Simplistic and childish notions that flat-earthers have

I think it's a bit sad of a realization that the existence of true flat-earthers, true believers, in this day and age is actually not surprising, given the stupidity of the average person. (As the joke goes, "think of how stupid the average person is. Now consider that half of all people are even stupider than that!")

There is a running theme among the vast majority of flat-earthers, and it's something that likewise is not very surprising: Many of them have extremely primitive, simplistic and childish notions about even the most basic things. Notions that a clueless 10-year-old might have, a mental age that they apparently have never succeeded in growing out of.

Here are some of them:

The concept of "force"

Unsurprisingly, most flat-earthers completely misunderstand what a "force" is in physics. Curiously and funnily, they seem to have the same misconception about it as a childhood friend of mine had when we were something like 12. (Even back then I knew that his notion was completely mistaken, even if I didn't yet have the knowledge and experience to fully grasp what he was thinking and to correct it properly.)

And the main misconception that they have is that they think that a "force" towards a particular direction implies and mandates motion towards that particular direction. In other words, if there is no motion towards that direction, or the motion is eg. in the opposite direction, then there is no force in that direction either.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what they are thinking (and they themselves probably don't know either), but I think that the main issue here is that they seem to think that "force" is the same thing as "acceleration", or even just "velocity". In other words, whenever someone claims that there is a "force" being applied to an object towards a particular direction, in their mind what that someone is saying is that there's an "acceleration" being applied to the object in that direction. And, thus, if the object isn't actually moving in that direction, that's not true.

Of course "force" and "acceleration" are not the same thing. They don't even have the same units.

They somehow seem incapable of understanding and accepting that there may be more than one force being applied to an object, and its movement (or non-movement) is the result of the sum of all these different forces. In fact, multiple forces on the same object is pretty much the norm, not the exception (particularly here on the surface of the Earth.)

In other words, just because the object may be moving in one direction does not mean there is no force being applied to it pointing to a completely different direction. It just means that there are multiple forces at play, and it's their total sum that affects the direction of acceleration.

(They use this misconception to argue that "there is no gravitational force" because an object can move upwards. Funnily, they never use that exact same argument to argue that "there is no buoyancy" because objects can move in a direction completely different from what their buoyancy would dictate. Somehow apparently buoyancy is special and the same logic doesn't apply to it.)

The irony of denying gravity

It's actually strange why flat-earthers have such a problem with gravity. They have decided as a collective that gravity must not exist and is just a huge lie, and they all just blindly repeat that over and over.

I have never heard any of them explain why they have such a problem with gravity. I don't see anything in their flat Earth beliefs that would somehow make gravity an impossibility even in their tenuous vague flat Earth model.

It's not a question of them being unable to explain what causes gravity and why it points to the direction it does. The exact same situation is happening with their favorite substitute, ie. "buoyancy". Whenever they are asked why buoyancy works in the direction it does and not some other direction, the most common answer is that it's a mystery. It just does, because. It's an unknown.

Thus, they don't have any problem in considering the mechanics and details of buoyancy a mystery. Why do they have a problem with gravity? I genuinely have no idea. To me it seems that some flat-earthers just started to argue against it, because reasons, and that notion just spread through the internet until they all started repeating the same notion. (And, indeed, historically there have been many genuine flat-earthers who had absolutely no problem with gravity. The "gravity doesn't exist" as a widespread dogma among flat-earthers is a relatively recent phenomenon.)

The irony of buoyancy

It's funny (and very childish) when flat-earthers try to explain buoyancy as if we had never heard of such a thing, as if it were some kind of novel marvelous concept that most people don't have any idea about. While they might not directly say it (or at least I don't remember seeing any of them say it), they act a bit like science kind of denies the existence of buoyancy or something. They act as if "gravity" were somehow an alternative explanation and mutually exclusive with "buoyancy", and they seem to imply that science (and of course NASA) deny buoyancy.

Of course there's nothing strange or controversial about buoyancy. Nobody has any problem with it. It's a very well known and studied phenomenon. Any science textbook will talk about it, any physics school book will talk about it, there are Wikipedia articles and millions of web pages and videos talking about it. It's one of the most basic concepts of physics, and there's absolutely nothing controversial about it and its existence. Nobody has any problem in accepting that buoyancy exists, and how it works. Yet flat-earthers talk about it as if it were this radical alternative explanation that scientists want to replace with "gravity", for some reason.

But do you know what the big irony is about buoyancy? The fact that buoyancy works because of gravity, not regardless of it. Buoyancy is not some kind of "alternative", some kind of phenomenon that's independent and separate of gravity. No, buoyancy works because of gravity. That's the very reason why it works in the direction it does. That's why it causes objects to move up or down rather than some other direction. Moreover, in zero gravity there is no buoyancy (because there is no gravity dictating the direction in which it works, pulling denser material in one direction and causing less dense material to move in the opposite direction.)

To flat-earthers it's a mystery why buoyancy exists and why it works in the direction it does, rather than some other direction (and most of them freely and openly admit this.) To science it's no mystery at all: It's all about fluid dynamics and gravity.

"Show me the curve"

Flat-earthers constantly demand "show me the curve" and refuse to hear any explanation, no matter how simplified, about why when you are standing on a ball that's 8 thousand miles in diameter, the horizon looks to be at the same elevation all around you, no matter which direction you look at. This is very simple geometry that can be demonstrated with pretty much anything, but they just refuse to listen and comprehend.

The one thing they never do is explain what they would expect to see if we were standing on a sphere that's 8 thousand miles in diameter. What kind of "curve" would we be seeing, if that were the case, according to their argument? They just demand for us to "show them the curve" but never give a geometric explanation of what exactly is it that they expect to see if the globe Earth model were true.

I have literally never, not even once, seen any flat-earther video where they say something like "if we were indeed on the surface of a gigantic ball, then we should be seeing the horizon curve like this", perhaps even drawing what they expect on paper. Of course even if they tried to do that, it would immediately fall flat (hah!) because it conceptually contradicts what would then happen if you turn to look in another direction. Would the "curve" follow your direction of sight or something?

This is particularly egregious in that there are myriads of free 3D rendering software which they could use to emulate what would it look like if we were indeed standing on the surface of a sphere that's 8 thousand miles in diameter. Would the 3D software be rendering some kind of visible curve?

(I wouldn't be surprised if at least some flat-earther has tried exactly that, in order to have a "gotcha" moment against globe-earthers, only to be frustrated by the fact that the rendering software is drawing a perfectly flat horizon. I wouldn't be surprised that if such a thing has happened, the flat-earther then just kept quiet about this result because he didn't want to admit anything, or rationalized that the software must be wrong and defective in some manner.)

But this is very common with flat-earthers: Spout notions and make demands that are very vague and poorly defined, without even they themselves understanding what exactly is it that they should be expecting, without understanding the geometry and other aspects of what they are talking about. They just spout these slogans as if they were some kind of great "gotcha" arguments, without even understanding what they are talking about.

Airplanes following the surface of the globe

Sometimes it's actually hard to comprehend what their objection actually is, and that's because they don't explain it, they only vaguely imply it.

One of their favorite "gotcha" arguments is that "if the Earth were a globe, then airplanes would need to be constantly pitching down in order to follow the curve of the surface."

And that's it. That's the entire objection. I have never seen them explain any further.

My answer to that is: "Yes. So what? What's your point? What exactly is the problem?"

They present that argument as if it were somehow completely clear and self-evident why an airplane "pitching down" to follow the Earth's curve is somehow a ridiculous idea. I have never heard them explain why they consider it a ridiculous idea. (Perhaps a bit surprisingly, I have also never seen a debunker say this very thing. In other words, "yes, so what? What's the problem?" I suppose it kind of is a bit of a "gotcha" argument because even debunkers seem to be caught off-guard and feel the need to try to explain the supposed "problem" away, even though there literally is no problem.)

After having thought about it, I believe that I now understand what their actual objection is, in other words, what they are actually thinking, even though the never state it out loud:

I believe that they think that in order for an airplane to be "constantly pitching down" the pilot needs to be actively pushing forward on the yoke in order for the plane to pitch down. That if the pilot does nothing, does not touch the yoke (as is very common in flight), then the plane does not pitch down and thus does not follow the curve of the Earth.

Of course, like with so many things, they just don't understand how airplanes work. They have an extremely simplistic (and childish) notion of how airplanes operate, and think that "if you don't touch anything, then the plane just keeps going straight, without pitching up or down."

Obviously this notion is incorrect for two reasons: Firstly, most airplanes (especially passenger planes) have an autopilot, and this autopilot is always engaged. The autopilot is turned off only in extremely few and special circumstances. In level flight this autopilot is, effectively, instructed to maintain a particular altitude (this altitude is actually explicitly set using dials or buttons, and can be seen in a numeric or other display.) The autopilot then does constant micro-adjustments (or even major adjustments if needed) in order to maintain that altitude from the ground, which is being constantly measured. So yes: When the autopilot is engaged and it has been instructed to maintain a particular altitude, it will literally follow the curve of the Earth by pitching down ever so slightly if needed. (Although this pitching is not usually done by the ailerons but by trimming, as seen below.)

Secondly, even if the autopilot for some reason was not available and the pilot needs to fly manually, he would still not have to be constantly pushing on the yoke in order to follow the curve of the Earth. Why? Because there's this thing called "trimming" in airplanes: Essentially, the "trim" setting sets a fixed pitch rate by adjusting certain trimming ailerons on the back of the plane. This means that to maintain a particular altitude manually, the pilot will use the trim to make the plane do so. He doesn't need to use the yoke for this. So yes: Even if the autopilot for whatever reason was unusable and the plane had to be flown manually, the pilot still wouldn't have to be constantly using the yoke to maintain altitude: He will use the trim setting in order to set a fixed pitch rate. The pilot can then visually follow the altitude display in order to manually make micro-adjustments to the trim if needed.

Maps and geometry

For some reason most flat-earthers seem to have extreme difficulties in understanding world maps and, particularly, the concept of projections (particularly in relation to projecting the surface of a sphere onto a 2D paper or picture.) Indeed, they seem to have a lot of very strange confusions about world maps, and how they should be interpreted and what they actually are.

You wouldn't believe how many times I have seen videos of a flat-earther taking your typical cylindrical map projection of the world (ie. one of the most common ones), claim that "this is the globe earth map", and then proceed to make linear measurements on that map and assuming that those are the same distances that correspond to the real world (at least according to "globe earthers" in their view.) Very commonly they assume that if they draw a straight line on such a map, that will be the shortest distance between those two points in real life, according to "globe-earthers".

It's very hard to understand what they are thinking. They know and acknowledge that the "globe Earth model" has all the continents and countries on the surface of a sphere, but then they take some 2D picture showing the entire surface of that sphere, claim that it's "the globe Earth map" and then proceed to make direct linear measurements on it, somehow not understanding that they will not correspond to distances on the original surface of the sphere.

It's like their understanding of basic geometry is at the 5-year-old level. They seem incapable of understanding that distances on the surface of a sphere do not correspond to distances on a 2D rectangle, and thus any 2D map projection you may use to represent the surface of the sphere will be distorted, with incorrect distances. If you wanted to measure actual real world distances, you would need to directly measure them on the surface of the sphere, not on some 2D rectangle. (Or, more commonly, use a software that will do the same calculations given two points on a map.)

And, of course, from all the possible map projections there are, they have chosen the azimuthal equidistant projection as the "true map" of the flat Earth, completely and willingly ignoring how much it distorts distances, particularly the farther you get from the North Pole. (For example Australia is extremely squeezed, to completely ridiculous levels, in this particular projection. Vertical and horizontal distances don't correspond to reality at all, and this can be measured in real life. But flat-earthers completely and willingly ignore this and don't even comment on it.)

And why have they chosen that particular projection as the "true" one, from literally hundreds of possibilities? Well, the fundamental answer is essentially "because". That's it. They have no reason. Some of them just decided it a long time ago, and the rest followed.

This is not the only nor even the simplest problem of geometry that they have a hard time understanding. Their understanding of even basic geometry is literally that of a 5-year-old. Many of them have difficulty understanding even some of the most basic concepts of 2D geometry. When presented with very basic geometry problems (eg. involving triangles), many of them talk as if all that geometry math is completely made-up nonsense that someone just invented out of thin cloth. I'm not even making that up. They literally seem to think that basic geometry is just arbitrary made-up nonsense based on someone's imagination and spurious claims. Their very understanding of mathematical concepts is often abysmal. How they can evern survive in the real world is one of the biggest mysteries.

NASA

For some strange reason most flat-earthers not only have a huge beef with NASA in particular, and have all kinds of conspiracy theories about that organization (thinking that it's some kind of world-wide secret society cabal, a bit like the Illuminati set on creating a New World Order), but moreover many of them attribute to NASA a lot of things that don't apply at all.

Not all flat-earthers, but quite many of them will say things like "NASA claims that (something something)", and "according to NASA, (something something)", as if NASA was the originator of Earth sciences and claims about the geometry of Earth. Many of them genuinely talk as if NASA was somehow the ultimate authority in Earth sciences, has invented and decided on all these "scientific facts" about the Earth, and then all science textbooks, school books, scientific papers and so on just repeat and follow what NASA says.

They completely and willfully ignore that Earth sciences, very much including pretty much everything we know about Earth's geometry, are much, much older than NASA. Hundreds of years. We figured these things out long, long before NASA even existed. Long before anything even slightly resembling NASA even existed. NASA is not some kind of authority and originator of Earth sciences which all scientists, science textbook writers etc. listen and follow blindly.

(Yes, sometimes NASA themselves make new discoveries and publish scientific papers about them, but these are usually really high-end specific stuff, often related to very advanced physics, not basic "the Earth is shaped like an oblate spheroid" level of stuff. The flat-earthers are not talking about the advanced physics that NASA sometimes helps advance.)

Most of these flat-earthers who talk about NASA in this manner don't seem to really have a good grasp of what NASA is, how old it is, what its role is in science, or pretty much anything at all. They have this very vague concept of what it is, and just repeat stuff they have heard others in their community say, and spout complete nonsense without ever even bothering to think about and explain it in more detail and accuracy. They talk about NASA as if it were the Freemasons, a cabal that has existed for centuries and controls the worldwide scientific community, and dictates what it must publish and claim.

Military navy surrounding Antarctica

This is not only one of the most infantile and childish that most flat-earthers have, but also one of the craziest: Many, if not most, of them genuinely believe that not only is the "Antarctic wall" surrounding us (which would make it literally like a hundred thousand kilometers in perimeter), but there's a super-secret international fleet of military ships guarding it everywhere, stopping people from approaching the wall.

It shouldn't have to be even said, but this entire idea is completely ludicrous in its absolute impossibility, for several reasons:

• If the azimuthal equidistant projection map were indeed the accurate representation of what the Earth actually looks like in physical reality, that would literally make the "Antarctic wall" something like a hundred thousand kilometers in length. It would be in the ballpark of twice Earth's actual circumference (which is about 40 thousand kilometers, or 25 thousand miles). There aren't enough military ships in the entire world capable of covering the entire circumference, close enough to each other to always see anybody who tries to approach the wall.
• Rather obviously, nobody has ever photographed, filmed, or gotten any other evidence of this gigantic secret naval fleet, constantly patrolling the edges of Antarctica. There is no footage, there is no whistleblower testimony, no eyewitness testimony (eg. by fishermen who went too far south), nothing.
• Coordinating such a gigantic super-navy of military vessels, completely in secret, is literally impossible. Where are all these ships coming from? Where do they get supplies and fuel? How many crew members are there in total, being there for months and even years on end, never telling anything to anybody?
• Why would every single country in existence either participate in this, or keep quiet about it if they have the technological capability of detecting such a massive navy? Why would every single country, including countries that are enemies of each other, agree to this world-wide conspiracy and spend billions and billions funding such a project? For what? What possible benefit would there be to any such country? (Every ship that they would send there would be a ship away from their own defense forces.)
• Where are all the people who were stopped by a military ship from going too close to Antarctica? Where are the eyewitness testimonies? Where's the footage of this? Or if they were just "disappeared", where are the reports and investigations of these mysterious disappearances? There isn't even a "Bermuda's Triangle" type of conspiracy theory going around that if you go too close to Antarctica your ship will just disappear.

And flat-earthers think that this has been going on for decades and decades, perhaps even a hundred years. So according to them, this has been going on during the entirety of the Cold War, during the Second World War, and perhaps even the First World War, with nations that were literally at war with each other, with the full intent of destroying each other, still somehow cooperating in this gigantic conspiracy to patrol the "Antarctic wall". Even at the height of the Cold War, when Russia, the US, and several other countries were still full enemies of each other, they somehow still cooperated. And nobody involved ever spilled the beans and went public.

And that, of course, is assuming it would have been physically possible in the first place. Which it rather obviously isn't.

The fact that so many flat-earthers seem to genuinely believe that it is possible and is happening in the real world just goes to show a very special kind of childish mentality. Some 10-year-olds might believe such a conspiracy theory if told with enough conviction. Adults, even unintelligent ones, should be smarter than that.

And the funny thing is that this would be testable in practice. How many flat-earthers are willing to test it, for their cause? They just want to believe, they don't want to test their beliefs.

Thinking they have found a flaw in science nobody else has noticed before

Recently a famous flat-earther uploaded a video where he argues that Newton's law of universal gravitation is ridiculous and a complete scam because the gravitational force between two objects is calculated by dividing a bunch of stuff by the distance between them which, according to him, would mean that if the objects are touching then the gravitational force would be infinite.

This just goes to demonstrate the completely infantile and childish mindset of most flat-earthers, who genuinely seem to think that they have discovered a fatal flaw in a physic formula... a flaw that nobody else has noticed (or has been kept quiet about for some reason). None of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who actively use and have used the formula for literally hundreds of years, none of them have ever noticed this fatal flaw, never raised concerns nor objections about it, never talked about it, never published any papers about it, nothing. This flat-earther, all on his own, has discovered a fatal flaw in a fundamental physics formula that nobody else has. Or, alternatively, all the hundreds of thousands of people who have noticed the fatal flaw over the past several centuries have for some unfathomable reason kept quiet about it.

It's normal for children to think that they have noticed a flaw in some commonly used thing. Like, say, thinking that "how come we are supposedly in the 20th century given that the year is 1997?" and then genuinely think that they have discovered a fatal flaw that nobody else has noticed, without having the capability of starting to think further and deeper about how impossible that would be (ie. that nobody else has noticed the flaw), and thus that it's he himself who has some misunderstanding about it.

Of course the answer to that flat-earther's objection is that the force of gravity between two objects does not depend on the distance from surface to surface, but on the distance from center of mass to center of mass. Even when two balls touch each other, their centers of mass are still well separated and, thus, the gravitational force between them is still absolutely minuscule.

(And if one ball goes inside the other, eg. through a hole, what then happens is that the gravitational force starts to actually lessen because more and more of the outer ball will be surrounding the ball inside, rather than all the mass being on one side.)

Being confused by large numbers

For some reason most flat-earthers seem to have a problem with large numbers, large quantities, large measurements, particularly when it comes to physical things like velocity.

Almost every single one of them repeats the same mantras about the Earth rotating at such-and-such large velocity (miles per hour), or moving around the Sun at such-and-such large velocity, or the solar system moving around the galaxy at such-and-such ginormous velocity.

They almost always state those quantities without any further explanations. They state them as if those velocities all by themselves were ridiculous, impossible and unbelievable, or something.

As far as I know (and a few of them might state something along these lines), what they seem to mean is that if we were moving at those velocities then we would feel it. I think this is a collection of multiple rather primitive and infantile notions and misconceptions:

Firstly, they conflate velocity with acceleration, without even trying to understand the difference. They seem to think that since we can feel even a slight amount of acceleration (eg. when sitting inside a car), then surely we would feel it if the Earth were indeed moving at a whopping 18 miles per second around the Sun? They seem incapable of understanding and/or accepting the concept that a constant velocity cannot be felt. (It's curious and telling that I have never heard them explain why you can't feel the speed of a passenger plane when you are traveling inside one.)

Secondly, and perhaps related to that traveling inside a car, train or airplane: It might be that they think that, just like when traveling inside a vehicle, we should feel some kind of vibration or something else? Not that they could explain what we should be feeling, or why, when moving at a constant speed in the vacuum of space (although don't mention that, as they will immediately derail the conversation by attacking the concept of "vacuum of space" rather than answering the original question, refusing to go back to the original topic even if you  try. Of course.) 

Thirdly, at least some of them are probably conflating, in a very fuzzy and vague manner, the concept of traveling at very high speeds in Earth's atmosphere to traveling at very high speeds in the vacuum of space. After all, if you were standing on the roof of a bullet train, the air would throw you off! It would be impossible to stand there. That would be completely ridiculous! (Curiously, here too they seem to completely skip the thought process of why the people inside the train aren't thrown off and don't feel much.)

Of course velocity is not the only situation where they are confused by large numbers, but it's one of the most common ones. 

Treating science as a religion

I'm not here referring to the typical claim of creationists that people believing in "science" is no different from people believing in religion, that believing in science requires faith (and, according to young earth creationists, even more so than believing in religion). Ok, that too, but not the point of this section.

I'm here referring to the notion that most if not all flat-earthers (and also most creationists) have that science works in a similar way to religions in the sense that there are some "prophets" of science who come up with "truths" and "facts", and that every scientist subsequently just blindly believes those "scientific truths" without question. Indeed, they very often talk as if most scientific facts were invented by single individual people, effectively scientific "prophets", and then every member of the scientific "cult" just believes it blindly without question. Some random science "prophet" invented the concept of the "geologic column", and everybody just believes it without question. Darwin, one of the biggest and most venerated "prophets" of science invented evolution, and everybody just believes it without question. And so on and so forth.

In the same vein, many flat-earthers believe that someone (often Copernicus is mentioned) just invented the globe Earth and the heliocentric model, and science has since just blindly followed that doctrine without question, as if a great Prophet of Science had revealed Divine Truth onto the Religion of Science, and all members of that cult just believe this undeniable Truth with awe and veneration, and doubt and skepticism is banned and shunned.

They also believe that the entire worldwide scientific community, for literally hundreds of years, has been in cahoots with all of this, all agreeing to the same made-up "truths" revealed by these Prophets of Science. All the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of scientists from all around the world, from different countries, cultures, backgrounds, customs, political and religious beliefs, even from countries that hated each other and were in war with each other and considered the others to be enemies and wrongthinkers to be distrusted and destroyed. No matter what the attitudes were towards the people of other nations, the scientists, however, were secretly in cahoots, like members of a worldwide secret cult that transcended all national and political boundaries, and worked together and agreed with each other in order to maintain and spread the same lies. Even when two or more nations hated each other so much that they would go on a full-on World War in order to destroy each other, the scientists on all these countries would still cooperate and agree on the same doctrines, none of them deviating from the doctrine, none of them revealing the actual truth, none of them attacking the scientists of the enemy nation with different claims about science. The biggest and most successful secret society and religious cult that has ever existed, with zero schisms, zero dissent, zero whistleblowers for all of its existence, transcending all political and religious boundaries.

The fact that so many flat-earthers seriously believe this is astonishingly naive and childish.