Slashdot Mirror
Flat Earther Now Wants to Launch His Homemade Rocket Into Space (phillyvoice.com)
At a flat-earth conference in May, Mad Mike Hughes will announce details of "an Antarctic expedition with the goal of reaching the edge of the world...to prove once and for all that this Earth is flat." But before that, he's heading for outer space.
An anonymous reader quotes PhillyVoice: If you recognize the name Mad Mike Hughes, it's likely because he strapped himself into a rocket last March and traveled three-tenths of a mile into the heavens in the name of Flat Earth awareness. (See for yourself!) Well, nearly a year to the date after that momentous achievement, the limousine-driving daredevil and gubernatorial candidate has announced he's building upon the lessons learned last year and pushing the limits even further...
We caught up with him Thursday afternoon on the phone from California where he was "putting decals on the rocket right now!" Before any sort of Antarctica excursion, he's planning for a May 9 launch either in New Mexico "or the middle of the ocean if the government tries to stop me..." He hopes to reach the Kármán line, some 62.8 miles above Earth where space begins. "That way, we'll see what shape this rock really is," he said.
"More people will watch this than those who watched the fake moon landing. It will be an incredible, incredible event. People will see what I'm seeing for three hours up there and back and they'll be able to make up their own minds.... I'm the only guy capable of actually proving what shape this rock is, and that's by going up into space to do it."
The Science Channel is now filming Hughes' progress. (Here's a slick trailer for an upcoming documentary called "Rocketman".)
And Hughes says he's also claimed the legal entities that famous people are operating under, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett, putting these powerful people in a precarious position because now "they can't even exist..."
"I have a lot of court cases going on."
An anonymous reader quotes PhillyVoice: If you recognize the name Mad Mike Hughes, it's likely because he strapped himself into a rocket last March and traveled three-tenths of a mile into the heavens in the name of Flat Earth awareness. (See for yourself!) Well, nearly a year to the date after that momentous achievement, the limousine-driving daredevil and gubernatorial candidate has announced he's building upon the lessons learned last year and pushing the limits even further...
We caught up with him Thursday afternoon on the phone from California where he was "putting decals on the rocket right now!" Before any sort of Antarctica excursion, he's planning for a May 9 launch either in New Mexico "or the middle of the ocean if the government tries to stop me..." He hopes to reach the Kármán line, some 62.8 miles above Earth where space begins. "That way, we'll see what shape this rock really is," he said.
"More people will watch this than those who watched the fake moon landing. It will be an incredible, incredible event. People will see what I'm seeing for three hours up there and back and they'll be able to make up their own minds.... I'm the only guy capable of actually proving what shape this rock is, and that's by going up into space to do it."
The Science Channel is now filming Hughes' progress. (Here's a slick trailer for an upcoming documentary called "Rocketman".)
And Hughes says he's also claimed the legal entities that famous people are operating under, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett, putting these powerful people in a precarious position because now "they can't even exist..."
"I have a lot of court cases going on."
Ironic name for a channel considering they're devoted to crackpot conspiracy theories like flat Earth
It was a water rocket.
Best case scenario if everything goes exactly as he describes it (and the whole operation isn't a fifteen-minutes-of-fame grift, which it is), the only flat-earther whose mind will be changed is his, as all of the rest on the ground won't believe the any fake news video or pictures that he get from this.
So, he goes up to space, sees that the edge of the world is not a straight line, and that the earth curves. So to maintain his "flat earth" delusion, he will come back and announce that the earth is actually a flat plate?
Aside from the fact that I would *never* wish harm on another human being, I really hope that when he lands, he does not land on his head. There is probably not much inside it to be damaged, but it might leave a sizeable crater.
I recommend this documentary: https://metro.co.uk/2019/02/27...
Yeah. No comments visible until you set the slider at 'show all'.
Anyhow. Please tell me this ass clown has not been allowed to reproduce himself....? Please?
Maybe we'll get lucky and the shoggoths will eat him.
The moon looks inverted when you travel to the other hemisphere (in fact of course it's you who will be "upside down". No flat earth theory can explain that.
Just how is that going to work ? There's no way to launch without accounting for the velocity of the Earth spinning.
Just what conceptual framework is he using for flat earth ? Is it meant to be a rapidly spinning disc ? why aren't people just hurled off when they get to the edges then ?
This should be absolutely hilarious
Stop giving this jackass attention. At best he's trolling the rest of us and at worst he truly believes this shit. Either way he doesn't deserve any attention.
Seems like it would be more logical to just use a high altitude balloon to go to the edge of space where you would either hit the edge of a dome or see the curvature of the Earth (while asphyxiating). Why deal with the complexities of a rocket?
Then again, he does think the Earth is flat.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There's no shortage of evidence that the Earth is round. Why wouldn't it be - is gravity somehow directional? Is the Moon flat, too? How about the Sun? And all of them happen to be showing their sides to us instead of their edges? How are satellites orbiting the Earth? Give me a break.
One man already went, but because he fell off, didn't live to tell about it.
Table-ized A.I.
...to actually get there. But my faith in the Round Earth Theory is surely stronger.
Let the battle of the faiths begin!
P.S.: Has anyone found it funny that flat earther want to prove something with actual science?
It is the individuals that drive me bonkers.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2...
Those in the ISS have turned SMFH into an legitimate exercise because of this shit.
Flat Earthers; Making our astro/cosmonauts stronger every day.
... but what if he lands on the other side of the disk?
There goes three minutes of my life I can’t get back. Why do we waste time on imbeciles like this? Just ignore him, he’ll still get an audience at the local bar and be happy about it.
#DeleteChrome
The basket ball player? He has the millions to do something stupid like this
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
/r/watchpeopledie has been banned.
By flat feathers trying this. Just do a search of youtube and previous attempts. How many times do they have to be proven wrong.
Funny thing is, I found that information by trying to find a recording of the hillbillies and Jethro launching himself strapped to a rocket
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
... are flat.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Drive your car to the edge, dude.
His goal is to send an unvaccinated astronaut in his ship Green New Deal high enough above Earth to circle the south polar region, getting images above the ice wall at the edge of the world in a rocket freshly stickered with No GMO and No Nukes decals. A successful mission would return pictures of the turtles that our planetary disk is resting on.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted his best wishes for the mission. "My aunt keeps telling me that 'if the Earth were flat like that bartender lady claims, cats would already have knocked everything off it'. Soon we will see who's right!"
And push it over?
I mean the Earth is *FLAT* right? If it is flat, then there is an edge and you can get into space by just pushing it right off.
Maybe they believe it is a disc though, and gravity attracts from both sides, in that case you just need to find a spot on the edge where gravity is perfectly balanced, into this thing called 'zero gravity' I keep hearing about, and even if the item is too big to avoid gravity from one side or the other holding sway, he should be able to launch an actioncam into space on a small model rocket attached to a tether and use that to prove the Earth is flat.
Once these experiments have been tested we can finally have some proof that the Earth is flat! /sarc
We can't get off this discworld -- there's a firmament above us!
He's going to look for the edge in Antarctica, because that is where it's drawn... By the same people who say the earth is round?
If you wanted to hide the location why would you draw it right there on a map?
He doesn't believe in a flat earth, he is just using flat earth to fund his projects for his own amusement.
Is all part of that process.. As to orbit good luck a disc, and a square have very different gravitational profiles than a sphere, assuming he is even using the Newtonian formulation of gravity.
He's just a publicity, and money hound. He only started saying the earth was flat to attract money to fund his goofy rockets. He only started this goofy flat-earth stuff when he realized he could separate idiot flat-earthers from their money.
If he wants to make flat-earthers more poor, I say more power to him.
I doubt any evidence will convince him - there is already a preponderance of evidence that the earth is spherical. The Netflix documentary on flat-earthers showed this well.
A few more technically minded flat-earthers decided to show that the earth was flat by very accurately measuring the distance between the top and bottom of two vertical towers. As you would expect they found that the tops were slightly further apart than the bases. However, instead of being convinced that there was a problem with the flat earth hypothesis they decided that their experiment must be wrong.
If they cannot be convinced by their own data that they themselves collected and which refute their beliefs then this is not a problem that can be solved by a rational, evidence-based approach.
give 5 minutes publicity to this mentally ill asshole?
Flights go from Chile/Argentina to South Africa and Australia, direct, because it is shorter. Generally, a string and a globe can predict the direct flight path between any 2 points on Earth.
These idiots are amazingly dumb.
The cheapest way to get a few of the Earth's curvature isn't with a rocket, it is with a relatively cheap high-altitude balloon. Some helpful software:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl...
Teachers are being trained in creating class projects around this.
Why doesn't the guy just get in a fucking balloon?
Why is /. even discussing this bullshit?
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
He sounds like Trump.
People should say the same of Trump: stop feeding him attention.
-
I love crazy sonsabitches like this They make the world a better place.
I knew a guy like this once. He was a chemist with a PhD and a good job and one day he asked me if I would read his manuscript. It was a 400 page "theory of everything" based on the shapes of numbers and dark matter and klein bottles and some kabbalah-level code that was the most insane thing I'd ever seen short of the Voynich Manuscript. Here was a functioning guy, who cleaned himself, went to work every day and spent 10 years of his life in a fantasy world of his own imagination. He was certain that his work would shake the very foundations of modern science and that there were powerful forces out to stop its publication and then he started suing everybody in sight and then he disappeared. Sometimes, I like to believe that he used his theory to construct a wormhole generator and is in some parallel universe sipping bloody marys and laughing at the small minds who wouldn't take him seriously.
So god speed, you magnificent bastard. I hope you achieve escape velocity.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why does this crackpot need to go to Antarctica? If the Earth were flat, you could travel in any direction and find an edge.
Better question: Why do we spend so much time talking about this stupid shit?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Congratulations to you Mad Mike. In our current social media world there is so much noise as everyone shouts their ideas into the void in order to attract attention; however like a bird in spring with a perfect voice you have reached a level of lunacy which lets you rise about the white noise threshold of crazy. The saddest thing ... you are probably not crazy at all, just using this as a strategy to become (in)famous and profit from it.
nt
Its simple, there's no need for rockets, he just needs to jump off the edge into space.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The coloration of the sunset is because the scattering crossection of air molecules depends on the frequency of the scattered light. Blue light is scattered more then red light. On sunset, the distance the sunlight has to travel through the atmosphere is longer, hence the effect is stronger. This also explains why the sky is blue and not black. It also explains why some animals can orient themselves by looking at the sky. Interestingly, this explanation will fail spectacularly in a classical model, so as a free bonus you get some quantum theory by understanding this effect.
In ten, nine, ...
Can we make a reality show out of this? Please?
Or when he shows pictures (though he'll never get into space: he'll just go high, maybe as high as the tropopause, CLAIM that is space and take a photo, maybe, or claim the photo was taken by "them"), the flerfer idiots will proclaim he was a hoaxer trying to discredit the flat earth all along.
Sad
If both sides as you claim are as bad as each other, then both sides should be gutting the education system, the republicans now and democrats when Obama was in power. Was it? Go on, look at the data. There's one party that is desperate to keep people uneducated unless they are already wealthy, keeping the powerful more powerful, and the other party has a plank for free education to university level, meaning even the poor can get educated.
It's really hard, but you can. It's easily within the limit of human vision, just that you have to be real careful. Photos will show a several pixel drop over the 40 degrees view of a standard 50mm lens shot on 35mm. Moreover, the horizon dips below eye level at every altitude, and at 35000ft it will be several degrees. Lower down you need a theodolite/laser level to detect the drop, but it is there. The Behind the Curve documentary demonstrated it was several feet of drop over a fairly short distance. The difference is that all of these, apart from the latter, are so small that they are easily claimed to be nonexistent by a flattard, and the latter they just shut up and pretend it never happened and if you push hard enough they either run off or claim that the experiment was flawed (but not how, or how to fix it, that would require a model, which they don't have, of what they claim IS reality).
It's only a few degrees when you're looking at something ten degrees above the horizon, and entirely and utterly negligible at an azimuth above 60, which both observations, being at noon, were.
Buy a telescope with an equatorial mount. Then try and work out how a flat earth can let such a thing track stars. No, pointing to the pole star is not pointing up, if you do so then you would not follow any paths that rotate around an axis from the "center of the flat earth", which is what is supposed to be rotating around. Pointing at, say, 40 degrees, would only hit stars correctly at zenith. Pointing straight up on a flat earth would not work either, since that would only track stars at zenith OR at the horizon all round. The only shape that works with an equatorial mount is a spherical earth, which requires its axis to be parallel with the earth's rotation AND for the stars to be very VERY distant compared to your distance from that axis.
The boat scene from that movie is awesome:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMjDAzUFxX0
"Interesting."
I think we should create a colony for all the flat-earthers. This colony would have everything they need to sustain life. The only thing different would be that this colony would be on the opposite side of the "flat earth" from everyone else. That way we wouldn't have to hear all their bullshit anymore.
Make sure he uses his own design for a space suit.
An illuminating view of people's beliefs, and what it takes to keep them.
A lot of people would take that deal.
Is he ignorant, stupid, amoral, or very clever and just milking the system for all it's worth?
I blame antisocial media for elevating stupidity to an art form and for turning people who should be ignored into celebrities.
Maybe he should just stay there. Or maybe he could even take some of other "disciples" with him. Please stay there for as long as you want. Marvel at the beautiful, blue, *round* planet. :)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
He'd better not go too high, he might bump up against the ceiling!
these poor misguided people are giving this assclown money to prove something when, in reality, theyre funding his desire for adrenaline rushes and media attention. his first rocket 'test' couldve been achieved in a helicopter or cessna but chose to strap himself to a rocket. hes just a daredevil. now he wants to go to space and then do an expedition in antarctic.. nothing daredevilish about any of that. im surprised he doesnt get them to fund a climb up everest. i think hes operating on a level of brilliance as al gore with his carbon credits. hahaha
Where's my sock? There it is...
"That way, we'll see what shape this rock really is," This guy and his kind of thinking is the kind of fuckery I detest. There is ample proof that the earth isn't flat. You can look through a telescope right now and see that every celestial body within our solar system is not the only spheroid in shape, but rotates so that you can see it is. Also, you can look at live International Space Station footage as it orbits the earth and sees that the earth has a curvature and is spheroid. For fuck's sake, we are dealing with people who are mentally diseased in that they rejected 600 years of science outright because "No One Can Tell Me What To Think!!!" No you fuckwits, the evidence is there for you to see from all the hard work others did for you.
I've always wanted to suggest an experiment to flat earthers. Take 3 ships to the Antarctic ring. (Is that what they's call it?) Equip the ships with beacons so they can tell the distance and direction between them. Just in case there is some curvature to the earth go with short wave instead of something that requires line of sight. (The illuminati might try to block the signal that way.)
Send two of the boats in opposite directions following the shore of the Antarctic ring. Park the 3rd boat at the edge of Antarctica. Then just record the relative distances and direction of each of the ships from the others until the 2 traveling ships meet on the opposite side of the disk/world(?). The for fun have them circle back to the parked ship recording more telemetry. Maybe throw in some support aircraft to further gather more telemetry. Maybe also have listening stations elsewhere on earth also monitoring. All of this being carried out by flat earthers. (The rest of us can listen in to, but those officially involved in running the experiment must be flat earthers.)
Then let them analyze the data and explain what they find. (I'm eager to hear that part.) Am I missing anything?