I’m not going to be cocky enough to say that mankind knows everything about the universe. We’ve been wrong about a bunch of stuff we took for granted before: space being composed of aether, disease being carried by smells, Australia having an inland sea, paisley shirts looking good. There are, however, a few things that the science is relatively settled on, one of the big ones being that the Earth is round (namely, an oblate spheroid). Not everyone agrees though; it’s 2017 and flat earthers are a shockingly visible group of people.
You can point to all the evidence you want – the movement of the sun and the moon, the shape of the shadow on the moon during an eclipse, satellite footage, the photos of the Earth taken from the moon – it does not matter: they always have some absolutely insane bullshit reason for how the evidence is faked and, actually, ‘globists’ are being tricked by the government for some reason related to the New World Order. Everyone’s gotta have a hobby, I guess.
For the most part, these people are pretty harmless; they get extremely angry at each other on forums for having conflicting opinions about whether the Disc is surrounded by a wall of ice and post memes about how anyone who believes you can fly around the planet is a cuck. California man Mike Hughes is different. In fact, California man Mike Hughes is building a series of home-made rockets so that he can finally call bullshit on the Earth having any form of curvature.
According to Science Alert, Hughes is beginning phase one of his rocket launches this weekend, hurtling his body through the air at 805km/h at a distance of 1.6km, hoping to reach a not insignificant height of 549 metres. Even if successful, he’s going to need to be about 30 times higher to actually be able to see the curvature well. As it stands, it’ll be about as helpful for seeing the curvature as climbing less than halfway up Hobart‘s Mt Wellington.
Hughe’s primary sponsor is Flat Earth Research, who I assume are providing a lot of help after his $150,000 Kickstarter closed out with $310 total, a mere $149,690 short. There definitely seems like a possibility that he adopted flat eartherism to get funding from the flat earth community, but he also seems to have some pretty weird ideas, most of them along the lines of this quote he gave to the AP:
I don’t believe in science. I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.
I’m no genius, but I reckon there might be, hey.
He’s set to simultaneously give the rocket its first test and also do the proper launch on Saturday (he’s not testing it, is what I’m saying), so I guess keep an eye out for news about a man exploding in a home-built steam-powered rocket in the Mojave Desert.
Mike, we wish you the best of luck as you “shut the door on this ball Earth.“
