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Ask HN: How do I Convince someone the Earth isn't flat
Ran into a few religious people who suggest the earth is a firmament. How do I prove it's not round/sphere.
- alex_lav 3y agoJust go find different people to talk to
- mtmail 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Let them bring evidence of Earth's flatness.
- lphillips0825 3y agoAsk them to take you to the edge of the Earth and show you where you can jump off. /s
- jfengel 3y agoThe trivial way is a phone call to a friend in a different time zone. It's dark there; it's not dark here. It's just past dawn here; the sun is at the highest a few time zones east. More phone calls to more places and it's pretty quickly apparent that the angle to the sun is exactly what you'd expect from a sphere and not from a disk. Not that it matters. Flerfers have had decades coming up with increasingly elaborate and absurd cosmologies. They don't understand them, but that's what science looks like to them as well, so they figure it's your word against theirs. And since their word is the Bible, they win. If they were genuinely curious, there are a million ways to show the roundness of the earth. But there are zero ways to demonstrate it to a person who is fundamentally incurious and doesn't want to know.
- yasp 3y agoDon't waste your time?
- cratermoon 3y ago"the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-asymmetry-principle/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...
- jjgreen 3y agoMeet them at night, point to the moon, walk away without saying a word.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 3y agoWhy do you need to prove them wrong? Have they given you doubt the world is round? https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-the-simplest-way-to-prove-the-earth-is-round https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-th...
- shyn3 3y agoYes because it's in the Bible. And Quran. And Torah. Have to convert the radicals. One argument is when the plane lands why doesn't it curve. Another is why can we see over 1500km with a telescope.
- clouddrover 3y ago> Ran into a few religious people who suggest the earth is a firmament The firmament is the sky, not the ground.
- shyn3 3y agoThis suggests that we can't make it to space so that's a new worm of crazy.
- clouddrover 3y agoNo, what it suggests is that you must first address your own lack of understanding before criticizing others for theirs.
- shyn3 3y agoThey don't believe we can leave the firmament so never been to mars, no satellites, and never been the moon. Feel free to answer that other comment in this thread mr smart.
- clouddrover 3y agoYou're struggling with basic vocabulary. Address your own shortcomings first before worrying about anyone else.
- gwnywg 3y agoOut of curiosity, what religion was that?
- zgs 3y agoIgnore their idiocy. Such folks cannot be convinced by mere facts.
- hardkorebob 3y agoYou don't. You respect their mind. Simple. Make love not war of any kind.
- iefbr14 3y agoDid they, by any chance, mention elephants and a big turtle too?