Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up
latimes.comI wonder if he really believes the earth is flat, or if he's just pretending so the flat earth people will keep funding his rocket hobby.
He’s doing it for money. He’s a daredevil and borderline con man who tried and failed to raise money through Kickstarter. When he realized he could exploit rubes to make a buck he started doubting scientific consensus.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/22/565926690...
That's exactly what it was. He was trying to raise money before and didn't succeed so he tried this angle.
Well, that's smart.
No one really thinks that the earth is flat it's just attention seeking behavior.
My take away from Flat Earthers is how much I rely on third parties as a source of truth. Or perhaps I should say “truth”. Probably a mixture of both.
Similar to what he said about the Earth being frisbee-shaped, I believe the Earth is round, but I know I don’t have personally-acquired observation that my belief is fact.
I'm more onboard with this then selling sugar pills as "alternative medicine".
The success rate of anti-depressants is closely comparable to sugar pills.
Well, earth looks like a frisbee disc from 1800 feet up...
Maybe 10% of flat earthers are true faithful and not trolls.
I'm optimistic and I'd say at least 2 orders of magnitude fewer.
It all started with some guys on youtube making probably quite decent money with their videos explaining that the earth is flat. Tons of people shared links to show others "look how stupid that guy must be". Because the videos were indeed made in the way to make you think the author is not very smart. I believe the suckers were those sharing the links and author decided that he'd rather have cash than his pride, outsmarting them all.
What surprised me, is that quite a few science channels made videos explaining and proving that the earth is not in fact flat, often providing links to some "flat-earther" video, basically helping him doing what he does.
Just being able to shoot a semi-decent video and uploading it to youtube, plus making some arguments for the earth being flat, takes way more comprehension than realizing that the earth is not flat. If there is some real flat-earther that made a video about it - you haven't seen it. Because it was likely low quality, not entertaining and he couldn't make it viral.
Not sure I agree, there are some pretty entertaining and well made movies about several religious topics. Also, one real flat earther that I know in person is a pretty good artist. He just has taken too many hallucinogens and gets drunk daily, which blunts his skeptic and logic abilities.
I have a high altitude balloon+electronics education project and it is very fun. We were using our pocket money. It can get expensive really quickly was very hard to raise money for this kind of stuff. We spend about $300 per launch (not including transportation) given we retrieve the payload successfully. If we don't, it is going to be $1.5k per launch for a latex weather balloon. There is a lot of risks involved in the process.
With that in mind, I think being able to launch a hunk of metal to 2k ft with just $20k is actually really quite impressive. I don't care if he raised money for the flat earth cause or any other scandalous cause, I think he did a legitimately impressive engineering feat, risked his life for it, raised money for it, didn't hurt or rob nobody. I am thoroughly entertained by this guy. Anyone with an iota of a brain will quickly realize this is just a comedy sketch, but as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted. If they didn't give money to this guy, they would have given their money to another stupid cause. And if anyone decides to give their money to any flat earth cause, I'd rather see they give money to this one.
With that in mind, I don't think I would go so far as going on the radio saying stupid shit just to raise money for my hobby project. But then, the world rewards people with crazy ideas and crazy execution plans when they work. Clearly, this is one of the instances when an unlikely funny idea actually worked. If I knew about this earlier, I would have chipped in some of my money just because it's so hilarious (and I can see many people would do that too).
Can't really fault him for literally studying "the natural world through observation and experiment" as opposed to blindly taking some else's word. But, he should probably spend his time understanding what others did to "study the natural world through observation and experiments" and realize it's not so blind to look at their conclusions.
If you’re going less than 2000 feet up, what’s wrong with an airplane?
It’s harder to get flat earthers to give you money for airfare.
Well obviously commercial jets have video screens instead of windows, but surely building an ultralight or using an open cockpit plane is easier than this.
I'm more interested in the fact that he converted a motor home into his launch pad. Well ... the steam-punk side of me also wants to see how his steam-powered rocket works. Unfortunately after looking at NoizeTV I don't think I'll be watching his launch.
Does he still believe the earth is flat?
I don't think this is high enough to see the curvature of the earth. So, experientially he probably has a confirmation-bias event which reinforces his core belief. Well.. the belief he espouses, to further his aims.
Video of the launch:
https://gizmodo.com/at-long-last-flat-earth-rocketeer-finall...
I think putting a gopro on a balloon would have been easier.
But the GoPro's firmware is probably hacked to show a globe, because GoPro is in on the conspiracy, etc., etc.
Admittedly, GoPro does actually have a lens distortion going on so that it can be wide angled. It actually makes it look more globe like than it is, as you can see from numerous sky diving videos. In them you can see this distortion by noting that the skyline is straight when it goes through the center of the view but looks highly curved when on the side.
Yeah, but then if you yourself were situated high enough to see the curvature of the earth, it's just because of whatever drugs they distribute via the contrails, and not actually real.
The flat-earth stuff is nonsense, but I am glad he stuck to it and launched. Congrats, and even a bit of admiration.
I was either downvoted twice because the mods were flat earthers, or because they view it as impossible to ever admire guts in an idiot. And if you want to say it was down-voted because the comment was not technically informed or provided insight as befitting an expert in the field, I'd respond that this article is clearly asking for flippant comments, no serious discussion is to be had about this article. It is a fluff article, and deserves fluff comments. So instead of down voting, as I am sure this comment will also receive, write why you disagree.
If he is a true believer, he is at least willing to test those beliefs by conducting an experiment. As it should be. How many true believers of anything are willing to have their their minds changed?
This guy should be praised instead of ridiculed by a bunch of internet non-contributing zeroes.
Yeah what he did was definitely cool. But if you just want to test a hypothesis, it would be much easier to send a camera and not a whole person. Also a balloon could obtain a higher altitude than any amateur rocket. And people have filmed the curvature of the Earth with just balloons, they can get quite high.
I am sure just the enormous challenge of actually building a rocket with a couple of friends also played a major role.
Except he doesn't believe, he just wants to go do something dangerous and adventurous and have other people pay him for it.
Wouldn't it have been more sensible to do the launch from somewhere nearer the edge of the earth?
Given people have always known the earth is round based on the shadow it casts on the Moon...
EDITED: Obviously not trying to argue that the Earth is flat, but flat things can still cast round shadows if they're, well, round
(ORIGINAL: Obviously not trying to argue that the Earth is flat, but there are round things that are also flat)
A disk will also cast a round shadow in some cases.
He could have gone up to the top of Burj Khalifa instead. But, that wouldn't have placed him on the headlines. Also, he is running for governor. As far as I can tell from recent experience, he will win.
Or pay for a helicopter tour. You can get a ~10 minute helicopter tour for under $100 where I live. They don't fly incredibly high, but given that the minimum safe altitude is 1000 feet in some cases:
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/27076/what-is-t...
Or, just book a flight on a commercial airliner, which is also cheap but doesn't get you a panoramic view. But you'll get way higher than 1875 feet.
The windows are actually screens to trick you.
Hah, I hadn't considered that!
Probably a skydiving trip would be a better plan then. I've never done it but it seems you jump from a decent height (13K feet or 4km -- so says https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving1.htm ) because they want to give you some good freefall time.
But I suppose the truly dedicated flat earther will find a way to dismiss that too.
Translation for metric units users:
1875 ft ≈ 570 m
150 miles ≈ 240 km
350 psi ≈ 2.4 MPa
350 mph ≈ 560 km/h
86 miles ≈ 140 km