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Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

latimes.com

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Re: Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

#41

Post by jimmies »

I have a high altitude balloon+electronics education project and it is very fun. We were using our pocket money. It can get expensive really quickly was very hard to raise money for this kind of stuff. We spend about $300 per launch (not including transportation) given we retrieve the payload successfully. If we don't, it is going to be $1.5k per launch for a latex weather balloon. There is a lot of risks involved in the process.

With that in mind, I think being able to launch a hunk of metal to 2k ft with just $20k is actually really quite impressive. I don't care if he raised money for the flat earth cause or any other scandalous cause, I think he did a legitimately impressive engineering feat, risked his life for it, raised money for it, didn't hurt or rob nobody. I am thoroughly entertained by this guy. Anyone with an iota of a brain will quickly realize this is just a comedy sketch, but as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted. If they didn't give money to this guy, they would have given their money to another stupid cause. And if anyone decides to give their money to any flat earth cause, I'd rather see they give money to this one.

With that in mind, I don't think I would go so far as going on the radio saying stupid shit just to raise money for my hobby project. But then, the world rewards people with crazy ideas and crazy execution plans when they work. Clearly, this is one of the instances when an unlikely funny idea actually worked. If I knew about this earlier, I would have chipped in some of my money just because it's so hilarious (and I can see many people would do that too).

Re: Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

#43

Post by CodeWriter23 »

sqdbps wrote: post #33
eloff wrote: post #5

I wonder if he really believes the earth is flat, or if he's just pretending so the flat earth people will keep funding his rocket hobby.

No one really thinks that the earth is flat it's just attention seeking behavior.

My take away from Flat Earthers is how much I rely on third parties as a source of truth. Or perhaps I should say “truth”. Probably a mixture of both.

Similar to what he said about the Earth being frisbee-shaped, I believe the Earth is round, but I know I don’t have personally-acquired observation that my belief is fact.

Re: Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

#44

Post by colordrops »

comboy wrote: post #26
colordrops wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 10% of flat earthers are true faithful and not trolls.

I'm optimistic and I'd say at least 2 orders of magnitude fewer. It all started with some guys on youtube making probably quite decent money with their videos explaining that the earth is flat. Tons of people shared links to show others "look how stupid that guy must be". Because the videos were indeed made in the way to make you think the author is not very smart. I believe the suckers were those sharing the links a…

Not sure I agree, there are some pretty entertaining and well made movies about several religious topics. Also, one real flat earther that I know in person is a pretty good artist. He just has taken too many hallucinogens and gets drunk daily, which blunts his skeptic and logic abilities.

Re: Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

#45

Post by manjushri »

Roritharr wrote: post #6
eloff wrote: post #5

I wonder if he really believes the earth is flat, or if he's just pretending so the flat earth people will keep funding his rocket hobby.

I'm more onboard with this then selling sugar pills as "alternative medicine".

The success rate of anti-depressants is closely comparable to sugar pills.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

Re: Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

#46

Post by adrianmonk »

selectodude wrote: post #32
adrianmonk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or pay for a helicopter tour. You can get a ~10 minute helicopter tour for under $100 where I live. They don't fly incredibly high, but given that the minimum safe altitude is 1000 feet in some cases: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/27076/what-is-t... Or, just book a flight on a commercial airliner, which is also cheap but doesn't get you a panoramic view. But you'll get way higher than 1875 feet.

The windows are actually screens to trick you.

Hah, I hadn't considered that!

Probably a skydiving trip would be a better plan then. I've never done it but it seems you jump from a decent height (13K feet or 4km -- so says https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving1.htm ) because they want to give you some good freefall time.

But I suppose the truly dedicated flat earther will find a way to dismiss that too.

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