You should check out the facebook groups, they are quite real and it's fascinating to observe. They basically never use any privacy settings so you can check out their personal pages and see them vehemently arguing with family and friends claiming all kinds of conspiracy stuff (Venn diagram overlapping with chemtrails and Illuminati blah blah). At the far end of that insanity you have groups like https://reddit.com/r/LEVELMANIA/
I've seen one guy argue that the sun is created and operated by NASA, and then there are the people who insist you can live from staring at the sun. Even a (quite nutty) friend of a friend claims to do this, someone I've personally spoken to and must unfortunately confirm is that dumb. He has 3 kids and is highly political, votes every time.
"...think about it – without the help of so-called "experts", how do you really know what you’re looking at? It could be a hologram, projected from various government installations throughout the world. It could be a large, crudely painted balloon, held in place by helium and propelled by tiny sails and rudders (which is why it moves across the sky so slowly). Or, most likely, it could have been different things at different times and different places, depending on the technology available to the conspirators and the culture and beliefs of the population being deceived.
The hoax could easily have been imposed on a gullible world at many points in human history. Perhaps it began as a collective hallucination or a religious myth, or perhaps an especially bright star that came to be exaggerated over time. However the moon story started, early proponents of the hoax were swift to recognize how it could be exploited for their benefit, and shrewdly devised a scheme to use it to their advantage.
They began to spread rumors, falsify scientific observations, and invent new gods to represent this fictional celestial body. They ingeniously concocted the idea of "cycles of the moon", and as their resources increased, were able to create the illusion that this object in the sky actually went through such changes. To make their hoax more plausible to early, superstitious societies, they arranged for these cycles to coincide with the months of the year.
But don’t all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn’t one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Even a layperson like myself knows that scientists are not supposed to approach issues with preconceived notions. Yet this principle is cast aside when the moon is at stake. You will never see the revisionist perspective on the moon being taught in institutions of higher learning, even as a controversial opposing view. In fact, in order to even become a recognized scientist in the current atmosphere of academic repression, one must pay lip service to the establishment’s orthodoxy. Could you imagine a student who argued the revisionist viewpoint on the question of the moon being awarded a degree? He would be hounded out of the university in an instant! How can one explain such behavior from institutions that are supposed to serve as forums for the free exchange of ideas, except to conclude that the establishment has something to hide?"
In addition, search for flat earth on a the popular crowd/fundraising sites. The lies they tell to separate the gullible from their money. It's a nice little earner.
"It almost seems a myth kept alive by the sheer absurdity of it."
For some, possibly. As for the others, they would probably be a 99.9% / 0.1% ratio composed by actual believers and few smart con artists who saw the opportunity to cash on books, merchandise, donations, and perhaps even votes.
You are missing a very large block of people who pretend to believe but not for money. Their rewards are feeling superior to both those who believe and to those who don't but fall for their show. Classic trolling. It gets scary where the line between trolling and believing blurs. Some will inevitably convert themselves, slowly forgetting their initial motivation while exposing themselves to all kinds of related conspiracy content while in their flat earther persona.
I suspect they're an extreme form of "contrarian" that craves disagreeing with conventional beliefs to the point where it becomes part of their self-image/identity. Like other conspiracy theorists, they're obsessed with intricate rhetoric and arguments, but they rarely take the extra step of trying to prove something without obfuscation and without ulterior motivations.
This guy strapped himself onto a homemade rocket and lit a fuse. There are easier ways to prove/disprove the Earth is flat-- even if you don't buy the shadow-measurment and clock experiments. One could, for example, mount an expedition of to reach the edge of the Earth and take pictures. But that hasn't happened, ever. Or perhaps it did happen, and the effect was merely to quietly convert the very chagrined expedition team members from flat-earthers into round-earthers?
The first time I stumbled on the flat earth societys website I really, really could not tell. They even had complicated looking physical models of how gravity etc. works on a flat earth etc. My conclusion was, that most did just trolling. But now after I met some real flat earthers .. I am not so sure anymore. They were also not plain stupid. Just far out and very ignorant. So they build a lot of complex logic on a false axiom.
They reminded me a lot of the classical "science" of bible theology. Where you take something ridiculus word for word - and then build a a complex stringent and logical philosophy above it. (with marxism I had similar experiences)
With religion the indoctrination begins very young. Fewer and fewer people believe as they become better educated or even just practice basic critical thinking.
I'm afraid the religious mindset creates a switch that turns off critical thinking for certain topics. Then people can be more vulnerable to all kinds of hoaxes and scams.
It doesn’t matter whether you actually believe something, if you act like you do and what you believed in is toxic you are still responsible for spreading poison.
You make the world a safer and more welcoming place for those who actually believe it.
At a certain limit it’s not so different from being a con artist essentially: literally taking advantage of the ignorant believers and using that for lulz or even power.
The premise, to me, is silly enough that you aren't poisoning anyone. Anyone that would believe it is going to feed off of some other poison. Very few are equipped to hurt themselves or others via "flat Earth thinking".
Yeah, maybe Jim Carrey doesn't actually believe in all that anti-vaxer nonsense he spouts, but he simply hates children and wants them to die of preventable diseases.
You know, it’s sad whenever a tinkerer or explorer gets killed, but I have a feeling he knew this was his destiny, and this was clearly the path he loved in life.
Good on him for being an explorer and pushing the limits. Sorry it had to come to a end :(
One thing to tinker, another to claim that a steam-powered rocket would ever get to high altitude. Nevermind flat Earth, that's just setting your face against engineering.
This reminds me that there's a company claiming to be developing a steam-powered booster for orbital launches. Scott Manley did a video about them a while back [1]. Where this stands on the spectrum between a scam and a real thing remains to be seen, but they did seem to be convincing enough to get some investments and build a test rig.
The major distinguishing factors between a scam and an also ran in my opinion are that for something to be a scam the people running it have to be aware that it will not work and that they have not ignored any expert advice telling them that it will not work in sufficiently clear terms that they can't claim that it is just naysaying.
Plenty of people that relieved investors from their funds were unaware that what they were building was a scam.
Plenty of people working for companies that built stuff that didn't work were not aware of the fact that it could not work until they themselves established that.
Plenty of successes where there were people saying 'this can't possibly work' right up until the time that it did, in fact, work.
Theranos, Moller sky car, Ubeam (now renamed to SonicEnergy in an attempt to leave their past behind them) -> clearly scams.
This particular steam powered rocket is not a scam in the sense that it did not attempt to pass the risk or the eventual results onto others. It is merely very stupid, and it should serve as an object lesson in that if you are trying to do something in your backyard that normally has budgets in the 10's to 100's of millions that you are likely not going to succeed. Finally, it should teach people that your tests of vehicles of any kind that go up should be done unmanned as long as possible.
If you squint at it the right way, the UK's Black Arrow launch vehicle was steam-powered; it used HTP (85-98% hydrogen peroxide) as an oxidizer, which decomposes to oxygen plus superheated steam on its way into the engine (the oxygen was then combusted with RP-1 fuel). The steam contributes a fair amount of reaction mass:
You know, I had some serious hopes that he'd actually find inspiration to pursue more mainstream rocket design through this hobby and use his experience operating on the fringes to make some interesting inroads in the mainstream.
I can say that I'm only comforted thinking that he died doing what he loved. If only we all could be so lucky.
I score it somewhere between "Bodhi riding the giant wave at the end of 'Point Break'" and "Reichelt Testing his Flight Suit from the Eiffel Tower" on the tragedy scale.
"explorer and pushing the limits" Which limits exactly? According to the article he planed to go up to 5000 feet. That's a "rent a Cessna and pay your pilot buddy to take you up" territory.
The limits of what a human is willing to do. Note that his title isn’t “rocket scientist” but “daredevil”. When you compare getting into a rocket you built on your own to riding a bike across the Grand Canyon, well, Evel Knievel seems tame.
> Good on him for being an explorer and pushing the limits.
NO. Just, no. This guy willfully ignored the knowledge and expertise that came before him; both, in how to accomplish the task and the demonstratively provable physics that show his goals were folly.
If he just claimed that gravity was false and jumped off a cliff to the rocks below to prove it, it would just be "local idiot jumps to his death." Some how, if you add rockets and a flat earth conspiracy it gets praise?
No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I love eccentric people but he wasn't likely to make any contributions to science; rather, he was a prop on a 'science TV' channel that that has very little science and lots of 'mysterious mysteries of strange mystery' - their top show right now is about the curse of the Bermuda triangle.
The glorification of guys like this is part of why we have disease outbreaks due to people's unwillingness to vaccinate and why every attempt to have a serious public discussion about climate change is overrun by denialists and trolls.
> This guy willfully ignored the knowledge and expertise that came before him;
This is true for all pioneers - the successful and the unsuccessful. Everything from airplanes to vaccines to the age of european exploration is a result of guys willfully ignoring the knowledge and expertise before them.
> No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.
I suppose except the "tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems" put a man on the moon, created the internet and the modern world.
If you are going to blame something for the failures, you should credit it also for the successes.
He wasn't a pioneer, though. It's one thing when people say it can't be physically done, and the people talking have no theoretical basis to support it. People said it would never be possible to fly, but they has zero physics to back up the statement.
It's another when it has been physically done and the physics behind it is well understood. If he believe he was building a faster than engine using some new gravmetric-eletromagnetic effect, well more power to him. We have an ample amount of history on rockets, how to compute the physical performance of them, and a multitude of failure scenarios. This was ignored.
When it came to putting a man on the moon, we used the might of our education to predict everything we could and used hindsight when we failed. Importantly, we built into the systems things that would tell us what was happening so if there was a failure we could learn to not make the same mistake again. Rocket systems fail, which is why you launch them without people first.
> It’s not clear how strongly he held the conviction, or if he really believed it at all. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said Saturday that the “flat Earth thing … was a PR stunt we dreamed up” to get publicity and attract sponsors for the rockets that the self-taught engineer made in his garage at his home in Apple Valley, Calif.
Interesting. That would make him much worse in my book. Now should I remember him as an irresponsible fraud or a mistaken fool?
It is one thing to be so misinformed as to believe a flat earth has any plausibility. It is another to reinforce people in this mistaken belief to take advantage of them!
That's because you think flat-earthers "deserve" being cheated because they're stupid. I wonder how you'd react to cons that exploit your own ignorance.
In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it. By adopting their beliefs as his own, he crossed into that zone. If he'd just announced that he'll check curvature for them, that would have been alright.
The flat earth model works if it was built by isolated tribes living on an island. It wasn't until Copernicus that people started to believe the round earth model.
The overall idea of a spherical earth is a consensus since ancient Greece, and has been considered a fact since then.
Copernicus more or less established that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around.
I use "more or less" here because
1) The idea of the earth revolving around the sun was not _new_, it was already discussed and debated in ancient Greek texts. Part of the renaissance movement is based on the re-study of ancient Greek texts, which was influential to Copernicus and his ideas.
2) There is no universal truth behind what revolves around what. It's just a matter of perspective, and having the earth rotate around the sun did had the advantage of making calendar computations much simpler, since you don't have to deal with intricate planet retro-cessions. That was the reason that led Copernicus to choose this perspective.
Just about the point that it was a consensus since ancient Greece: it certainly wasn't a consensus around the world until somewhat recently
According to Wikipedia:
"Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th century.
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat Earth model."
Interestingly, it seems nobody but the Greeks independently discovered the spherical earth model
But it was certainly a consensus in educated Western Europe, or Columbus wouldn't have been heading west to get to the East Indies (his innovation was to be obstinately wrong about the diameter of the Earth, which would have doomed the voyage but for the fortunate collision with the Carribean)
d) I will open up a new commercial route starting directly from western Europe to reach India without the hassle of crossing the whole Europe on ground.
It's still a very popular route for sailing. You essentially ride the tropical conveyors from the Azores until the Indian Ocean. The Americas are a minor inconvenience, solved by the Panama Canal.
It's getting back which is the issue - your have the disastrously weathered cape of good hope, or the pirate-infested Aden. It's quite ironic that if you want to sail around the world, it's the ancient routes that are the worst parts.
If Columbus had discovered the Americans were an archipelago, or if the gulf of mexico had properly separated north and south, the discovery would have been a very popular trade route - even today.
We don't have to wonder, because he wrote it down.
Ptolemy estimated that the continents of Europe and Asia collectively spanned 180 lines of longitude, leaving 180 to travel by sea. Most contemporary scholars believed this too. In actuality, the continents span about 130 from China to Spain, leaving 230 that would need to be travelled by sea. The best sources available to Columbus were wrong, and the other available sources typically erred on the ocean being too small. Few, if any, people thought Europe and Asia spanned less lines of longitude than estimated by Ptolemy.
Additionally, he read that each line of longitude spanned 56 2/3 miles at the equator. Unfortunately, his source was quoting Arabic miles, but Columbus was only familiar with Roman miles, which are shorter.
He didn't believe that he discovered something the scholars of the day didn't. The fragmentation of the Mongol Empire meant that overland trade was growing more expensive, meanwhile nautical technology and seamanship was rapidly advancing. It would have been impossible to have made Columbus' planned (as he understood it) sea voyage in, say 1300. But now, the overland route wasn't well run, and the caravels used by Columbus were much better suited to ocean travel.
If Columbus hadn't done it, the economic necessity of the rising price of goods and dropping costs of sea travel would have resulted in someone else doing the same thing. Some people say he was a unique visionary, other people say he was dumb and lucky. Neither were true. He did his research and came to the natural (if wrong) conclusion. (he was lucky though)
> The fragmentation of the Mongol Empire meant that overland trade was growing more expensive, meanwhile nautical technology and seamanship was rapidly advancing.
The fall of Constantinople and the the Ottoman Empire Also made trade routes more expensive
There were also efforts to circumnavigate Africa for this reason
My bad, I was just commenting on it because it seems like a very primitive model of physics developed by islanders. It makes me wonder why people are still debating about these things even if they are facts. Maybe it's because most people can hardly math. You can blame half the bullshit on conspiracy mongers.
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth about 220BC, he was out by <50 miles on the modern accepted value.
He pre-dated Copernicus by a mere 1500 years.
Educated people have known for a long time that the earth is spherical is what I'm getting at, For many hundreds/thousands of years what the educated class knew and what the rest of society knew was often wildly divergent - as you'd expect in a society with no formal education system where only the wealthy or the sons of the wealthy could afford to spend the time educating themselves/tinkering.
Models are supposed to have a purpose. They give you a way to better understand, visualise, stimulate etc. I don't think an isolated tribe would really have any need to create models in this way. And the curiousities of creation can be explained using myths and legends. Those kind of stories are more compelling and apparently useful than a mundane physical understanding or reality. Particularly when those people already have an intimate understanding of the physical world ingrained.
I think you may be confusing heliocentrism with "round" earth? The ancient Greeks and (nearly) everyone since believed in a round earth. They also believed in geocentrism. And Copernicus had the broadly right idea, but convinced very few people since his idea was wrong. Kepler is the one who really convinced people that heliocentrism, because his model was quite accurate in its predictions and was thus able to overcome Aristotle's arguments for geocentrism.
Kepler's boss, Tycho Brahe, had a charmingly incorrect model that had the sun and moon orbiting the Earth while the other planets orbited the sun. It's like heliocentrism with the frame of reference locked on the Earth.
I was just thinking this. The rhetoric is going to be... what is it, the airline companies and NASA are the bad guys in their conspiracies, right? Anyways, they sabotaged his rocket. They didn't want him "uncovering the truth". More fuel for the fire I guess...
Then again, even if he did live and went, "Yea, it's round." All of them would just say he's a paid shill. You can't win with stupid. It's a lose-lose situation.
Rockets are dangerous and this was entirely too predictable. I think it's worse if he wasn't a flat-earther because he used misinformation to promote and enrich himself.
What an insight! If only all these daredevils knew that their occupation was hazardous, they could die a healthy death by cardiovascular disease, like the rest of us.
There is a difference between a calculated risk and a death wish. I am by no means anti daredevil. Go ahead and jump from the edge of space or ride a motorcycle over a canyon. Just don't fly in an amateur rocket if you have any sense of self preservation. The budget to do it safely is far out of reach for the self funded thrill seeker.
I can't read the article here, the details are "below the fold" and it won't scroll. In case others are in a similar situation, the submission above is another source for the story.
Sad to read this. He is one of the few eathers trying to prove the earth is flat rather than to disprove that the earth is sphere. He would have failed in the end, but he chased for an answer.
The article points out that he probably wasn't really a flat earther...
“I don’t think he believed it,” Shuster said. “He did have some governmental conspiracy theories. But don’t confuse it with that flat Earth thing. That was a PR stunt we dreamed up.”
2015 kickstarter [0] mentions nothing of FE at all. Just wants to break his previous record. Kickstarter flops, hard.
2017 gofundme [1] sells itself as $7500 of sponsorship in return for the prime advertising spot on the side of the rocket.
None of these rockets were about trying to prove or disprove anything, he was no more scientist than evel knievel was. The FE community were openly courted for cash, but cash was the only relationship between FE and the rockets.
Darwin doesn't require you have no children, just that you remove yourself from the genepool through complete and utter stupidity. if you do it before having children all the better, but not necessary.
He had the courage of his convictions. Though a bit of mathematical insight could have shown that if the world was flat then gravity would not diminish with height. Some people just prefer practical experiments to theoretical calculations.
If he quietly did his thing I’d understand but it was in part a show for attention. When this happens other Darwin Awards candidates are springing into existence. Maybe it is not bad after all. However, as a human, I feel bad for the guy. Hope others learn something from his lesson
"was captured on video as he rode a rocket into the sky, failed to activate a parachute "
That's not quite right. The parachute deploys very early after the launch, separates from the rocket, and falls to earth by itself. I'm surprised there wasn't some kind of secondary parachute.
The text uses the phrase "backup parachute handle" several times, but not "backup parachute" on its own. The former is potentially ambiguous - is it possible that there was only the one parachute, possibly with two separate deployment mechanisms?
Based on a quick reading of the TFES website there is a notion of Universal Gravity [1] which at first glance would seem to orient a simple horizon indicator in the right direction.
There are also some articles on perspective from their POV which are easy to find. Their ideas of perspective are novel.
If you mean horizon as in a "horizontal earth service, to which your plane might not be parallel to", Flat Earth is more compatible with horizon than a spherical Earth.
If you mean "where the sky meets the ground far away", it's a finite distance away but maybe you can't ever reach the end, perhaps due to increasing drag force the closer you get to the edge, and a curved prism that distorts optics.
If you allow natural forces to vary with distance from the edge of a disk, you can probably recovery most spherical phenomena.
There's a sort of equivalence between static geometry models and dynamic force models.
I meant where the ground meets the sky. If there's a measurable distance landmark there, the math of "I'm on a sphere" is hard to argue with. Especially if you repeat the exercise in many far flung places.
Rocket science is actually rocket science. Making rockets that work, especially with people aboard, is about the most complex thing humans do. Even spending vast amounts of money and hiring the best people can still result in disaster. Doing it by yourself is highly unlikely to work.
I always joke that programming is not rocket science even though some people I know think they are similar.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadI've seen one guy argue that the sun is created and operated by NASA, and then there are the people who insist you can live from staring at the sun. Even a (quite nutty) friend of a friend claims to do this, someone I've personally spoken to and must unfortunately confirm is that dumb. He has 3 kids and is highly political, votes every time.
It's obviously the NOAA. They even tell you when they're going to be turning it on and off - it's like they're not even trying to hide it.
"...think about it – without the help of so-called "experts", how do you really know what you’re looking at? It could be a hologram, projected from various government installations throughout the world. It could be a large, crudely painted balloon, held in place by helium and propelled by tiny sails and rudders (which is why it moves across the sky so slowly). Or, most likely, it could have been different things at different times and different places, depending on the technology available to the conspirators and the culture and beliefs of the population being deceived.
The hoax could easily have been imposed on a gullible world at many points in human history. Perhaps it began as a collective hallucination or a religious myth, or perhaps an especially bright star that came to be exaggerated over time. However the moon story started, early proponents of the hoax were swift to recognize how it could be exploited for their benefit, and shrewdly devised a scheme to use it to their advantage.
They began to spread rumors, falsify scientific observations, and invent new gods to represent this fictional celestial body. They ingeniously concocted the idea of "cycles of the moon", and as their resources increased, were able to create the illusion that this object in the sky actually went through such changes. To make their hoax more plausible to early, superstitious societies, they arranged for these cycles to coincide with the months of the year.
But don’t all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn’t one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Even a layperson like myself knows that scientists are not supposed to approach issues with preconceived notions. Yet this principle is cast aside when the moon is at stake. You will never see the revisionist perspective on the moon being taught in institutions of higher learning, even as a controversial opposing view. In fact, in order to even become a recognized scientist in the current atmosphere of academic repression, one must pay lip service to the establishment’s orthodoxy. Could you imagine a student who argued the revisionist viewpoint on the question of the moon being awarded a degree? He would be hounded out of the university in an instant! How can one explain such behavior from institutions that are supposed to serve as forums for the free exchange of ideas, except to conclude that the establishment has something to hide?"
https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/The-Mad-Revisi...
https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/Feedback4.htm
https://phdn.org/archives/revisionism.nl/Moon/Moon3.htm
In addition, search for flat earth on a the popular crowd/fundraising sites. The lies they tell to separate the gullible from their money. It's a nice little earner.
For some, possibly. As for the others, they would probably be a 99.9% / 0.1% ratio composed by actual believers and few smart con artists who saw the opportunity to cash on books, merchandise, donations, and perhaps even votes.
I suspect they're an extreme form of "contrarian" that craves disagreeing with conventional beliefs to the point where it becomes part of their self-image/identity. Like other conspiracy theorists, they're obsessed with intricate rhetoric and arguments, but they rarely take the extra step of trying to prove something without obfuscation and without ulterior motivations.
This guy strapped himself onto a homemade rocket and lit a fuse. There are easier ways to prove/disprove the Earth is flat-- even if you don't buy the shadow-measurment and clock experiments. One could, for example, mount an expedition of to reach the edge of the Earth and take pictures. But that hasn't happened, ever. Or perhaps it did happen, and the effect was merely to quietly convert the very chagrined expedition team members from flat-earthers into round-earthers?
They reminded me a lot of the classical "science" of bible theology. Where you take something ridiculus word for word - and then build a a complex stringent and logical philosophy above it. (with marxism I had similar experiences)
I'm afraid the religious mindset creates a switch that turns off critical thinking for certain topics. Then people can be more vulnerable to all kinds of hoaxes and scams.
If it wasn't flat earth, it would be some other conspiracy theory, but a lot of the time it's simply all the conspiracy they can fit in their head.
You make the world a safer and more welcoming place for those who actually believe it.
I prefer the world in which people do the crazy stunts.
It should make the entire movement even less credible:
“How can you believe this? Your fellow believers are probably just faking to get attention”
Seems to not be the first time, though, that I wonder if backup parachutes should be activated remotely.
Good on him for being an explorer and pushing the limits. Sorry it had to come to a end :(
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT9HBkWGg7s
Plenty of people that relieved investors from their funds were unaware that what they were building was a scam.
Plenty of people working for companies that built stuff that didn't work were not aware of the fact that it could not work until they themselves established that.
Plenty of successes where there were people saying 'this can't possibly work' right up until the time that it did, in fact, work.
Theranos, Moller sky car, Ubeam (now renamed to SonicEnergy in an attempt to leave their past behind them) -> clearly scams.
This particular steam powered rocket is not a scam in the sense that it did not attempt to pass the risk or the eventual results onto others. It is merely very stupid, and it should serve as an object lesson in that if you are trying to do something in your backyard that normally has budgets in the 10's to 100's of millions that you are likely not going to succeed. Finally, it should teach people that your tests of vehicles of any kind that go up should be done unmanned as long as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow
... And the (one) satellite it successfully launched is still in orbit, nearly 50 years later.
Presumably Hughes's belief system demanded that all his silver exist in coin form, hoarded and buried in the backyard, or something.
1 - http://www.astronautix.com/h/h2o2.html
2 - https://space.stackexchange.com/a/8720
I can say that I'm only comforted thinking that he died doing what he loved. If only we all could be so lucky.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Douchebag%20...
The limits of stuntmanship.
NO. Just, no. This guy willfully ignored the knowledge and expertise that came before him; both, in how to accomplish the task and the demonstratively provable physics that show his goals were folly.
If he just claimed that gravity was false and jumped off a cliff to the rocks below to prove it, it would just be "local idiot jumps to his death." Some how, if you add rockets and a flat earth conspiracy it gets praise?
No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.
The glorification of guys like this is part of why we have disease outbreaks due to people's unwillingness to vaccinate and why every attempt to have a serious public discussion about climate change is overrun by denialists and trolls.
This is true for all pioneers - the successful and the unsuccessful. Everything from airplanes to vaccines to the age of european exploration is a result of guys willfully ignoring the knowledge and expertise before them.
> No. This is the tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems.
I suppose except the "tragedy of the U.S. education and mental health systems" put a man on the moon, created the internet and the modern world.
If you are going to blame something for the failures, you should credit it also for the successes.
He wasn't a pioneer, though. It's one thing when people say it can't be physically done, and the people talking have no theoretical basis to support it. People said it would never be possible to fly, but they has zero physics to back up the statement.
It's another when it has been physically done and the physics behind it is well understood. If he believe he was building a faster than engine using some new gravmetric-eletromagnetic effect, well more power to him. We have an ample amount of history on rockets, how to compute the physical performance of them, and a multitude of failure scenarios. This was ignored.
When it came to putting a man on the moon, we used the might of our education to predict everything we could and used hindsight when we failed. Importantly, we built into the systems things that would tell us what was happening so if there was a failure we could learn to not make the same mistake again. Rocket systems fail, which is why you launch them without people first.
https://archive.md/1QX2W#selection-2017.0-2017.330
Sounds like he wanted to build and ride rockets, and this was a way to get strangers to pay for it.
It is one thing to be so misinformed as to believe a flat earth has any plausibility. It is another to reinforce people in this mistaken belief to take advantage of them!
In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it. By adopting their beliefs as his own, he crossed into that zone. If he'd just announced that he'll check curvature for them, that would have been alright.
> In my ethics it is fraud to keep people in a mistaken belief to profit from it.
See: all of organized religion.
The overall idea of a spherical earth is a consensus since ancient Greece, and has been considered a fact since then.
Copernicus more or less established that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around.
I use "more or less" here because
1) The idea of the earth revolving around the sun was not _new_, it was already discussed and debated in ancient Greek texts. Part of the renaissance movement is based on the re-study of ancient Greek texts, which was influential to Copernicus and his ideas.
2) There is no universal truth behind what revolves around what. It's just a matter of perspective, and having the earth rotate around the sun did had the advantage of making calendar computations much simpler, since you don't have to deal with intricate planet retro-cessions. That was the reason that led Copernicus to choose this perspective.
According to Wikipedia: "Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th century.
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat Earth model."
Interestingly, it seems nobody but the Greeks independently discovered the spherical earth model
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df-uemc-e3w
a) "I believe the distance is smaller and that we'll be able to get there no problem (as much as a trip like that could be ""no problem"")"
b) "distance is bigger but there might be something in between, etc, and I like adventures"
c) "distance is (or might be) bigger and this will be a very boring trip but we'll eventually get there but might have to wing it.
Going west from Europe to India doesn't make sense today, it seems the Cape of "Good Hope" was reached (but not crossed) before Columbus's voyage.
It's getting back which is the issue - your have the disastrously weathered cape of good hope, or the pirate-infested Aden. It's quite ironic that if you want to sail around the world, it's the ancient routes that are the worst parts.
If Columbus had discovered the Americans were an archipelago, or if the gulf of mexico had properly separated north and south, the discovery would have been a very popular trade route - even today.
Ptolemy estimated that the continents of Europe and Asia collectively spanned 180 lines of longitude, leaving 180 to travel by sea. Most contemporary scholars believed this too. In actuality, the continents span about 130 from China to Spain, leaving 230 that would need to be travelled by sea. The best sources available to Columbus were wrong, and the other available sources typically erred on the ocean being too small. Few, if any, people thought Europe and Asia spanned less lines of longitude than estimated by Ptolemy.
Additionally, he read that each line of longitude spanned 56 2/3 miles at the equator. Unfortunately, his source was quoting Arabic miles, but Columbus was only familiar with Roman miles, which are shorter.
He didn't believe that he discovered something the scholars of the day didn't. The fragmentation of the Mongol Empire meant that overland trade was growing more expensive, meanwhile nautical technology and seamanship was rapidly advancing. It would have been impossible to have made Columbus' planned (as he understood it) sea voyage in, say 1300. But now, the overland route wasn't well run, and the caravels used by Columbus were much better suited to ocean travel.
If Columbus hadn't done it, the economic necessity of the rising price of goods and dropping costs of sea travel would have resulted in someone else doing the same thing. Some people say he was a unique visionary, other people say he was dumb and lucky. Neither were true. He did his research and came to the natural (if wrong) conclusion. (he was lucky though)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographi...
And yes if it wasn't him it would have been someone else.
The fall of Constantinople and the the Ottoman Empire Also made trade routes more expensive
There were also efforts to circumnavigate Africa for this reason
Damn though, engineering mishaps are bad :/
He pre-dated Copernicus by a mere 1500 years.
Educated people have known for a long time that the earth is spherical is what I'm getting at, For many hundreds/thousands of years what the educated class knew and what the rest of society knew was often wildly divergent - as you'd expect in a society with no formal education system where only the wealthy or the sons of the wealthy could afford to spend the time educating themselves/tinkering.
Then again, even if he did live and went, "Yea, it's round." All of them would just say he's a paid shill. You can't win with stupid. It's a lose-lose situation.
What an insight! If only all these daredevils knew that their occupation was hazardous, they could die a healthy death by cardiovascular disease, like the rest of us.
That's the magic -- doing what seems impossible to survive. Doing what is impossible to survive, and dying, is just stupid.
It is improbable, difficult, and dangerous.
I can't read the article here, the details are "below the fold" and it won't scroll. In case others are in a similar situation, the submission above is another source for the story.
“I don’t think he believed it,” Shuster said. “He did have some governmental conspiracy theories. But don’t confuse it with that flat Earth thing. That was a PR stunt we dreamed up.”
2015 kickstarter [0] mentions nothing of FE at all. Just wants to break his previous record. Kickstarter flops, hard.
2017 gofundme [1] sells itself as $7500 of sponsorship in return for the prime advertising spot on the side of the rocket.
None of these rockets were about trying to prove or disprove anything, he was no more scientist than evel knievel was. The FE community were openly courted for cash, but cash was the only relationship between FE and the rockets.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1441636269/mission-rock...
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/flat-earth-community-rocket-launc...
That's not quite right. The parachute deploys very early after the launch, separates from the rocket, and falls to earth by itself. I'm surprised there wasn't some kind of secondary parachute.
There's a video here: (NSFW warning...no gore, but you do see the crash) https://twitter.com/justindchapman/status/123133600217571737...
> *None of Hughes’ backup parachutes activated, either, Chapman said.
Or see: https://imgur.com/a/C37q14M
There are also some articles on perspective from their POV which are easy to find. Their ideas of perspective are novel.
[1] http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=...
If you mean "where the sky meets the ground far away", it's a finite distance away but maybe you can't ever reach the end, perhaps due to increasing drag force the closer you get to the edge, and a curved prism that distorts optics.
If you allow natural forces to vary with distance from the edge of a disk, you can probably recovery most spherical phenomena.
There's a sort of equivalence between static geometry models and dynamic force models.
I always joke that programming is not rocket science even though some people I know think they are similar.
Perhaps so, but he's actually done it successfully before in 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89dChsgznw
>"We were somewhere outside Barstow, on the outskirts of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."