Posted on 02/01/2019 12:44:09 AM PST by Simon Green
A group of people who believe the Earth is flat have announced their “biggest, boldest, best adventure yet”: a Flat Earth cruise scheduled for 2020.
The cruise, organized by the Flat Earth International Conference, promises to be a lovely time. Flat earthers – who include the rapper B.o.B. and reality television person Tila Tequila – will be able to enjoy restaurants, swimming pools and perhaps even an artificial surf wave.
There’s just one problem for those seeking to celebrate the flatness of the Earth. The navigational systems cruise ships, and other vessels, use rely on the fact that the Earth is not flat: theoretically puncturing the beliefs of the flat Earth crowd.
“Ships navigate based on the principle that the Earth is round,” said Henk Keijer, a former cruise ship captain who sailed all over the globe during a 23-year career.
“Nautical charts are designed with that in mind: that the Earth is round.”
Keijer, who now works as a forensic marine expert for Robson Forensic, said the existence of GPS, the global positioning system, alone is proof that the Earth is a sphere, not a flat disc. GPS relies on 24 main satellites which orbit the Earth to provide positional and navigational information.
“The reason why 24 satellites were used is because on the curvature of the Earth,” Keijer said.
“A minimum of three satellites are required to determine a position. But someone located on the other side of the Earth would also like to know their position, so they also require a certain number of satellites.
“Had the Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to everyone on Earth. But it is not enough, because the Earth is round.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Sounds like it ight be a fun cruise. A few eccentrics are much more interesting than normal people.
Forget about GPS. Just try sailing across any ocean with a compass, a chart, and a chronometer (technical name for a marine clock), the way everybody did it before GPS was invented. The whole thing was, and is, based on spherical trigonometry and wouldn’t work if the earth wasn’t an oblate spheroid.
I believe they sent out a flyer stating people from AROUND THE GLOBE will be attending.
The great-circle distance or orthodromic distance is the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere, measured along the surface of the sphere (as opposed to a straight line through the sphere's interior). The distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a straight line between them, but on the sphere there are no straight lines. In spaces with curvature, straight lines are replaced by geodesics. Geodesics on the sphere are circles on the sphere whose centers coincide with the center of the sphere, and are called great circles.
All of which pretty much puts the lie to the Flat Earth nonsense.
Dismissed out of hand as part of the Great Conspiracy. :-)
Probably more than half really don’t believe it. It’s just a mental exercise.
*did you see this one, ping ?*
Imho they must have some good drugs.
5.56mm
Thanks Simon Green.
Ah, there are a few still around, but I haven’t seen them on this type of posts since the zot.
Lol!
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