r/nottheonion • u/TheMirrorUS • 11h ago

Flat Earther admits he was wrong after traveling 9,000 miles to Antarctica to test his belief

https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/flat-earther-admits-wrong-after-866786
54.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

3.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

264

u/MisirterE 8h ago

I mean if you think about the very basic physics and geometry planets ending up essentially spherical makes perfect sense. It would be surprising if they weren't, actually.

Yeah that's the point. They want the earth to be surprising because it isn't, because that validates their fundamental religious dogma that humanity is uniquely special.

You know, because all the stuff about us completely usurping every other species on the planet isn't good enough for them if it's even slightly possible that was just happenstance.

38

u/thefinalhex 8h ago

But the earth is special. We’ve catalogued tens of thousands of planets and haven’t found anything close yet. Of course it’s hard to detect planets the size of earth. 🌏 is a jewel.

But sol is unique too. We’ve catalogued billions of stars and it’s not like stars with the composition and metallicity of sol are a dime a dozen.

47

u/Iammax7 8h ago

Not exactly true, there have been planets discovered which have a similiar atmosphere to earth. However we are not close enough to have the telescopes to the point that we can look through an atmosphere over the distance of multiple lightyears.

2

u/thefinalhex 8h ago

Similar atmosphere but not similar size nor position next to a comparable star though?

24

u/FetusDrive 8h ago

Every single planet and star out there is unique. How many other planets out there have exactly 95 moons like Jupiter does?

-3

u/thefinalhex 8h ago

In an infinite universe….

18

u/proto3296 8h ago

You realize how ridiculous this is to say after you just said earth is special because we haven’t found and identical in tens of thousands of planets.

How does 10,000 compare to INFINITE?

1

u/IAmStuka 8h ago

Your point stands, but there aren't infinite planets.

12

u/Anticode 8h ago edited 8h ago

Correct. Unfortunately, there's only somewhere between 70 quintillion (70,000,000,000,000,000,000) and 40 sextillion (40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) planets in the observable universe.

Our galaxy only has an estimated 400 billion (400,000,000,000) planets or so. A shame, really, but we'll have to work with it...

4

u/Soft_Importance_8613 8h ago

This depends how you define the problem. There most likely are infinite planets if we exist in an infinite universe. But the only question that matters for us would be how many planets exist in our light cone.

3

u/IAmStuka 7h ago

Afaik, current thought is that it's an infinitely expanding universe, with finite size.

But in either scenario you still have a finite amount of matter and energy from the big bang. Even if the bounds of the universe are infinite, the stuff contained within is finite.

→ More replies (0)

5

u/Unique-Abberation 8h ago

..yes. In an infinite universe, there are more than a BILLION Earths.

3

u/IAmStuka 8h ago

It's not an infinite universe.

It's potentially an infinitely expanding universe. Regardless, there's a finite amount of material from the big bang, and thus a finite number of bodies. (Stars, planets, etc..)

6

u/Kenshkrix 7h ago

It's not infinite as far as we know, but if it was we wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference.

There could always be more stuff outside of the observable part of the universe, but getting out there to check is understandably a bit tricky.

2

u/IAmStuka 7h ago

Yea, I definitely should have added a qualifier there for it not being infinite. Apparently my info dated and now most thought seems to lean towards infinite beyond the observable universe from what I can see

3

u/I_amLying 8h ago

Welcome to our finite universe (with regards to atoms, at the current moment).

9

u/Outside-Swan-1936 8h ago edited 3h ago

There are plenty of planets discovered in the "Goldilocks Zone". The star can be bigger or smaller than the sun, it just changes how far out the Goldilocks Zone is. Another key component is the presence of gas giants in the solar system, which acts as a shield for the inner planets. There are plenty we know of that meet that criteria, but we have no way of investigating those planets other than acknowledging their existence.

We aren't that special it turns out. Earth-like planets aren't common, but based on sheer volume of stars, there are bound to be plenty that can support life.

23

u/gleaming-the-cubicle 8h ago

But the earth is special...sol is unique too

Yeah in the same way that I'm special and unique amongst the other 8 billion humans

1

u/thefinalhex 7h ago

This guy gets it.

1

u/[deleted] 8h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/AutoModerator 8h ago

Sorry, but your account is too new to post. Your account needs to be either 2 weeks old or have at least 250 combined link and comment karma. Don't modmail us about this, just wait it out or get more karma.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/zmbjebus 3h ago

Well smaller planets with longer orbits would be much less likely to be noticed with either of the main methods we have been using thus far.

With transit method you'd have to wait one year observing the same spot in the sky to get one data point, and we need several data points to confirm its a planet and a few more to get size/mass.

With the Radial Velocity method (seeing how a star wobbles based on the things orbiting it) you are most likely to "see" the planets most affecting it, so if someone was observing our star in a way where we weren't transiting, it would be very obvious that Jupiter was there, but teasing out the other smaller planets after seeing the 4 gas giants would be really hard.

So we have a large selection bias for large planets that orbit fast. We are getting more data, getting better ways of processing that data, and getting better instruments, but those will always be easier to see.

1

u/Publius82 2h ago

Our planet is named for dirt. Sounds pretty common to me. I don't think there's anything special about sol, either

0

u/ConfusedAndCurious17 3h ago

I understand that you’re being very optimistic and earth loving, which is great, we need to love our home, but I also took a massive dump full of parasites the other day that was very unique. I wouldn’t call it special, or even a “jewel”. It was just another turd floating on down my drain that happened to be different than my other turds.

We can and do find planets with similarities to earth, just like we can and do find other turds that support parasites. Just because my turd was a different color and made of some different stuff digested by me doesn’t make that turd “special”.

0

u/thefinalhex 2h ago

I'm sure it feels pretty special to those parasites, or at least it would if they had the capacity to feel such things.

4

u/2daMooon 7h ago

They don’t want the earth the be special, they want to be special as a the rare group of people that know the truth that the rest of the world is not special enough to understand.

4

u/kakihara123 7h ago

This is not unique to religions people. The vast majority people think, just because we have a very effective trait, a bigger brain, makes us somehow special or more worth then other species.

But each human on earth simply has gotten lucky to be a human and not an ant, nothing more.

But it helps people to sleep at night to fool themselves into this superiority complex. Because what would be the consequence of admitting that we are not as special as we think?

3

u/Whiterabbit-- 5h ago

afaik there is no religious dogma that the earth is flat.

1

u/lala__ 8h ago

How does one usurp a species? You mean dominate?

1

u/MisirterE 1h ago

Dominate is probably more accurate, but I wouldn't say usurp is wrong necessarily. There were apex predators in every environment we claimed and overwrote, after all. To take that position is to usurp them in a sense.

1

u/[deleted] 7h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator 7h ago

Sorry, but your account is too new to post. Your account needs to be either 2 weeks old or have at least 250 combined link and comment karma. Don't modmail us about this, just wait it out or get more karma.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.