I do see tribes talked about quite a bit these days, as people look back and see how things used to be. And it is true, I could be experiencing some kind of tribe disassociation disorder, given what the majority of the world believe. But I can’t go into that here.
I guess conspiracy theories have existed as long as written and mis information?
Actually before that but we have only records of the written ones. Misinformation and conspiracies are part of our nature, one is fueled by our desire to be a part of a community ( better living ) which drives us to tell lies just so we stick with the pack ( misinformation ). And the other is fueled by our doubt ( doubt in all cases against other people and against ourselves ) (conspiracy),
So you don’t remember to which tribe you belong ? Nah joking what you mean is you don’t think you are tribal is that it ? Because i thought so but I was just lying to myself.
Option 1 can’t happen. He’s using a tiny-ass steam rocket, which would have to be several times larger than multi-million dollar combustion rockets in order to even be able to reach the altitude necessary to actually see the curvature of the Earth.
(And no, the horizon effect is not the same thing as the curvature of the Earth; sure you can see it at sea-level, but it’s still not an empirical proof. You have to reach almost a dozen kilometers of altitude to actually see curvature.)
Of course the dude is hella wrong about a lot of things, but a lot of people who have the correct belief about the curvature also have an incorrect justification for it, due to lacking knowledge in geography, optics, rocketry, or physics in general. To be fair, it’s generally not explained well enough in time-limited media for people to fully understand the relevant details.
Thinking that Hughes could possibly see the error of his ways in that small steam rocket is only slightly less wrong than being a flat-earther.
Because he’s only applying formulas, not thinking critically.
Critical thinking is what is lacking here, and that’s a meta-scientific field.
I’ve seen a fair share of seemingly daft scientists and engineers who managed to perform perfectly well and fine in their specific line of work, as long as they never encountered a problem that exceeded their theoretical frame of reference.
It’s not necessarily that they’re dumb, it’s that they’ve been conditioned to not take certain factors into account. Everyone works like that to some degree.
Like, a sociologist who still can’t grasp the point of intersectionality theory even when it’s blatantly the most valid methodological approach to a problem outlined in his last research paper.
Actually that was calculated (somewhat inaccurately) waaay back in Antiquity. There have been written treatises on the shape of astral bodies for at least 2400 years, and people may have figured it out even earlier.
We only have access to the earliest remaining written documents, there could have been even earlier ones, and that’s not counting all the natural philosophers who didn’t write anything.
I mean, there are some people in academia who think that atomic theory could be even older than the spherical bodies theory, but the earliest written document is from Democritus’ Fragments, many of which may actually have been plariagized or (more likely) originally misquoted and attributed to the wrong author, with a margin of error of a couple centuries!
Ironically, many people in greek antiquity seemed to explicitly take this stuff as clearly being metaphorical.
(people weren’t more gullible back then, they just had shittier instruments of measure)
At least after Aristotle published his series of best-sellers (which were later re-edited and re-titled “Physics” and “Metaphysics”), many people believed that the Earth was a sphere (because spheres are the “shape of divine perfection”). And that all the astral bodies were necessarily spherical too, as they were believed to be made of aether and not matter, thus giving them the shape of geometric perfection. In fact, for a long time, anything that was thought to be outside the material sphere was literally thought to also be necessarily spherical in shape.
Yeah, some people actually believed that god(s) were spherical, somehow being both immaterial and geometrically spherical at the same time, because “spheres are perfection”, “divinity is perfection”, and thus “the divine is also the spherical”, etc.
Ancient treatises on this matter are sometimes very entertaining to read.
Just imagine the format of “countryball” memes, except with mythological entities.
I just wonder when all the flat earth sheeple will finally wake up and realise the truth.
We all just exist in the dreams of the giant space bunny, and if we’re not quiet, it’ll wake up.