Explanation:Eratosthenes was a Greek polymath who lived in North Africa in the 3rd century BCE. An immensely accomplished and intelligent man, one of his most resounding achievements was to measure the size of the earth. While Greek philosophy already considered the world to be spherical, Eratosthenes managed to use extremely simple tools, with an understanding of mathematical principles, light, shadow, and geometry, to calculate the size of the earth to within ~10% of its actual value, as measured by modern tools!
Flat Earther lunatics in the modern day have attempted to re-perform his experiment, expecting a different result from the OBVIOUS flatness of the earth. It never works out for them. Curiously, it rarely changes their minds, either.
Oh absolutely. Most influencers are in just for the grift. There’s probably some dumb enough to believe it, but I’m sure most of them are just grifting fools.
The secret is to know your bullshit is bullshit and fervently believing it at the same time. Doublethink is not something Orwell invented, he just described it.
I remember watching “beyond thr curve” or whatever that netflix documentary was called. Me and my gorlfriend played a game where we tried to spot the idiot or the grifter. It’s pretty funny, like: that guy just wants to build cool stuff and sell it to tgese people…
Suddenly that guy pops up on that conference and said something like: hi, these are my kids, they are third generation flat earthers.
There was something about that sentence that was truly sad, and you could see some people probably thought tye same thing.
i think there was a greek(?) guy who made a map of all known locations on earth in the 3rd century AD, and in the preamble he stated that the earth was a sphere, and he almost got the diameter correctly, he only estimated it to be 25% less than it actually is (same order of magnitude though).
1200 years later columbus read that stuff and thought “huh, okay, based on this diameter i can sail to india no problem”. even though it was known at the time that the diameter would have to be higher, columbus kinda willfully ignored it (wishful thinking). and got lucky.
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Explanation: Eratosthenes was a Greek polymath who lived in North Africa in the 3rd century BCE. An immensely accomplished and intelligent man, one of his most resounding achievements was to measure the size of the earth. While Greek philosophy already considered the world to be spherical, Eratosthenes managed to use extremely simple tools, with an understanding of mathematical principles, light, shadow, and geometry, to calculate the size of the earth to within ~10% of its actual value, as measured by modern tools!
Flat Earther lunatics in the modern day have attempted to re-perform his experiment, expecting a different result from the OBVIOUS flatness of the earth. It never works out for them. Curiously, it rarely changes their minds, either.
I think a lot of the flerfer influencers know and simply keep the charade because it’s profitable.
I think a lot of the antiscience influencers are like that, actually.
Oh absolutely. Most influencers are in just for the grift. There’s probably some dumb enough to believe it, but I’m sure most of them are just grifting fools.
The secret is to know your bullshit is bullshit and fervently believing it at the same time. Doublethink is not something Orwell invented, he just described it.
I remember watching “beyond thr curve” or whatever that netflix documentary was called. Me and my gorlfriend played a game where we tried to spot the idiot or the grifter. It’s pretty funny, like: that guy just wants to build cool stuff and sell it to tgese people… Suddenly that guy pops up on that conference and said something like: hi, these are my kids, they are third generation flat earthers.
There was something about that sentence that was truly sad, and you could see some people probably thought tye same thing.
@PugJesus
Flat Earthers aren't interested in facts or evidence. It's a wonder they even bother to check 😆🤦♂️
i think there was a greek(?) guy who made a map of all known locations on earth in the 3rd century AD, and in the preamble he stated that the earth was a sphere, and he almost got the diameter correctly, he only estimated it to be 25% less than it actually is (same order of magnitude though).
1200 years later columbus read that stuff and thought “huh, okay, based on this diameter i can sail to india no problem”. even though it was known at the time that the diameter would have to be higher, columbus kinda willfully ignored it (wishful thinking). and got lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps
That’s why the islands are called West Indies because they thought they were almost to india
Well if you won’t accept the evidence of two sticks and math, the alternative for me is to shove the sticks up your ass.
In my head, I only ever hear Erastothones’ name in Carl Sagan’s voice as he recounts the story in the original Cosmos series. ❤️