There Really Is A Flat Earth Society

[guohua]

That planet needs a new name.  (Something like, "Urectum"). Would have been a better project for science than de-listing Pluto as a planet.

Cheers

Perhaps Kadashian.  Bout the same size from a rear view.

 

  

[F2d5thCav]

I see @"guohua" got behind that one quickly.

Cheers

[Bally002]

@"Bally002" 

I am putting together a sign.  "Uranus matters".  

That's a beauty, I'll take it! lol.
Bally:)

[guohua]

I see @"guohua" got behind that one quickly.

Cheers

Does Uranus have a Moon? 
 

[Bally002]

I see @"guohua" got behind that one quickly.

Cheers

Does Uranus have a Moon? 
 

Now I'm gonna have strains of "La Bumba' going through my head today while working.  lol

Kind regards,

Bally:)

[guohua]

Now I'm gonna have strains of "La Bumba' going through my head today while working.  lol

Kind regards,

Bally:)


Okay,  does this help?

[Bally002]

Now I'm gonna have strains of "La Bumba' going through my head today while working.  lol

Kind regards,

Bally:)


Okay,  does this help?

Crikey,,,that's um cute, but I prefer the kissing arse cheeks lol.  Just that vision and the tune to the sound of the purring log splitter motor and wood cracking.  

Kind regards,

Bally:)

[Ninurta]

That planet needs a new name.  (Something like, "Urectum"). Would have been a better project for science than de-listing Pluto as a planet.

Cheers

When I was taking Astrophysics courses at the university, one of my professors took great exception to the pronunciation most use for Uranus. If anyone pronounced it "Ur-A-nus" he would stop everything and make a point of pronouncing it "URINE-ous"... which, to my mind, was not really a vast improvement...

.

[Mystic Wanderer]

That planet needs a new name.  (Something like, "Urectum"). Would have been a better project for science than de-listing Pluto as a planet.

Cheers

When I was taking Astrophysics courses at the university, one of my professors took great exception to the pronunciation most use for Uranus. If anyone pronounced it "Ur-A-nus" he would stop everything and make a point of pronouncing it "URINE-ous"... which, to my mind, was not really a vast improvement...

.

I was watching John B. Wells' show earlier. He somehow got on the topic of Uranus and went off teaching everyone how to pronounce it too. He said people in the U.S. are the only ones who mispronounce it.
Now, here I see it again.

Weird.  


ETA: @"guohua" , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!  

[Ninurta]

I was watching John B. Wells' show earlier. He somehow got on the topic of Uranus and went off teaching everyone how to pronounce it too. He said people in the U.S. are the only ones who mispronounce it.
Now, here I see it again.

Weird.  


ETA: @"guohua" , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!  

Well, that particular professor was an American, too - from Wisconsin, got his Phd at Yale. At the same university, I also studied Ancient Greek, because there was a language requirement. I think, because of that particular course of study, that it originally was neither "Ur-A-nus" nor "URINE-ous" - I believe the original pronunciation was more like "Oo-RAHN-ose".

But that's just me, and my pronunciation likely wouldn't cause as many giggles in a crowded lecture hall, and so is not as entertaining.

.

[guohua]

I was watching John B. Wells' show earlier. He somehow got on the topic of Uranus and went off teaching everyone how to pronounce it too. He said people in the U.S. are the only ones who mispronounce it.
Now, here I see it again.

Weird.  


ETA: @"guohua" , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!  

Well, that particular professor was an American, too - from Wisconsin, got his Phd at Yale. At the same university, I also studied Ancient Greek, because there was a language requirement. I think, because of that particular course of study, that it originally was neither "Ur-A-nus" nor "URINE-ous" - I believe the original pronunciation was more like "Oo-RAHN-ose".

But that's just me, and my pronunciation likely wouldn't cause as many giggles in a crowded lecture hall, and so is not as entertaining.

.

They are act like Old Maids and Religious Zealots, worrying about pronouncing a word that is actually spelt UR-A-NUS Not YURR-EN-US 

Understand why the "Yurr-AY-nus" pronunciation of "Uranus" is sometimes considered vulgar.

• Break the word into three syllables: "Ur", "An", and "Us". Many people pronounce the "A" as "ay" or "ey (a long "A") and re-distribute the syllables as "Ur", "A", and "Nus". This makes the word sound uncannily like "Your anus"--which may be humorous to some people, and offensive to others.[2]
  
• The "Yurr-AY-nus" pronunciation may seem especially apt because Uranus is a gas giant, swirling with high concentrations of toxic methane.
  

[size]
Source of URANUS[/size]

We all grew up calling it “your anus,” so when did it morph into its more superficially respectable current state?


As early as 1920, the Oxford English Dictionary referred to it as, “you-ran-us,” like a proper English sentence.

But by 1980, Merriam-Webster had noted the slight shift to “YOOR-uh-nus” among both astronomers and those who worship Greek deities.
Somewhere between those two dates, we all picked up the habit of pronouncing it the dirty way regardless — probably because it was more fun, but also because it’s closer to a phonetic pronunciation of its spelling in American English.

The wider population (us dummies) took little heed of the dictionary change until the planet started hitting the news again once the space program picked up. As one commenter here describes it: “Uranus was changed to ‘URINE-us’ in 1986 (? — maybe ’85) when one of the space probes was preparing to do its fly-by.

Newscasters around the country realized that three weeks of ‘your-anus’ would never work, especially when also tossing in the reference to a ‘deep space probe.’”
It IS YOUR-AN-US

[guohua]

@"Mystic Wanderer" 

ETA: @guohua , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!   

I type in phrases in the search bar of my browser and add gif.
Look at the gifs that come up.

Example: assholes gif

[Bally002]

@"Mystic Wanderer" 

ETA: @guohua , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!   

I type in phrases in the search bar of my browser and add gif.
Look at the gifs that come up.

Example: assholes gif

This is what I like about Rogue Nation.  Go to the Space, Science, Technology and Advancement forum and have a good laugh at times.

Kind regards,

Bally.:)

[guohua]

@"Mystic Wanderer" 

ETA: @guohua , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!   

I type in phrases in the search bar of my browser and add gif.
Look at the gifs that come up.

Example: assholes gif

This is what I like about Rogue Nation.  Go to the Space, Science, Technology and Advancement forum and have a good laugh at times.

Kind regards,

Bally.:)

Thank You, Being to serious all the time in my opinion can make a thread threatening to some.
JMHO

[Bally002]

@"Mystic Wanderer" 

ETA: @guohua , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!   

I type in phrases in the search bar of my browser and add gif.
Look at the gifs that come up.

Example: assholes gif

This is what I like about Rogue Nation.  Go to the Space, Science, Technology and Advancement forum and have a good laugh at times.

Kind regards,

Bally.:)

Thank You, Being to serious all the time in my opinion can make a thread threatening to some.
JMHO

All's well.  Now what was the topic?  Oh Yeranus. lol.  No wait...gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn ?  Um Kadashian?  Moons?  

Kind regards,

Bally

[F2d5thCav]

I see @"guohua" got behind that one quickly.

Cheers

Does Uranus have a Moon? 
 

Several, from what I've heard!

Cheers

[guohua]

@"Mystic Wanderer" 

ETA: @guohua , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!   

I type in phrases in the search bar of my browser and add gif.
Look at the gifs that come up.

Example: assholes gif

This is what I like about Rogue Nation.  Go to the Space, Science, Technology and Advancement forum and have a good laugh at times.

Kind regards,

Bally.:)

Thank You, Being to serious all the time in my opinion can make a thread threatening to some.
JMHO

All's well.  Now what was the topic?  Oh Yeranus. lol.  No wait...gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn ?  Um Kadashian?  Moons?  

Kind regards,

Bally

It was about,,,,,,,,,,
 More or Less 

[Wallfire]

Some info about flat earth


  
Today we're going to point the skeptical eye at a series of beliefs that are said to be about the shape of the Earth. The Flat Earth Society is well known, and widely assumed to be a group of people who lobby the idea that the Earth is not actually a globe. While this is described as an ancient, pre-scientific belief, it's increasingly common today to point out that very few ancient societies who had any meaningful science actually believed the Earth was flat. We're going to try and sort all this out, to see who actually believes what today, and who actually believed what going back through history. Perhaps of the greatest interest is the question of why certain beliefs were adopted in cases where the observations conflicted with the dogma.
The Flat Earth Society does indeed exist, but its current incarnation is quite a bit different today than what was originally founded. It's had a spotty history, having never really been much more than a newsletter mailing list, and it's only been around since 1956. While that seems quite recent compared to how long the flat Earth theory must have been around, it's actually a large chunk of it. For it wasn't until the mid-1800s that any sort of an organized flat Earth lobby existed; in fact even the very idea that people ever thought the Earth was flat is only a few years older than that.
An entire mythology has arisen claiming that authorities used to believe the Earth was flat. It's not clear how or exactly when this myth was born, but examples are easy to find. A case in point was the 1919 Boys' and Girls' Reader, in which the very first sentence of the very first chapter on history was:

When Columbus lived, people thought the Earth was flat.

This author may have been inspired by Washington Irving, the author of such tales as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, who also wrote a book called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. Irving's narrative included a scene where Columbus had to pitch a royal commission on his voyage; an event which Irving had to entirely invent, as the actual minutes of any such meeting were never recorded. Irving wrote:

To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of scripture. They observed, that in the Psalms, the heavens are said to be extended like a hide ... extended over the earth, which they thence inferred must be flat.

However, Irving knew that this did not, in fact, represent the state of knowledge in the day. For a few lines later, in the very same paragraph (which is never cited by promoters of the claim), Irving also spoke of the more learned members of the commission:

Others, more versed in science, admitted the globular form of the earth, [but] ... they observed, that the circumference of the earth must be so great as to require at least three years to the voyage...

Older examples exist as well. Even Thomas Jefferson was fooled by the myth, wrongly writing in 1784 that:

Galileo was sent to the inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere: the government had declared it to be as flat as a trencher.

Even the popular meme of "Turtles all the way down", in supposed reference to an ancient belief that the Earth was flat and resting on the back of a giant elephant, which stood on the back of the World Turtle, is not a literal claim. It's from an old joke, repeated over and over again in books since at least the 1800s. The old illustrations we see of turtles bearing the flat Earth are not from ancient cultures, but from Western misinterpretations of allegorical Eastern beliefs, which were then parodied into straw man arguments depicting ancient science as ridiculous.
The ancient Greeks had no doubts that the Earth was a globe, as virtually any observation or measurement you can make indicates this. Pythagoras noted this as early as the 6th century BCE, followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and others. Building upon this foundation of knowledge, Eratosthenes, a geographer and mathematician, measured the difference in the angle at which the sun shone down two different wells about 925 km apart, the locations of which were thoroughly established by multiple surveys. Through a simple geometric computation, he determined the circumference of the Earth to within 2% of its exact measurement known today. This was in about 240 BCE, and the experiment was repeated and confirmed by any number of other Greek scientists.
And such has been the state of our knowledge ever since, as accepted by virtually all educated people, even throughout the Middle Ages. And so it remained until the 1800s, when a small but vocal group of Biblical literalists began interpreting Bible passages as meaning that the Earth was literally flat. None of these was more influential than Samuel Rowbotham, who exclusively used the pseudonym Parallax. Parallax had made many personal observations at a six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford River in Norfolk, England, an absolutely straight and calm canal. For whatever reason, Parallax believed he was able to see straight along the surface of the water for the full six miles. He wrote, lectured, and debated tirelessly. In 1864, he published the book Zetetic Astronomy: The Earth not a Globe, which became the Magnum Opus of the flat Earth movement. According to his science, which he called Zetetic Astronomy, the Earth was a flat disc with the North Pole at its center and the vast ice walls of Antarctica rimming its outer edge, and hell lay beyond the ice. He drew the word zetetic from the Greek for inquiry, which in Parallax's mind meant a continuous questioning of all established science.
Parallax made himself quite the media personality, and established the Universal Zetetic Society. Among its members was John Hampden, who made a much-publicized £500 bet that he could prove the Bedford canal was level and had no curvature. It was accepted by a surveyor, Alfred Wallace, who was unaware of Hampden and Parallax's previous experience at the canal, and also unaware that one of the referees chosen to judge the results was another Parallax follower. A wonderfully detailed account of the Bedford Level Experiment is given in Christine Garwood's excellent book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea.
It took several attempts before equipment could be sorted and boats and crowds could be managed, but eventually the contenders established a sight line thirteen feet above water level from their position to a bridge six miles away. A pole on the shore at the halfway point was marked at the thirteen foot level, and when studied through a surveyor's theodolite, the mark on the pole was about five feet above the line of sight — just as the curvature of the Earth would predict. Wallace believed he'd won the bet, but Hampden bizarrely asserted that the five feet was accounted for by the height of the crosshairs in the eyepiece — a claim so outlandishly wrong that neither Wallace nor the reporters on hand could form a cogent argument to dispute it. Thus it was reported that Hampden won the bet and the Earth was flat; until a replacement referee, the editor of a hunting magazine, finally judged in favor of Wallace, and awarded him the £500 that Hampden had put on account. Hampden sued Wallace, Wallace sued Hampden, and it was a terrible mess until Hampden was at last jailed for making vicious public death threats against Wallace.
So all of this brings us to the modern International Flat Earth Research Society, founded in 1956 by an English sign painter named Samuel Shenton, whose belief system was a curious combination of Biblical literalism and alternative science. He shared Parallax's view that the Earth's surface was a flat circle surrounded by Antarctica, but he also believed that Atlantis lay buried beneath the North Pole and that its flying saucers would rise up through a hole and visit us regularly.
Shenton considered his International Flat Earth Research Society to be a descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society, though there was no actual connection. He ran the organization as a newsletter out of his sign painting shop. Although he did support his views with scriptural quotes, his was very much an alternative science group first, and a creationist group second. Shenton took on the mammoth task of defending the flat Earth during the opening days of the space race, space travel, and the moon landings (which he, of course, insisted were hoaxed). He developed alternate explanations for everything — every satellite seen flying overhead, every procession of the seasons, even how the Earth casts a round shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. He won few friends with his assertion that the fire that killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts in 1967 was a curse from God in punishment for trying to explore the heavens. By the time spacecraft sent back photos of the Earth clearly showing its spherical shape, Shenton's excuses grew so bizarre that International Flat Earth Research Society membership dwindled to only twenty four.
Upon Shenton's death, an American couple, Charles and Marjory Johnson, picked up the torch. They lived in devout poverty in the California desert. They incorporated the International Flat Earth Research Society of America as the Covenant People's Church, and adopted a fire-and-brimstone mannerism. Their quarterly Flat Earth News steered away from Shenton's alternative science and toward radical Christian fundamentalism mixed with broad conspiracy mongering. Charles burned bridges everywhere, waging wars against the US government, other flat Earth groups, authority of all kinds, the scientific method itself, and even other creationist groups like the well-funded Creation Research Institute.
A representative tidbit of Flat Earth News doctrine was the claim that the United Nations flag, which shows a flattened map of all the continents with the North Pole at the center, represents the true shape of the Earth as known to the elite UN Illuminati.
The International Flat Earth Research Society of America died when the Johnsons' modest home burned down and they lost everything in 1996. The Johnsons themselves died only a few years later, and for some time there was no real flat Earth society of any kind. But in 2004, a Londoner named Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel Shenton) created an Internet forum at theflatearthsociety.org, and in 2012 announced that he'd acquired Samuel Shenton's archives from the University of Liverpool. The forums are quite active, with hundreds of thousands of posts; but from paging through them, it appears that the current Flat Earth Society barely mentions Biblical literalism, but is instead mainly about conspiracy theories, distrust of science, and any type of alternative science views.
One lesson to learn from the flat Earth movement is the folly of challenging science's core discoveries without having having a foundation of scientific literacy. Research is always going on, and we're always learning new things and improving our knowledge. But these new discoveries are rarely, or never, that profoundly well-established core fundamentals like the shape of the Earth are wrong. For someone who lacks thorough expertise on a subject to jump in and suddenly claim that everything everyone else knows is wrong is a sure sign of crankery. Take the flat Earthers as a lesson in the importance of developing a basic scientific literacy.
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[Wallfire]

The New Flat Earthers

Today we're going to follow up on an older Skeptoid episode from a few years ago, the Flat Earth Theory. In that episode we looked at the history of belief in a flat Earth, which was mainly driven by 19th and 20th century Christian fundamentalism driving clumsy efforts to prove the literal truth of the Bible. That era ended when the last of the well known proponents, an elderly couple who called themselves the Covenant People's Church, died after their house burned down in 1996, taking with it the archives of their International Flat Earth Research Society of America. And where their story ended, today's story begins, with a new, reinvented version of the Flat Earth theory.

The Biblical literalists have moved from the center of Flat Earth belief to its fringe, and their place has been taken by believers in conspiracy theories and alternate science. 21st century Flat Earthers are less likely to recite Bible verses and more likely to oppose vaccination, to charge that 9/11 was an inside job, and to claim the government is drugging the population with chemtrails sprayed from airliners. Flat Earthing is now entwined with perpetual motion machines, with a belief that Nikola Tesla held the secrets to free energy now suppressed by the global elite, cold fusion and zero point energy, and declare that it's all part of the grandest coverup of all: that the Earth is actually a flat disk and not a globe.
An excellent resource for tracking the popularity of ideas is Google Trends, which tells us that Internet searches for the term "Flat Earth" began a sharp increase at the beginning of 2015. The popularity of this search term is still rising, and is presently at its greatest over the course of Google's entire tracking history. This is with the exception of January 2016 which saw a tremendous spike. By then a pair of fringy C-list celebrities had been trumpeting the Flat Earth and declaring their rejection of the Earth as a sphere loudly and proudly, though it's never been clear whether they actually believed this or were just bucking for attention. One of these was a rapper named B.o.B, who had been among the most vocal; and to the delight of the Internet, astronomer and beloved science personality Neil deGrasse Tyson began correcting him over Twitter. Within a short time it developed into a rap battle, with Tyson's nephew providing the rhythm. The other was celebrated salacious person Tila Tequila, for whose Twitter feed the Flat Earth tweets constituted the most intelligent and weighty content.
If the new Flat Earthers were limited to these two "celebrities" and the handful of remaining Christian Flat Earth fundamentalists, that would be one thing. But they are not. Google Trends proves that B.o.B and Tila Tequila were only riding a wave that had been building for the better part of a year. Where was it building? YouTube provides another indicator. Search YouTube for "Flat Earth" and you'll find countless videos, mainly amateurish explainers full of gross misunderstandings and misinformation, yet many with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views. Most of these were posted throughout 2015 and 2016. What triggered the sudden renewal of interest?
One Flat Earther claims to have the answer to this question. Eric Dubay is a conspiracy theorist who, in November 2014, self-published a book on Lulu.com titled The Flat Earth Conspiracy, and also made a YouTube video of the same name. Dubay's works seem to be Case Zero, sort of the Typhoid Mary of modern Flat Earthism. Very soon, all the other YouTube videos started appearing, and the trending search term became a part of pop culture. It grew for a year, seeping throughout the YouTube conspiracy theory community, until it finally consumed B.o.B and Tila Tequila.
Dubay is a young yoga teacher living in Thailand, where he says he works full-time to expose the New World Order; evidently, a yoga studio is the best place to acquire a deep geopolitical education. The new Flat Earthers fit nicely into a pattern we've grown very familiar with here on Skeptoid: claims of superior insight and knowledge coming from people with no plausible standing from which to have acquired such insight, into fields as diverse as geopolitics, economics, and virtually all physical sciences. Many are attracted by the promise of superior knowledge, the idea of secret and forbidden wisdom. Many are highly receptive to the idea that powerful entities like governments and banks are inherently evil and are now actively exerting massively repressive powers to control us. And were such a situation ever to be a reality, who would not want to envision themselves as part of the tiny circle of courageous rebels who alone have the vision to overcome and triumph? The whole idea of conspiracy theories is deeply attractive at an organic level, and the prospect of powerful Illuminati who are now successfully pulling off such an unspeakable hoax against all of mankind ticks all the boxes. Dubay did not create this phenomenon; he simply happened to be the one who dropped a splinter of conspiracy mongering that struck the right note at the right time with a large community tired of beating the dead horses of JFK and 9/11.
A question we're tempted to ask the Flat Earthers is why? Why would governments, the Illuminati, whomever, want to fool the sheeple into thinking the Earth is a different shape? What's to be gained from such a daunting and impossible-sounding task? I found no satisfying answer, but I did find many different answers. Some argued it was to protect airline profits somehow, yet oddly including the claim that the scam has been going on for 500 years. Some said it was to keep money flowing to the satellite and communications contractors who don't actually have any satellites. Others argued that it was simply about control. Control the population with mega-misinformation, and then, well, something. For a conspiracy community to thrive, it's unnecessary for there to be a consistent version of the alternative belief; all that matters is for all to agree that the mainstream narrative is a lie. We see it in the many different versions of what's claimed to have struck the twin towers: it might have been holograms or missiles or remote-controlled airliners; we see it in the hundreds of different JFK theories; and we see it in the diversity of Flat Earth versions. We don't agree that any one alternate version is true, we only agree that whatever the "Powers That Be" say is a lie.
Another thing many of these new Flat Earthers have in common with more mainstream conspiracy theorists is deep-seated anti-Semitism. One of the main forum sections on Dubay's website is called NASA, UN, Freemasonry, Vatican, Jews, Jesuits, NWO with discussions like The Jewish Run Slave Trade, The Zionist Jew World Order, and Jewish Ritual Sacrifice. Why is anti-Semitism wrapped up in New Flat Earthism? It's just one more piece of evidence showing that this is not about the science or the geography, it's about the ideology of control by evil masters. They're not actually interested in whether the flat earth rotates like a record or whether it's stable and the sun flies above it in a circle; those details don't matter. The only thing that's important is their belief that they're being controlled and deceived by the evil elite. That they default to Jews as the enemy is not new; Jews have been the scapegoats of conspiratorial claims ever since the story of the crucifixion (and maybe that's a topic that deserves its own episode one day).
Any discussion of Flat Earthers raises the question of "Hey, those people aren't actually serious, they're just practicing the art of rhetoric and philosophy." Sort of an epistemological exercise in supporting an unsupportable idea. It's true, those people are out there, but they don't make up any significant fraction of the flat Earth forums I visited. My impression is that the existence of Flat Earthers who only pretend to believe for the intellectual challenge — at least in any significant numbers — is an urban legend. The discussions are overwhelming dominated by conspiracy theorists.
It's a bit of a shame, because I found some interesting questions amid the least insane 1% of flat Earth discussion. One of the interesting claims made by the new Flat Earthers is that gyroscopic attitude indicators on aircraft (also called artificial horizons) seem to stay flat no matter how long of a flight you take. This sounds like reasonable evidence. If you flew a plane all the way around the Earth, a perfectly functioning gyroscopic instrument would take a full 360° tumble over the course of the flight. Yet, as the Flat Earthers note, it doesn't. Why not? Because they didn't take five minutes to look up how these instruments work. These devices are mounted horizontally in an aircraft, and show attitude changes on the two horizontal axes: pitch and roll. They are also designed in such a way that they are constantly precessing back to the neutral position, slowly, anywhere from two to eight degrees per minute. This way they never have to be calibrated, and they continue to give a neutral reading independent of the aircraft's trim. Thus, on a round-the-world flight, attitude indicators will stay neutral relative to their mounting position in the dash. No Flat Earth is needed to explain their basic function.
Another claim that's superficially intriguing is that while a lot of airline routes go over the north pole, almost none go over the south pole. New Flat Earthers argue that this is because there is no south pole, just a wall of ice surrounding the circular flat Earth. But again, there are fine reasons for this that don't require us to discard science. First, there are very few international hubs in the southern hemisphere, thus few routes for which a southern polar crossing would make sense. The hub-to-hub route that comes closest to the south pole is Melbourne to Buenos Aires, and even that never gets much closer than about 74° South. Second, there simply aren't any diversion options over the southern seas. Antarctica has no airports where an airliner can make an emergency landing. In short, there's no reason an airliner would want to fly over the south pole.
There's also no good reason to look much deeper into any of the evidence claims raised by the Flat Earthers. It's mainly a lot of repetitive claims that you can't see the curvature of the Earth from anywhere, and assertions that such photos are due to distortion from wide angle lenses. Tired, tired arguments. Focusing on minutiae like lenses and gyroscopic attitude indicators, and ignoring the much larger and more obvious evidence, is a hallmark of conspiratorial thinking. The lesson to be learned from the New Flat Earthers has nothing to do with the shape of the Earth, and everything to do with the shape of our thought processes. The problem is not a lack of science literacy, it's a lack of reasoning to filter overactive conspiratorial tendencies
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