the steam-powered rocket in his spare time, and will be livestreaming the launch over the internet. The self-described daredevil says he switched his focus to rockets after twice breaking his back doing stunt jumps in cars.
>“I don’t believe in science,” declared the 61-year-old. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula.”
The Christian Right have done a real number on flat earthers and their like, they're also almost exclusively British or American. It's bizarre. I had an old school friend phone me in a rage and say "You and your precious gravity!" once when I was explaining to him why all the water doesn't spin-off the Earth on a "NASA lies" FB post he'd made.
What I don't get about flat earthers is that they imply not only is australia fucking massive, but you can't get from australia to say, South America without traversing an insane amount of distance, yet planes do this literally every day.
Sydney to Santiago takes like 12 hours or so with no stops, but one of the arguments I've heard as to why it takes so long to get to [literally anywhere outside Europe] from here is because they have to maintain the illusion of the Globe and go via the Middle East and South-East Asia and you can't go direct. So, considering you're covering more distance on a flat earth from Sydney to Santiago via the roundabout "NASA approved" route, Australia should be <12 hour flight and it isn't.
That is always where they tell you you're a sheep, because deflecting is easier than accepting you're a tit.
Ironic because testing and retesting findings regardless of how established they are is the cornerstone of scientific method. We laugh but what if he does prove the Earth is flat - what do we do with the Royal Family, does one need to be a human to hold the Crown?
>>14075 But Australia is fucking massive and crossing the pacific ocean is an insane amount of distance. I don't want to sound like some sort of conspiracy theorist but you're not going to get a direct flight across the South Pacific because you'd probably crash and never be found again.
>Ironic because testing and retesting findings regardless of how established they are is the cornerstone of scientific method.
That, and even the most basic physics formulas according to which that daft rocket of his is going to take off, or not, didn't just fall out of the sky. Like he will.
Silly puns aside, without the likes of Newton, who is among the most revered scientists of all time precisely because of the genius and rigorousness with which he applied the scientifc method to his research and later findings, this daft git from the colonies would never be able to launch his pseudo rocket in the first place.
The problem isn't that there are pea-brained tits like him. The problem is that there are many. Who all believe that the Earth being a sphere or the Earth being more than 8,000 years old is a government or liberal media conspiracy, or both.
I saw on TV a while ago that some Young Earth Creationist outfit even offers guided tours through the Grand Canyon during which the guides attempt to convince people that the geology of the Grand Canyon is proof positive that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.
>>14086 One of the greatest problems we have as a species is stupid people with too much money. He's right there with others like Apple in helping to relieve it.
>because you'd probably crash and never be found again.
Your chances of survival are indeed somewhat better if you crash over land. From what I've read, a water landing makes it slightly more likely that the plane will stay intact upon impact, and therefore that you won't get torn to shreds together with the airplane. But then if you are in the middle of the ocean, your survival time is often just a few hours, on account of possible cold water temperature, strong waves, and predatory wildlife like sharks.
Then again, the vast majority of plane crashes occur during takeoff and landing. Mid-air disasters, let alone in the middle of the ocean, are very rare. So even if your plane crashes on water, it's likely to be near the coast and rescue personnel will be able to recover you within a short time. Also, mid-air disasters at 30,000 feet tend to have the worst survival rates regardless of whether you go down over land or sea. A fall from that altitude is simply not survivable.
There's an urban legend that one woman survived the Lockerbie Air Disaster bombing, and that she was actually still alive after she hit the ground. "Alive" being a relative term though, I guess it was more that she still had a pulse and was whimpering quietly. She died just moments after rescue teams happened upon her.
I flew from Honolulu to Sydney once. Pretty impressive, because for many hours at a time, you've got nothing but vast featureless ocean beneath you except for a few small dots of coral reefs and islands. But the weirdest thing is still when you cross the date line, because suddenly the date changes to a day earlier. You do worry what will happen if your plane goes down in the middle of the ocean, but again, you will be dead just the same if your plane drops out of the sky over land from 30,000 feet.
>>14089 >A fall from that altitude is simply not survivable.
You need less than 200m fall to reach terminal velocity which is the point at which how high you actually were becomes irrelevant. Plenty of people have been documented to have survived falls of more than 200m, in particular Vesna Vulovic who fell 33,330 ft.
The chances of survival aren't great and you won't walk away from it but it does happen.
>Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food cart in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were sucked out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact.
That's still markedly different from falling from 30,000 feet and hitting the ground dead-on. It's a bit like ski jumping, or even ski flying. Athletes can be up to 100 feet and more up in the air above ground, but they usually survive their jump unharmed because the ground slopes down where they land, and thus the kinetic energy is deflected slowly. Jumping 100 feet straight down, even onto a snow cover, typically kills you or at least you'll have severely life threatening injuries. Even a fall from just five metres can kill you if you're very unlucky.
Don't let survivorship bias fool you. For all practical purposes, you are really as good as dead when your plane starts falling to the ground from six and a half miles up. And most people also will not survive a direct fall onto a level surface from 200 metres. You hear about rock climbers falling a few hundred feet and surviving, usually with a few broken bones, but again that's typically because a sloped hillside slows down their fall and deflects kinetic energy.
>>14093 I'm not sure what your point is. If you fall out of a plane you're not going to be travelling directly down and most of the planet is covered with stuff. I'm just explaining that when you said it's "simply not survivable" you're wrong and that there are more than just one urban legend about someone surviving a fall from that height. The chances of survival aren't great and you won't walk away from it but it does happen.
>And most people also will not survive a direct fall onto a level surface from 200 metres.
Yes I already said about terminal velocity.
>If you fall out of a plane you're not going to be travelling directly down and most of the planet is covered with stuff.
True, in that initially, your forward velocity will be much greater at some 500 mph than your downward velocity. But you do reach terminal downward velocity at some point, as you said. It's generally held to be something like 200 mph, isn't it?
>The chances of survival aren't great and you won't walk away from it but it does happen.
Really very rarely though. How many people die in mid-air plane disasters, and how many do you hear about surviving it, to the point that they will eventually recover from their injuries. Not failed takeoffs or landings (you've actually got around an 88 percent survival rate in those if you follow a few rules), but actual crashes from high altitude. I'm sure the rate is about one in several hundred.
Like I said, for all practical purposes, consider yourself dead if your plane starts falling out of the sky from 30,000 feet. It's kind of a safe bet.
How many skydivers do you know who live to perform their sport repeatedly without a parachute?
What's true though is that parachutes are pointless for a passenger airplane when a disaster hits. Your forward velocity of some 400 to 500 mph even after your plane has disintegrated is too high to safely open a parachute. Your neck would probably snap in half from the sudden deceleration of a deploying parachute canopy at that kind of speed. Moreover, at 33,000 ft, you are in fact a few miles higher than the top of Mount Everest, which even experienced mountaineers will not climb without an oxygen tank. If your plane breaks apart at 33,000 feet, you will lose consciousness in about 20 seconds from the sudden decompression, and will not be able to put on a parachute and pull on its cord. Add to that the possibility of your parachute getting tangled in wreckage and what-have-you.
Terminal velocity for a human being is about 122mph as you approach sea level in the typical parachutist's spread-eagle position. If you fall from high altitude you'll reach a higher terminal velocity in the early part of the fall, but start slowing down again as you reach denser air.
The equation is totally different if you're still in an aircraft or attached to a piece of wreckage. It doesn't take a huge amount of extra drag to slow you down to a survivable impact velocity, especially if you land on something soft and you're falling at an angle. Kinetic energy increases with the square of speed, so you don't need to reduce the velocity by much to massively reduce the impact energy. Your odds are still fairly poor, but Mad Mike might survive simply because his shit "rocket" is generating a small amount of lift.
It's a funny article, but a bit too glib for my taste. The crucial point is that the sample size you need to establish statistical significance is dependent on the effect size. You don't need a particularly large sample size to establish that a gunshot wound to the head is fatal. The difficulty of evidence-based medicine is that you're often dealing with very small effect sizes, so you need very rigorous research methodologies to figure out what's going on. "Common sense" is extremely dangerous when you're dealing with very large NNTs or effects that take years or decades to manifest.
His rocket design is perfect but so-called "globe-earth" conspirators will murder him, have his rocket shot down, just to keep their secret. I'm calling it now. Screencap this.
How long would it take you to reach the ground if you fell out of a plane, then? I can't remember how to do the downward/horizontal velocity acceleration thing from GCSE physics.
If you at least have a few minutes of freefall, I think it would be a pretty serene way to go. Grab a bottle of wine from the in-flight duty free, light up a cig, and jump out. Spend your final minutes in free-fall, weightless, reflecting on the wonder of the planet you will soon be leaving a small bloody crater in.
A typical airliner cruises at about 11,000 meters. The initial acceleration up to terminal velocity will take about 5 seconds and 150 metres. You've then got about 3 minutes and 20 seconds of freefall at 54m/s, assuming you're in a standard skydiving posture.
There is very little oxygen to breathe at 11,000 metres. It is generally held that if the cabin depressurises fully at that altitude, you will lose consciousness within the first 20 seconds. So you will not even witness your own death, let alone be able to reflect on it.
You might come to again as you fall into denser layers of air, from about 4,000 metres downward. In which event you will probably be more concerned with the sight of the ground racing towards you than to sit back and light one up.
Also, why not just put a fucking go-pro on a weather balloon if you want to see the curvature of the earth (or lack of it, harhar) - people frequently do similar things successfully.
>A Grimsby man who believes that the Earth is flat is calling on bookmakers to accept his bet after he has been rejected by a number of the main national bookies.
>Gerrard Gallacher, of Eastern Inway, has attempted to bet a number of national bookmakers up to £100 that the Earth is flat, however is constantly being rejected by them, as they say that his request is "invalid".
>But Gerrard firmly believes that he will win the bet, and in doing so could end up costing bookies millions of pounds. He also feels that if the betting agents feel that he is 100 per cent wrong and won't pay out on the bet, they should at least accept it.
>He said: "I think the reason that they won't accept my bet is because they know that I am right in saying that the Earth is flat, and if other people joined me in placing the bet they could lose millions."
>Gerrard says that he first began thinking that the Earth was flat a few years ago after becoming curious about the subject and since then he has done research and is now even more convinced that he is right. One of the biggest arguments that persuaded him, is the theory that there are no actual real photographs of the Earth, believing that NASA use computer generated images because it is not possible for them to send a rocket into space.
>He said: "I just don't believe that we have ever sent rockets into space. I cannot comprehend that if space is a vacuum where there is no air, then what do the rockets propel against? I have also viewed footage of amateur weather balloons that clearly show to me that the Earth is flat, as I cannot see a curvature anywhere. Another reason that has convinced me is that apparently water is always meant to fall at a level and does not bend. So then how does the Earth manage to bend water all the way around a globe, it just doesn't seem to add up."
I wonder why the bookies won't take his money though, is it because the bet is already concluded, as the proof already exists? Like they wouldn't let you bet on who won the last World Cup when already know who did?
>>15047 >It's a problem when someone is clever enough to question the world around them, but not clever enough to think beyond their very first conclusions.
His name is Gerrard. He's got greasy hair and lives on a council estate in Grimsby. He decided it would be a good idea to wear a Celtic top to look nice when having his picture taken in the local paper.
They know that it's more hassle than it's worth. If they take the bet, he'll keep coming up with spurious evidence that "proves" he has won and demanding a payout. He might take them to court, even though betting slips aren't legally binding. He might organise a protest outside their headquarters. For the sake of a hundred pound bet, they could end up spending thousands dealing with his bullshit antics. They could find themselves being bombarded with similar bets from even more unhinged weirdos, which could get very ugly.
And they likely know that if a fucking live feed from a space station isn't enough proof for them, then they'll probably never accept any sort of evidence as proof they've lost.
If you haven't watched Behind The Curve on Netflix then I recommend it; here's one of the flat earther experiments proving the curvature of the planet.
