Reader Paulina from Poland called my attention to this live feed from the International Space Station (ISS), a feed I didn’t know existed. If you look right now, it appears to show a spacewalk. But it also, as always, shows the curvature of the Earth.
But the weird thing about it is this warning at the bottom of the notes:
WHAT THE HELL? We have to give warnings to flat-Earthers now? The world has truly gone to hell. Pinker was wrong after all.
Oh, and flat-Earthism isn’t a “Theory”. It’s a crazy speculation that is wrong.
TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR FLAT EARTH BELIEVERS??? Oh jeez! What next??? Just how crazy are we getting??? I want trigger warnings for old ladies who are tired of all the lunacy!!!
A trigger warning for a group that didn’t request one. Hey, isn’t that virtue signalling?
I think that might be ironic..
That was my thought too – a humorous dig at flat-earthers surely?
That said, who knows these days?!
I also think it’s ironic. But then, maybe I’m being ironic. Who DOES know these days?
Hope it’s an irony. …..
I don’t think so, I think they’re tired of flat earth BS and hoping to ward off some with that “trigger warning.” Owners of videos would like some good comments, not the endless battle of flat earthism that take over too many comments sections.
Whether that “trigger warning” will make any flat earthers shut up, I don’t konw.
Glen Davidson
Flat-Earthers wouldn’t be bothered by this. From what I’ve read, they think the entire space programme has been faked all the way back to the 1960s. They’d just dismiss this as clever CGI cooked up as part of the grand conspiracy to keep us believing in a spherical Earth.
They need a trigger warning for the live chat going on on that page. Nothing to do with science, ISS, or space. Uranus jokes and flirty comments. So sad.
I only I were 30 years younger…
This is what the perpetual offended culture of the far left leads to. I am actually not that surprised.
Note the address. The Guardian is involved so no surprises here.😈
That ‘trigger warning’ has nothing to do with the Guardian article link. As others have said it’s sarcasm directed at the trolls in chat. Fecking lads in basements.
“Space & Earth [official]” YouTube channel has nothing to do with the ISS or NASA, they’re tapping into the feed & presenting themselves as “official” something or other. [NASA etc don’t run a Patreon account like this channel does]
The images are not LIVE as the video suggests. The ISS is near Australia on the night side, but we’re being shown daylight imagery. This imagery is from THURSDAY I think.
The trigger warning is just a diversion. You need to look behind the trigger warning to understand what’s really going on. Why do they want to distract us with these trigger warnings? NASA is clearly working with the Jews and the IMF, so the only question is how…and on what…and why…and where…and if…and perhaps…and possibly…and maybe…
Indubitably!
You left out George Soros.
CGI. Flat earthers aren’t triggered by the various “spherical earth” hoaxes that NASA produces.
In a way that’s true, and the “trigger warning” is more of a plea to withhold the stupid flat earth comments. The water of the oceans would flow downhill on a spherical earth, or whatever they’re going to say.
I think that space photos of earth as just kind of blanked out by flat earthers, much as homologies are by IDists/creationists. They have their “proofs” that the spherical earth or evolution are untrue, so they can ignore the evidence that they actually are true.
As to “theory,” well, flat earthism doesn’t really seem like a theory, nor does the spherical earth for that matter. But there are models of both, and sometimes the “model” and “theory” are treated more or less equivalently. The flat earth models are just ad hoc “let’s fit everything to the model that we can” (it gets bizarre, as the disk of the flat earth is constantly accelerating to produce “gravity” in some models) but can be somewhat interesting in the sense of alternatives and issues of possibilities. So in the end it might not be a theory, while it’s still fine to say that there are flat-earth models, just not ones solidly based in physics.
Glen Davidson
Yeah, I thought that too after reading it.
Its only fair to warn flat-earthers otherwise they’ll fall off the bedges of their chairs.
On Thursday there was a spacewalk:
HERE’S where you can go to see what the camera is outputting in real time & also a map of ISS position
Let me take the part of a flat-earther, one who would likely win a debate against ‘yer avruj kallaj ejyoukated’ North American, or at least one who majored in literary criticism. This will be looking in particular at ‘them there pikchurs’ from the space station. (Maybe emeritus sometimes translates as ‘too much time on his hands’, not like our host Jerry, who does mostly useful things, even sometimes with boots, cats and pop-music!)
Firstly a cylinder means something like an ideal soupcan. A skinny cylinder has two possibilities: something the shape of a telephone pole, but not here; or here, the shape of a quarter or from more advanced monetary objects, a Canuck toony (You’d hardly get one mouthful of coffee for a USian single paper $!) As a prelim, it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the surfaces of cylinders, and spheres (as with your mistaken earth, more-or-less), or about the solid object itself each time.
Anyway, a mathematician can easily find for you a 1 to 1 correspondence, which is continuous, between any sphere and any cylinder. And now I claim that the earth is flat, like a really huge coin. How can it be? Well just write down that correspondence between my giant flat coin-shaped cylindrical earth and you-guys’ so-called spherical earth. For example, the points within say 10 km on both sides in your sense of your equator, might correspond to the points around the edge of the coin. The equator would go all the way round the middle of the edge. Well, you’ll say, that gives all the distances wrong. No, I’ll say, you’re all mixed up about distances. The true distance between two points on my cylindrical earth is closely related to your distance: just take your peculiar (to me!) distance between the correspondence images of my two points as my true distance on my cylinder.
And of course, look at that picture from the space station: Does it not look exactly like a picture of a portion of one side of a giant coin? Sure does to me!
The (perhaps rare!) reader, who has actually read this far, is encouraged to provide any math/physics or other counter-arguments.
That was an over complex run up to the crease! If I’ve interpreted your one-to-one correspondence correctly – you’ve taken my ball-Earthers globe & squeezed it flat to produce the real situation.
i.e. I think you mean
[1] Equator runs along the coin edge
[2] Northern hemisphere is on the ‘heads’ face of the coin with North pole at the centre of that face
[3] Southern hemisphere is on the ‘tails’ face of the coin with South pole at the centre of that face
[4] Faces are separated by an arbitrarily small distance, compared to the face size, so we might as well set at zero for geometrical simplicity
Is that what you mean OR does the milled thickness of the coin play a significant part?
OR is the entire globe mapping to only one face of the one true coin with the other face doing nothing?
(1) Yes, but only the middle of the edge, which has some small width.
(2)and (3) Yes to both.
(4) No, coins do have thickness. The solid object is 3-dimensional. Your version of the northern and southern hemispheres would be the same thing likely. It is true that some (2-dimensional) surfaces have 2 sides (not the Moebius band, nor the projective plane for an example with no edge). But the notion of a ‘side’ in this sense is too subtle to have some different ones of us living on each side it! Perhaps this explains the need for my supposed “..over complex run..”.
You basically got it right and gave no counter-argument. So I take it that I’ve convinced you that the earth is flat,
and it is curved also; or could be anyway. So it’s got twice the interesting properties that a sphere has, which is curved but nt flat.
I wasn’t going to present a counter-argument until I was sure of your premises. Going by your rules I can’t uses stars since they’re not visible in the video, thus I’m waiting for a day/night or night/day transition which should occur every 46 ish mins. No way to advance or speed up this “LIVE” video [which isn’t].
Good, though you needn’t wait for a transition. As the space station moves, the shape of earth remains as an observer-centred disk, the view one would always have of a sphere. The shape of a giant coin would not remain that way.
There are many other correct counter-arguments which I eagerly await.
Yes, you can produce a mapping from a sphere to a disc. That doesn’t mean that the two models are equivalent. There would exist features that have a simple representation in one model and a strange or unphysical representation in the other. An example is the shape of the day/night terminator, which is always close to a great circle on the globe, but which maps to a strange ‘D’ shape on the disc (and does a bizarre ‘flip’ at each equinox).
If you want an argument from physics, how about the Coriolis effect? It has a different form on a globe compared to a disc, and one of its components falls to zero at the equator on a globe and has the opposite sign in each hemisphere (in complete contrast to a disc, where no such thing occurs).
“Yes, you can produce a mapping from a sphere to a disc.”
From any topological space to any other, there is a continuous mapping, with the one exception of a non-empty one to the empty one. So the quote says nothing without the word ‘1 to 1’. And then it would be false unless you mean thickened disc, which should be called a cylinder.
“That doesn’t mean that the two models are equivalent.”
My two models ARE “equivalent”, if by that you mean, as you should, ‘homeomorphic’. Remember the coffee mug and the doughnut, which are also homeomorphic, though neither is homeomorphic to the sphere, nor of course to the cylinder.
I think the rest of your 1st paragraph is very close to Michael’s above and is correct.
Do you have a reference for your 2nd paragraph? I’m pretty ignorant (or rusty if I wish to pretend I once knew it all!) about Coriolis, esp. for non-spheres. I’m assuming you have the disc spinning (once every 24 hours roughly of course) in the obvious way preserving my equator—rather than, for example, in the manner of a coin-flip.
It seems the “LIVE” video is segments from
9/12/17 – Exp 53/54 Launch
12/15/17 – Dragon Launch
12/17/17 – Exp 54/55 Launch
12/17/17 – Dragon Capture
12/19/17 – Exp 54/55 Dock
February 2018 – Exp 53/54 Land
April 2018 – Exp 54/55 Land
All segments are day only
There are no stars visible
The easiest counter-argument [given the limitations of this video] is the appearance of recognisable coastlines. There’s probably bits on the vid showing equatorial coastline with no discernable edge to the Coin-Earth, but I haven’t the patience to wait for those moments because there’s no searching through the vid & I ain’t DLing it.
It is flat, but round like a pizza. Jeez, you spherical-earthers are easy to fool.
Yeah, and that curve is the curvature of the edge.
A little know fact that most people don’t know is that Pratchett’s Discworld stories are actually allegorical histories of the real literal earth.
In reality the universe is a thin cylinder, spinning around its centre, and the earth is just the inside of one end. The sides of the cylinder/universe are clear, which is why you can’t see them, and they hold the water back from pouring over the edge.
Fewer and fewer people seem to appreciate irony these days anymore.
🙁