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Mic has an article on the upcoming Solar Eclipse across the USA, focusing on one particular group of observers: Flat Earthers, who believe that the sun and moon rotate around each other above the Earth's surface.
...astronomers (both professional and amateur) aren't the only groups excited for this once-in-a-lifetime event. Another, more controversial community believes the upcoming eclipse could provide overwhelming evidence to support their cause. These people are flat Earthers, and they believe the solar eclipse will prove once and for all the Earth is not a sphere.
The article describes some of the proposed arguments from the newly resurgent, and apparently quite serious, flat earth community.
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Flat Earth Truthers and the Solar Eclipse
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:12PM (3 children)
I think this would be pretty easy to simulate on an underground moon base using two cranes and a very bright light source, you just woosh the crane along the path once per day, lit one illuminating and unlit one not illuminating.
Some decades ago I read a semi-serious "popular science" level magazine seriously proposing this for polar moon bases to grow food for lunar colonists. The theory was if you use very large mirrors to gather 24x365 sunlight at the poles and reflect that into a greenhouse, the plants will all grow toward the light and some species will never bend to follow the sun which might weaken them so it makes sense to force the apparent source of light to different locations over a roughly 24 hour day. They also had some weird speculation about localized heating, 24x7 growth might be a problem for some species, so simulating a cooler darker night might be biologically important.
Of course this was 1970s style industry solution. Today we'd use 24+ banks of individual high power LEDs run off solar panels. Copper high voltage cable is a lot cheaper than mirrors big enough to run a civilization sized greenhouse. And I'm sure we'd need tons of electricity to do something else anyway on the lunar surface, make oxygen from lunar rocks or melt lunar grit into construction materials or whatever. But it made a pretty magazine article. A giant moving mirror in a single giant greenhouse, the perfect pile of singe points of failure, yet artistically pleasing in the magazine.
Personally I kind of like the "giant moving mirror" solution as I appreciate a good trolling such as flat earthing. There are many aspects where flat earth is sociologically valuable. It give a subset of the population a mostly harmless target for the two minutes hate. It gives people who like a good troll, something mostly harmless to salute. It gives people who are WAY to holier than thou for their own good a harmless target to preach against. It provides an authority for people to rebel against in a hopefully non-violent peaceful manner, which could be redirected to other fictional beliefs like religion or political progressive beliefs or multiculturalism or any other fictional false belief. In summary flat earth is good harmless fun, a net positive to society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:22PM (2 children)
I think the biggest issue would be that the sun would have to reset every day. Which would require it to move infinitely fast on the back side of the disk or for there to be more than one sun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:46PM
You mean move at light speed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @05:36PM
As I understand it, their spotlight sun rotates about the north pole, or the “center” of the world as they think of it. Imagine an azimuthal equidistant map projection, then take a spotlight and move it continuously over the equator in a giant circle. This gives timezones and local apparent sunrise/sunset. Of course, their spotlight sun doesn't actually set but moves far enough into the distance that it appears to drop below the horizon.
This is also their explanation for why distant ships appear to disappear below the horizon. It's an optical illusion of some kind.
The flat-Earth AC had a powerful telescope and claimed to be able to see distant ships after they had apparently dipped below the horizon to any other observer. Or else she was using that to disprove curvature since she could see those ships despite the fact that they should have been below the horizon.